I Remember Nightfall
Marosa di Giorgio
Translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas
2018
Ugly Duckling Presse
318 pp
$22 (paper)
Reviewed by Clara B. Jones in Otoliths
[AU, October 2019]
"As a rule a father prefers
his daughter and a mother her son; the child reacts to this by
wishing, if he is a son, to take his father's place, and if she is a
daughter, her mother's." Sigmund Freud
“The temporal is only a symbol.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publication of I Remember Nightfall
is part of a relatively recent “recovery project” highlighting
unrecognized, or forgotten, female artists—including, the American
“beat” poet, Elise Cowan (Ahsahta Press) and the Brazilian poet,
Ana Cristina César
(Parlor Press). Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004), Uruguayan lawyer,
actress, and poet, was raised by her hard-working Italian immigrant
family on a farm in rural Salto, a “readymade” world of flora and
fauna—including, human fauna—for her vivid imagination and
mental, if not physical, escape from loneliness, even, trauma.
“Marosa” means “lover of freedom,” an apt description for her
fluid transformations and configurations of words, images, Nature,
music, and occasional soft rhyming. Jeannine Marie Pitas' stunning
translations of di Giorgio's lyrical, narrative prose verses
demonstrate a childlike wonderland inhabited by familiar, altered,
and devised people, situations, memories, as well as, other animate
and inanimate events, phenomena, and things—a conjured fantastical
environment. The feminist prose poet, Holly Iglesias, has theorized
that the prose poem symbolizes the “boxes” in which women have
traditionally been confined—kitchens, bedrooms, nurseries,
playrooms, convents—like di Giorgio, farms.
The
bilingual I Remember Nightfall comprises four separate
texts packaged as a single volume and paginated consecutively—a
wise editorial decision since, in effect, the compositions may be
viewed as a long-form poem that should not be read as discrete
sections but as fluid elements, in some instances, interchangeable,
using the same symbolism throughout, a feature that, in addition to,
the poetic form, unifies the text—though the Uruguayan scholar,
Carmen Boullosa, has commented that di Giorgio, “always wrote the
same book.” Indeed, the author is reported to have characterized
her complete oeuvre as a single project, and the reader might
interpret the prose poem form as a malleable element for “collage”
writing with the capacity for combinatorial play. Such a linguistic
trait might be received as symbolic of a fragmented reality in the
Postmodern sense—representing social and political chaos such as
that experienced by di Giorgio in Uruguay, including a period of
urban guerilla warfare and military dictatorship. War is referred to
several times in the text; however, it may be a mistake to perceive
di Giorgio as a “political” poet since, according to the
Uruguayan scholar, María
Carolina Blixen, the poet was primarily consumed by her writing
throughout life.
Di Giorgio's poetic style has been
labeled, variously, as “expressionism,” “magical realism,”
“surrealism,” and “neo-gothic.” One might, also, argue that
many of these verses are examples of “grotesque” literature in
which empathy resides with cruelty—represented by other notable
female writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch. As several
writers have pointed out, the “voice” of di Giorgio's poems is
childlike, and, in her verses, the narrator is referred to as being,
eight or nine years old [“I was only a little girl with a crown of
braids.”, 259], “sixteen” [279], and “not yet twenty”
[257]. This girl's persona should be read as Marosa herself,
clearly indicated repetitively in the text [“Marosa,” “María,”
“Rosa María,”
“Marge,” “Virgin (María)”
and, speculatively, “Mario,” “Maríano.”]
Di Giorgio's persona is, as well, symbolized by iconography,
possibly, alter egos or imaginary intimates—plants [roses,
carnations, magnolias, violets, squash], animals [rodents, hares,
birds, butterflies, bats]—each of these living entities having its
own symbolic meaning in myth and literature, indicating multiple
facets of personality, situation, locality, and space—differentiated
and complex.
