Fugues

by Claribel Alegría, Darwin J. Flakoll (Translator)

Well-known for her incisive descriptions of war and violence in El Salvador, Claribel Alegría is one of Central America's most eminent poets. In Fugues, a lucid and strikingly beautiful original collection, she looks squarely into the face of mortality, love, and aging, to explore the personal as well as universal questions that face each human being.

Genres: Poetry

143 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1993

About the author

Clara Isabel Alegría Vides was a Nicaraguan poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist who is a major voice in the literature of contemporary Central America. She writes under the pseudonym Claribel Alegría. She was awarded the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life is a downpour
whose brooding mutter confounds us
until Death's wind
cuts it short.

****

I,
poet by trade,
condemned so many times
to be a crow,
would never change places
with the Venus de Milo:
while she reigns in the Louvre
and dies of boredom
and collects dust
I discover the sun
each morning
and amid valleys
volcanos
and debris of war
I catch sight of the promised land.

****

Don't set up barriers
it's useless
my unsheathed heart
hurtles toward you.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having met Claribel Alegría several times, I have a strange sensation while reading Fugues, which was published in 1993. Fugues is about love on several levels, perhaps most immediately because Alegría's husband D.J. “Bud” Flakoll translated the poems. He graduated from San Diego State University, where I first met both of them when I was an undergrad.

I had been a music major, but one of the events that turned me toward literature and writing was hearing Alegría read Flowers from the Volcano in the People’s Poetry Series curated by Professor Nick Nichols. Alegría wore a black dress with a green collar. She described herself as a Salvadoreña poet living in exile in Nicaragua. She wrote in her poem “We Were Three,” “I am a cemetery,/I have no country/and they are too many to bury” (55). The black dress symbolized not only the genocide in El Salvador but the Nicaraguense dying in The Contra War that raged throughout the 80s and still affects the Americas. Alegría’s green collar represented hope, small, but growing ike the flora of Central America emerging from volcanic rock. Whether Nichols introduced her as a poet of witness or not, I don’t remember, but that’s how I thought of her. Having grown up with undocumented workers in both my grandparents’ house and my single-mother’s home, I had questions about the Americas. I found some answers in Flakoll’s translation of Alegría’s poems. Fugues seems to be an exchange of their love, a hope that historical enemies can diverge from national agendas.
While mythological allusions shackle a lot of contemporary poems, Alegría’s commitment to “Persefone” in Fugues seems earned:

y todo estaba oscuro
y era difícil descender
………………………………..
y soy raíz
y no me importa si sueño
que soy hoja

(and everything was dark
and it was difficult to descend
………………………………..
and I am root
no matter if I dream
I am leaf)… (92-95)

Although Fugues is now nearly 30 years old, its darkness characterizes the foreign relations between most Central American Countries and the United States, a darkness that can be seen in refugees at the U.S.-Mexico Border.

Alegría moves past Persefone in Fugues’s penultimate poem “Haciendo Maletas” (“Packing My Bags”), which begins with an epigraph by Cavafi: “The barbarians are arriving today” (137). While Persefone briefly appears as the mother “haciéndome erupción/en las capas jurásicas” (erupting in my Jurassic strata), it is Alegría’s comparisons that symbolize the power of love over historical hostilities: “you were William Walker/and I Rafaela Herrera” (Walker was a U.S. slaver who tried to establish Nicaragua as a slave empire; Herrera was a criolla who fought the British in Nicaragua). Alegría seems to break into an intimate moment, at the risk of biographical criticism, that describes her love of Flakoll:

Te conté de Sandino
y del negro Martí
y tú no me entiendías
y querías saber
……………………….
y tu lengua es extraña
apenas si la entiendo
¿qué estoy hacienda aquí?
pero te miro y sé
que tú seras mi hombre
y tú aún no lo sabes
y me trago la risa
y no te digo nada
las palabras me trago

(I told you about Sandino
and Farabundo
and you didn’t understand
but wanted to learn
……………………………….
and your tongue is foreign
I barely understand you
what am I doing here?
But I look at you and know
that you will be my man
and still don’t know it
and I stifle a laugh
and don’t say anything
I choke down words … (138-139).

Fugues was published shortly after Violetta Chamorro defeated Daniel Ortega for president of Nicaragua. While Alegría did not leave Nicaragua literally, her time with Flakoll was nearing the end. He would pass in 1995.

For too many Central Americans, death from old age is a luxury. Alegría definitely had her father-in-law’s life in mind while writing Fugues. “In Memoriam” is dedicated to A.A. Flakoll, who lived in San Diego and was probably one of the reasons Alegría was available to read at SDSU (14-17). In “Deseo,” Alegría indulges in the good death denied so many of her people, “olvidar mis recuerdos” (forgetting my memories), which is a strange position for a poet to take (88-89).

Fugues is a lovely book by a poet exiled by a pain she seems to have escaped through love. Amid the genocide she writes in the short poem “¿Como No Amarte?”

¿Cómo no amarte
oscuridad
si de ti vengo
de tus grutas mis sueños
contigo mi poesía
y hacia ti me encamino?

(Why not love you
darkness
if I come from you
my dreams from your grottos
my poetry with you
and toward you I travel?) (96-97)

Fugues, despite its harsh context, remains an uprising of hope in the face of death. While I might not find her allusion to Pandora as useful as her use of Persefone, Alegría ultimately drops the mask of mythology, illuminating much of her work with Flakoll in the process.

Full disclosure: in 1985, I’d just been assigned a person-on-the-street column for my conservative community newspaper. Knowing that Alegría would be in San Diego, I made the question about U.S. involvement in Central America and ran quotes from both her and Flakoll. I asked all the questions I thought my editor would ask, at which point, Alegría said that I had an inaccurate view of Nicaragua and that I should visit the country to see it as it really was.

Five years later I acquired credentials from the Nicaraguan consulate in Tijuana to observe polls in Nicaragua’s 1990 election. As luck would have it, Alegría and Flakoll were on same Mexico City-Managua flight as I was. They were struggling with their bags at the airport, so I helped them and reintroduced myself. They invited to their home. Although none of us knew it, the time we arranged coincided with Daniel Ortega’s Managua speech. I attended the early part of the rally and left for their home before the candidate spoke, which I now think was one of the best decisions I made on the trip.
While the journalist in me wanted to see the crowd’s reaction to Ortega (I’d already been at the rally for Chamorro to hear her), some kind of line was being drawn for me by Flakoll. He was the experienced journalist, but the rally was not the story. People were buzzing about Ernesto Cardenal being trapped between Pope John Paul’s and Rosario Murillo’s politics. The real shape of the political spectrum would not emerge for years.

During the evening, Flakoll confided that his mother had just passed, and that he’d rather be at home. I apologized for intruding, but they insisted I stay and asked me about my sense of things. Managua was full of foreigners from around the world. It had been strange speaking Spanish to Eastern Europeans, but everyone thought the Sandinistas had the advantage. Alegría was not so sure. She said her mother was nervous. Of course, her mother was right in ways no one could see. That Ortega would lose and return to power by banning abortion is one of the most bizarre reversals in all right-wing mythology. Politics are powerful, but poetry survives politics, and Alegría knew that.

[RD Chiriboga Moncayo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear, precise, wide-ranging, and beautiful.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claribel Alegria's poetry is absolutely beautiful. Letters To An Exile, contained in this book, is one of my favorite poems.