Literary Quickie: Rosario Castellanos

I've been thinking about Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos lately, especially her direct and fierce feminist voice. And since today is International Women's Day, and Mexicans are being maligned by you know who, it seems perfect. Also, she is virtually unknown outside of Mexico and Latin America. Rosario was phenomenal. She wrote poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. And in them she wrote, oh so eloquently, about women's lives, class struggles and politics. Like the mundane everyday life in the short story Lección de Cocina (Cooking Lesson) where while a woman cooks, Castellanos dismantles the institution of marriage. Or the powerful political poem Memorial de Tlatelolco, about the massacre of student protesters on the eve of the olympics in 1968.  

I offer you the first poem of hers that I read: Meditación en el Umbral (Meditation On the Threshold). I remember being stunned with it’s simplicity and strength. How in just three stanzas, she rips open women’s history. 

Meditación en el umbral

No, no es la solución
tirarse bajo un tren como la Ana de Tolstoy
ni apurar el arsénico de Madame Bovary
ni aguardar en los páramos de Ávila la visita
del ángel con venablo
antes de liarse el manto a la cabeza
y comenzar a actuar.   
 
Ni concluir las leyes geométricas, contando
las vigas de la celda de castigo
como lo hizo Sor Juana. No es la solución
escribir, mientras llegan las visitas,   
en la sala de estar de la familia Austen
ni encerrarse en el ático
de alguna residencia de la Nueva Inglaterra
y soñar, con la Biblia de los Dickinson,   
debajo de una almohada de soltera.   
 
Debe haber otro modo que no se llame Safo
ni Mesalina ni María Egipciaca
ni Magdalena ni Clemencia Isaura.   
 
Otro modo de ser humano y libre.
Otro modo de ser.



Meditation on the Threshold

No, it is not the answer, to throw yourself
under a train like Tolstoy’s Anna,
nor hastening Madame Bovary’s arsenic
nor waiting for the angel with the javelin
to reach the parapets of Avila
before you tie the veil to your head
and begin to act.
 
Nor intuiting the laws of geometry,
counting the beams in your cell
like Sor Juana. The answer is not
to write while visitors arrive
in the Austen living room
nor to lock yourself in the attic
of some New England house
and dream, the Dickinson family Bible
beneath your spinster’s pillow.
 
There must be some other way whose name is not Sappho
or Mesalina or Mary of Egypt
or Magdalene or Clemencia Isaura
 
Another way to be free and human.
Another way to be.