And my heart remained like winter
oranges, curdled and frozen; I /
became delirious; they put me in the
big bed and watched over me. /
At times, I got up, paced through the
rooms, fell back into bed. And I /
always dreamed of that Rose, now a
giant, who drank all the herbs, the /
mushrooms, the hens, and above all, who
had some other scheme fixed /
in his mind...until at last the harvest
was measured; the carts went out to /
the village, filled with jewels, those
gems thrown out by the plants. And /
the old man left. /
Through my fever I heard my mother
tell me: “The old man Rose /
has gone.” (155)
*
Her
father came, having crossed all the land, all the fields; he knelt /
down
and nearly kissed her. She could still run away, once and for all; /
the
boundaries were clear, and beyond them lay other fields and other /
kings,
who perhaps would take her in sweetly, shelter her for life. But she
/
was
sure of one thing: she was never going to take a single step beyond /
the
family property. Her father embraced her; he remembered the night /
when
he had conceived her, the tiny, the cry from the gut as she began /
to
be born; he looked at the stars that had sent the order; he kissed
her /
almost
as if she were his bride, on her lips, on her breast that was naked /
like
a mushroom, and he killed her. (257)
Di
Giorgio's poetry encompasses myth, fable, and unconscious processes;
although, despite Pitas' report that the author was not prone to
revision, the verses seem intentionally composed, not a product of
automaticity [an ideal of the Surrealists]. Similarly, many of the
poems are “indeterminate,” incomplete, and di Giorgio often
leaves us hanging. This characteristic, also, seems, to me, a
purposeful conceit. I do not “read” di Giorgio as a naif
despite the childlike posture she adopts in her poems. The writer is
aware of life's possibilities and contradictions—both pain and
beauty, love and violence, acceptance and rage.
She
displays a genuine fondness for her maternal grandparents [section
two, Magnolia,
is dedicated to her grandmother], but she has an ambivalent
relationship to her mother who is foreboding and powerful:
Then,
my mother appeared with her box of letters; /
I
could see her slim form, her well-hidden shoulders. I had to close /
my
eyes and dig my nails into the grass in order to contain myself, but
/
I
followed her cautiously until she crossed the threshold and sat down
/
on
the bed and started to sort through some recently arrived postcards;
/
then,
I attacked her; I scratched at her clothes; her breasts popped out, /
big,
fat, smooth, with pink tips, like two gorgeous fungi, two singular /
mushrooms...[S]he
recognized me, she stared at me straight in the /
eyes,
but I tore at her violently, and then almost immediately, she died.
But,
I
Remember Nightfall
is not only about a girl's unhealthy, love-hate bond with her mother.
Moreso, we are in the depths of a familial triangle—child, mother,
father, and the book's conceptual framework is a classic, Freudian
“Electra Complex” [see epigraph] involving Marosa's love for
“Papa” [51] and the ultimate trauma—the betrayal of that love
and trust by his emotional and physical violations [257]. In several
places throughout the text, the child-woman portrays herself as a
victim of men, a possible source of her conflicted rage directed
toward her mother's failure to protect her. Perhaps the female
iconography mentioned above represents a “doubling” [“mirroring”
in Lacanian psychoanalysis] of Marosa and her mother, a possibility
that the poet may have been aware of—possibly, as a result of some
intimate knowledge with psychoanalytical treatment so pervasive among
the privileged classes in Uruguay, as reported by the Uruguayan
psychoanalyst, Ricardo Bernardi. On the other hand, Marosa's primal
instincts may, simply, be releasing her covert psychological
motivations.
Clearly,
it is a straightforward exercise to interpret di Giorgio's work in
terms of Freudian theory, investigating the interaction of conscious,
subconscious [e.g., dreams], and unconscious processes. In
psychoanalysis, the patient undergoes “talking therapy”
[“free-association” and dream interpretation] to access latent
mental content negatively influencing current behavior, including,
language [e.g., “Freudian” slips] and other creative, generative
acts. If we follow Freud's paradigm to consider erotic and morbid
features of thoughts and actions, we can identify these elements in
di Giorgio's writing that include overtly sexual allusions, e.g.,
“corrola” representing female genitalia; “mushrooms”
representing “phallus” or nipples; autoeroticism; orgasm;
homoeroticism, as well as, numerous examples of her ambiguous,
conflicted relation to sex, including, her knowledge that sex is
considered a sin in her Catholic tradition [though she, or her
persona,
pursues it, anyway].
Though
di Giorgio''s poetry lends itself to interpretations of hallucination
and pathology [“crazy” occurs several times in I
Remember Nightfall],
Pitas and Blixen have communicated to me via
e-mail that there is no evidence that the author underwent analysis.
