This week saw huge events to mark International Women’s Day around the world with its theme this year “Let’s all be each for equal.” Our writers are bringing news this week too of celebrations of underrepresented voices who, through their literature, translations, and discussions also strive for equality: a weeklong Instagram Takeover sharing the work of seven Tibetan women; an international symposium of Indigenous writers in San Diego; and two important forthcoming translations of Brazilian voices. Read on to find out more!
Shelly Bhoil, Editor-at-Large for Tibet, reporting from Brazil
There is a slow but sure arrival of women to the Tibetan literary scene, evident in the takeover of High Peaks Pure Earth’s Instagram by seven Tibetan women, one each day, beginning February 24, the first day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year.
In the cavalcade of visual stories, Asymptote contributor Chime Lama threw poetry exercises with shapes and games. A peek-a-book at her concrete poetry collection makes one anticipate it! Tenzin Dickie, the editor of Treasury of Lives, brought Tibetan humor and wisdom with snippets from her forthcoming family memoir—“if you don’t control your appetite even your knees are part of your stomach” or “a bucketful of vomit for a handful of food.”
Beijing-based Tsering Woeser’s resistant rootedness in her inner exile is telling from the Dalai Lama’s photo, banned in China, at her Losar altar. She showed a view from her apartment window, where a blizzard had occasioned her poem “But It Was“. Kaysang shared the view of Dharamsala from her office space, calling it “Exile Home, The Only Home I’ve Ever Known”. She also left a heartfelt note on sustainable gratitude. Gratitude is something always becoming on Tsering Wangmo Dhompa for her late mother, whose photo she carries wherever she goes. In a work in progress, which Tsering shared, the discerning woman resists “the man who was uncertain of being loved” because “At best, he saw me as the best / of the worst number.”
Lekey Leidecker, born to a Tibetan father and white mother, made a statement with—”I love my name. It is Tibetan.” Coincidently, among the many poems shared by Sonam Tsomo Chashutsang, “Barred Blessing” is about naming a girl Tenzin in an attempt to get the closest one can to the Dalai Lama in Tibet. Unsurprisingly, the editor of High Peaks Pure Earth, Dechen Pemba, who publishes news and writings from Tibet in translation, was once deported from China.
This Instagram takeover by Tibetan women ended at the beginning of March, a month when women are celebrated around the world and, in Tibetan diaspora, for Tibetan women’s uprising against Chinese occupation in 1959. If the Dalai Lama’s successor, as hinted by him, could be a woman, it may as well should be!
Paul M. Worley, Editor-at-Large for Mexico, reporting from the USA
Note: I was a conference participant, am a translator for Siwar Mayu, and in general friends with most of the conference participants.
The international symposium Indigenous Writers and Their Critics took place at the University of California at San Diego on February 24 and 25. Organized by Campesino/Maya Ch’orti’ Gloria Chacón, the program brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, scholars, and intellectuals from throughout the Western hemisphere to discuss contemporary Indigenous cultural production. Featuring Osage Robert Warrior, Nez Perce/Tejana Inés Hernández-Avila, Cristina Leirana Alcocer, Arturo Arias, Jerome Rothenberg, and Chacón, the inaugural panel covered a wide range of topics. Among the highlights of these discussions were: Rothenberg’s discussion of his trajectory as one of global Indigenous literature’s pre-eminent translators; Arias’s reflections on his own experiences as a scholar and critic; Leirana Alcocer’s tribute to the recently deceased Yucatec Maya writer Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim; Chacón’s developing a notion of Trans-Indigenitude; and Hernández-Avila and Warrior’s respective calls for those present to understand Indigenous expressive culture as going well beyond the page, including elements such as bodies (Hernández-Avila) and cooking (Warrior).
Of particular note to Asymptote readers, on the second panel Juan Sánchez Martínez presented about his new online literary journal Siwar Mayu, literally “a river of hummingbirds.” As a space dedicated to hemispheric Indigenous cultural production, the journal translates Indigenous writers from Latin America into English and Indigenous writers from the US and Canada into Spanish, overcoming the asymmetries between these languages and seeking to establish broader dialogues among the hemisphere’s Indigenous Peoples.
Throughout both days there were important readings and panel presentations by Indigenous writers, with those participating including Yucatec Maya Jorge Cocom Pech, Kaqchikel Maya Calixta Gabriel Xiquin, Mazahua Susana Bautista Cruz, and Mapuche Calibán Catrileo. There were a number of moving readings: Kaqchikel poet Miguel Angel Oxlaj Cúmez’s reading his poem “Genocidios” or “Genocides,” from his recently published Xti Saqirisan Na Pe/Planicie de Olvido “The Plains of Forgetting”; Navajo Sherwin Bitsui’s searing poem about a family member’s substance abuse from Dissolve; Tongva/Luiseño poet Casandra López read a number of haunting poems centered on loss and survival from her recently published debut collection Brother Bullet, and Nahua Judith Sanopietro read from her recent homage to Andean cultures, Tiawanaku: Poems from Mother Coqa.
Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil
Inspired by the endless sounds and sights of this year’s “turbocharged”/politically charged carnaval, I’ve just begun what is always one of the most difficult tasks of the year: revamping my reading list. High on the list are, naturally, translations, both from Brazil and around the world. I often start by taking a glance at “Globetrotting”—a preview of forthcoming translations, published annually by The New York Times. But this year, the preview seemed to fall a bit short: was something missing, or was it just a case of post-carnaval blues?
On the list, I was thrilled to see Cars on Fire, by Mónica Ramón Ríos (translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers) and Shooting Down Heaven, by Jorge Franco (translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg). But I was eventually struck by what I realized to be a great imbalance: fifty-one titles from Europe, and only two from Latin America. I’m confident that the NYT will continue to add to this preview throughout the year, but I feel compelled to use this dispatch to highlight some of the fantastic work coming out of Brazil in the months ahead.
First up: Úrsula, by Maria Fermina dos Reis, translated by Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey and edited by Peggy Sharpe. Reis (1825-1917) is widely considered the first woman to have published a novel in Brazil. In its portrayal of Africans and Afro-Brazilians, Úrsula denounces the injustices of slavery and paves the way for a black literary tradition—literatura negra—that has continued until today. Ferreira-Pinto Bailey and Sharpe have worked at length with Conexões Itaú Cultural, and their translation—forthcoming from Tagus Press (University of Massachusetts)—will no doubt make a remarkable contribution to both literary and academic spheres.
Another work on the watchlist is Twenty After Midnight, by Daniel Galera, translated by Julia Sanches. This timely piece, which paints a “portrait of the first generation of the digital age,” will be Galera’s third novel in translation (after Blood-Drenched Beard and The Shape of Bones, both translated by Alison Entrekin). With millennials across the globe questioning their place in today’s seemingly right-leaning world, Galera’s Twenty After Midnight feels all the more urgent, allowing us to question and explore that one consequential feeling that somehow keeps us going: hope.
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Read more dispatches on the Asymptote blog: