Sandra Lorenzano: "We have forced ourselves to learn to live without utopia"

Poetry and prose, gender violence, migration and exile, everything fits into the daily life of Sandra Lorenzano, an active woman and activist who came to Mexico at the age of 16 with her family from Buenos Aires fleeing the dictatorship. de Videla and, like María Zambrano, turned exile into homeland.

The jacaranda that blooms purple every spring in front of her window tells him where her house is.

At the age of 63, the author of

(Tusquets),

(Seix Barral) or

(Alfaguara) continues to write, receiving prizes, such as the Clemencia Isaura 2023 poetry prize, and looking torn how the flames of exile devour entire families.

With this woman you can talk about the divine and the human.

Ask.

First the divine.

What is poetry for?

Answer.

Personally, to rediscover myself, but poetry is useful for much more than that, the poetic word helps us to think about the world, to feel it, to perceive things that, otherwise, with the purely rational and intellectual we would not perceive, moreover, I am more interested in what is thought and felt through the poetic word than rationality.

Q.

The publishing industry does not take verses very seriously.

Is the world not for poetry?

R.

It is the market that does not realize that the world is for poetry.

When a poet can get the word of him to the people, look at the one that is armed, full auditoriums.

Poetry is like an open secret, as soon as you give people poetry, they catch on.

Actually, that's where we come from, from the rhythm, from the words that we don't quite know what they mean, to ro ro my girl to ro ro my sun.

Of lullabies

Q.

It seems that this genre is still on the margins.

R.

Poetry was born as an alternative discourse, it is not bad that it is on the margins, but it does prevent it from reaching more people.

But leave her alone, when we institutionalize her or make patriotic poetry, that is no longer poetry, it no longer interests me.

Poetry is still resistance, word of mouth, it is made of complicity and love of words.

Q.

You have just given the Hiperión award to a young Nicaraguan, William González, who explores other contents, such as semi-enslaved migrant women in strenuous tasks.

Sandra Lorenzano. Aggi Garduño

R.

Yes, there is a certain return to a more narrative poetry, which has a lot to do with contemporary issues.

I am thinking, for example, of Sara Uribe, with the disappeared in Mexico and Balam Rodrigo, the son of migrants who crossed Guatemala and stayed in Chiapas.

And many young people do hip hop or listen to unconventional, alternative songs, where there is a game between poetry and music that is very worthwhile.

It has great symbolic power throughout history.

Go tell Homer that what he was doing on the streets was minor.

Q.

To continue in Nicaragua, a country of poets, and now a great painful migration.

Or is it exile?

R.

Painful, yes.

I am from a generation that before the age of 20 went to schools to support the Nicaraguan revolution.

What is happening, for a long time now, is the fall of a whole world, along with what is happening in Cuba and other social movements that marked our lives.

For a long time we have forced ourselves to learn to live without utopia.

Q.

Do you appreciate a difference between exile and migration?

It seems that countries behave better with what we call exile.

R.

It seems that exile has a political cause and migration does not, but the poverty and violence from which migrants flee also has a political cause.

And it also seems that the exiles are more like the intellectual middle classes of the countries that receive them, on the other hand, the migrants are poor and they do not like the poor.

I believe less and less in that dichotomy, and in any binary.

Exile work and migrations and there is a nucleus that is shared and it has nothing to do with the fact that some want to leave and the others have to leave, because who measures that?

If you can't feed your children, then you have to leave the same as if the army of your country persecutes you.

Exiles and migrants are united by a commitment to the future.

Q.

You were a 16-year-old girl when you arrived in Mexico.

How do you live exile at that age?

R.

I did not want to leave my house, my friends, my school.

But, on the other hand, when I arrived in Mexico I wanted to be like the others, not to be the foreigner, the different one, and I tried hard not to be, now I see that it was a matter of survival.

For me exile is a break in the language, basically.

Finding my own language is indeed difficult and that has to do with the origin, the entrails, finally I write to make that break in the language hurt less.

Q.

This year the cinema put a date in the life of Argentines and half the world,

R.

It is an important film, if democracy is so fragile, memory is an essential exercise for survival, and the fact that we have been the only country in Latin America that tried its military leadership is something that we have to be proud

When the movie started I knew I was going to cry a lot and just like that, I didn't stop crying until the end.

Never more.

They will not pass, this extreme right that is crazy in half the world will not pass.

Q.

You have just been awarded the 2023 Clemencia Isaura poetry prize for your collection of poems

.

What else is she doing?

R.

I am also working on a little book of literary essays that arises from all this that I have been asked to write about exile and migration, interwoven between my voice as an exile and the voices of migrant women, with whom I identify.

And also, it occurred to me, studying María Zambrano and her exile in Mexico, that we could create a chair of the Malaga-born philosopher.

I told Juan Duarte, the Spanish ambassador in Mexico, a great guy, so that it could be done between Mexico and Spain.

And then we add.

She taught in Morelia because the exiles, although they did not like it, considered that she was too young and also a woman to share academic spaces with them, and they did not allow her to stay at the Casa de España, later Colegio de México. .

Q.

It was machismo.

You are also an expert in the prevention of gender violence at the university.

In Mexico, rapes occur frequently on campus, and not only in Mexico.

R.

When someone says that the new generations are different, I remind them that a very high percentage of complaints about gender violence in universities come from their peers.

A culture comes together, the Mexican, very macho, patriarchal, misogynistic and violent, which confronts women, especially the youngest, who come with wonderful power and a hunger for change.

And I believe that no one who has privileges wants to give them up, and many men of all ages consider that female empowerment takes away from them.

The other explanation is that the patriarchy is not going to fall in two days, and we are experiencing furious responses, like when you go to catch an animal.

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