In fact, according to Pitas, her family vigorously denies it. On the
other hand, even if these demurrals are accurate, an article by the
Uruguayan psychoanalyst, Denise Defey, reports that Uruguay has high
rates of depression and suicide and there has been a tradition of
untrained analysts and networks of informal therapy groups in the
country; thus, it cannot be excluded that di Giorgio had intimate
knowledge of and with “talking” therapies in one way or another.
The translator, Jessica Sequeira provided two articles, one
describing di Giorgio as “the madwoman of Uruguayan letters,” the
other as, “la rara.” Via
e-mail, Blixen stated that di Giorgio was called, by some, “;rara'
o 'extravagante'” On the other hand, in a book chapter, Teresa
Porzecanski depicts di Giorgio as a retiring, rather parochial, old
maid; however, since di Giorgio traveled extensively abroad and
received at least one international prize, she may have been more
sophisticated and worldly than she appeared to many. We know that the
poet was perceived as strange, eccentric, and flamboyant, but,
whatever the facts may be, many details of her biography are lacking
or unclear, requiring systematic research by scholars and critics.
The
psychological and linguistic are not the only levels at which a
reader can consider the complexity of di Giorgio's collection. Her
themes resonate with her documented knowledge of myths, perhaps, the
stories of Demeter [agriculture and fertility] and Persephone
[underworld]. Further, considering the poet's use of Christian
symbolism mentioned above, religious motivation should not be taken
literally since Uruguay is said to be the most secular of Latin
American countries.
Indeed, none of the writing in I
Remember Nightfall
should be taken at “face value,” particularly, since the author
clouds so much in mystery. Di Giorgio was, also, no doubt, familiar
with European fairy tales with their idealized and romanticized
themes of good and evil—“surrealist dreamscapes” lending
themselves to Freudian dream analysis. Consider, for example, the
German fairy tale, “Snow White and Rose Red,”—“Rosy-Red /
Will you beat your lover dead?” Again, the grotesque is apparent in
this tale as well as in di Giorgio's compositions [“We devoured her
and it was like she was alive. / The ring I now wear was once hers.”:
49].
Comte
de Lautréamont was the nom
de plume
of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, a French poet born in Uruguay whose
writing di Giorgio must have been familiar with. Lautréamont's
only works, Les
Chants de Maldoror
and Poésies,
had a major influence on 20th
Century
arts and letters in Europe, particularly on the Surrealists who
championed interpretation of unconscious motivation, especially,
dreams, and who strove to practice “automatic writing.” According
to Bernardi, and other direct and online sources available to me,
Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan are major figures in psychoanalytic
traditions and practice in Uruguay—Klein's program advanced ideas
about how the child's “existential anxiety” manifests in the
unconscious [71: “...he / searched the wardrobe, drawer by drawer;
he looked into the album; he / asked which one was Celia. We showed
him my little sister. / He chose her.”], and Lacan's project
addressed the notion of “desire” to be recognized by the “other”
[253: “There / were only two dwellings in that vast region. 'Ours'
and 'the other.' Our / family and 'the other;' that was how we
referred to each other.”]. The scholar, Bruce Dean Willis, has
pointed out that a theme of South American poetry is “recognizing
one's self in one's other.”
In
conclusion, di Giorgio's writing expands our understanding of Latin
American literature at a time when women in the arts are receiving
well-earned, though delayed, recognition. Consistent with this
project, it is important to determine the extent to which she was
engaged with feminism—intellectually and/or actively. Who, for
example, were her friends? Did she live a “liberated,” “bohemian”
lifestyle like many other female artists of her generation? The poet,
Cristina Peri Rossi, has stated that “feminism began very early in
Uruguay,” women enjoyed working—preferring to be single mothers,
and they “detested” marriage and domesticity. Was di Giorgio a
woman who broke traditional rules? Did she participate in the sexual
freedom associated with a “unisex culture,” as Rossi describes
the 1960s and 1970s in Uruguay among artists and intellectuals? The
feminist scholar, Soledad Montañez,
analyzing di Giorgio's “erotic prose,” claims that the poet
“constructs gender narratives in order to undermine the patriarchal
system from within.” At this point, many issues regarding di
Giorgio—her work and her life—must remain indeterminate—like so
many of her poems. Perhaps, she has written her verses and her
biography to be intentionally ambiguous with regard to meaning and
interpretation. Whatever the case, I highly recommend I
Remember Nightfall
to any reader who appreciates noteworthy innovative writing. Marosa
di Giorgio deserves a wide audience and international recognition.
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