Posts featuring Roy G. Guzmán

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 2, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from Poland and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news from Poland and Central America. In Poland, the life and work of the renowned poet Adam Zagajewski has been celebrated after he passed away, while Olga Tokarczuk has published a children’s book; and in Central America, a new literary magazine has been launched to feature LGBTQ+ voices. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

The literary community not just in Poland but around the world has been mourning the loss of  the great Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski, who passed away in Kraków on 21 March, aged seventy-five. The winner of numerous literary awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2004) and the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize (2014), Zagajewski was appointed a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in 2016. His 2002 poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” (translated by Clare Kavanagh) captured the sombre mood after 9/11. In his final interview, published last summer on culture.pl, he defined poetry as follows:

I’m partial to a very old definition articulated by an Italian Jesuit poet and philosopher at the turn of the 18th century: “Poetry is a dream made in the presence of reason.” I adore that, as it contains two elements—something wild connected to imagination and dreams, yet still kept in order by reason. A sort of dialogue with the imagination.

Although he had been mooted as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years, Zagajewski never received that accolade. Olga Tokarczuk, who won the prize in 2018, and has “always held that writers don’t really have biographies, and that the best way to find out about them is to read their books,” was nevertheless compelled to write a biographical essay, which has recently appeared on the Nobel Prize website (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones,) in which she tackles the subject with her customary warmth and originality.

Tokarczuk has also branched out into picture books with Lost Soul, a “meditation on the fullness of life,” illustrated by Joanna Concejo and also translated by Lloyd-Jones. The translator is also behind the English version of the delightful second outing of the matronly sleuth, Zofia Turbotynska, in Karolina and the Torn Curtain, a retro crime story set in the 1890s in Kraków, penned by Maryla Szymiczkowa, a.k.a. the writer-translator duo Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński. For further details of these Polish books and more, due to appear in English 2021, look no further than this helpful list compiled by culture.pl.

The latest threats to freedom of expression in Poland are summed up in a report by constitutional lawyer and former journalist Anna Wójcik. They relate to a 1,700-page anthology on the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany-occupied Poland during the Second World War, Night Without End. The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, published in 2018. A Warsaw district court ruled in February that its authors, prominent Holocaust researchers Professor Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa and Professor Barbara Engelking, who heads the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, must publicly apologize for statements alleging that the mayor of the village of Malinowo shared responsibility for the death of Jews there in 1943 at the hands of Nazi Germans and that he robbed a Jewish woman of her possessions.

To end on a positive note: in December 2020, writer, publisher, and head of the Pogranicze (Borderland) Foundation, Krzysztof Czyżewski, was awarded the Ambassador of New Europe prize by the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk and the Eastern European College in Wrocław for his book W stronę Xenopolis (Towards Xenopolis), while Szczepan Twardoch’s The King of Warsaw (trans. Sean Gasper Bye) was longlisted on 11 March for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Literature Prize 2021.

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Last month saw the launch of a new arts, culture, and literary magazine in Central America: Revista Impronta, which will focus on the work and voices of the LGBTQ+ community in the region. Made possible by the effort of journalist Daniel Villatoro, Revista Impronta has since shared work by Central American artists such as rapper Rebeca Lane, writer David Ulloa, poet Roy G. Guzmán, fashion designer Manuel de la Cruz, and comic book artist Breena Núñez.

Additionally, authors, bookstores, and festivals across Latin America recently came together to honor the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, who would have turned 100 this year. Monterroso is most famous for books such as La oveja negra y demás fábulas (The Black Sheep and Other Fables), and for his story “El dinosaurio” (“The Dinosaur“). Augusto Monterroso was also awarded the Juan Rulfo Award in 1996, the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature in 1997, and the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature in 2000 and is regarded as one of Guatemala’s finest authors.

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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Against Invisibility: Poet Roy G. Guzmán on Queer Identity, Memory, and Honduras

March 18, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

The literary market, films, music, everything tells you, in some way, that no one’s interested in your voice, in your stories, and in your culture.

Roy G. Guzmán (they/them) was born in Honduras, grew up in Miami, lives in Minnesota, and last year, Graywolf Press put out Catrachos, their first book of poems. In February, the book was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards in the poetry category, alongside Ray González, Danez Smith, and Torrin A. Greathouse. Roy debuted with authority, potency, rebelliousness, and nonconformity, but also with pain and sensitivity, with empathy and nostalgia and tenderness, with admiration. Catrachos is filled with references to their childhood in Miami and how it was for them, a poor Central American person, to grow up in a hostile environment. In a country that considered them, in their own words, “an afterthought” and “a second-class citizen.” Catrachos, in a way, serves as a testimony for the experience of the Central American diaspora in the United States. But it’s more. Mucho más.

In Roy’s poems we find, yes, family traditions, but also violence, resistance, what it was like for them to grow up as a queer kid. Catrachos is a beautiful and soothing portrait, not devoid of harsh and urgent criticism toward imperialism and racial violence. Roy, in their debut, speaks with curiosity and tenderness, while acknowledging the devastation caused by colonialism. Trailblazing, the gringos might say.

Last year, Roy and I spoke about all this. About Catrachos, their memories of Honduras, their family, their identity, about considering themselves “the other.” We spoke about Rubén Darío, X-Men, and the Pulse massacre—the basis of a poem they wrote called “Restored Mural for Orlando.” We spoke about being a poet, about being queer, Latinx, mestizx, mulatx, indigenous in the United States and in Honduras.

–José García Escobar

José García Escobar (JGE): First, I wanted to ask you about leaving Honduras and growing up in the U.S. I’m curious about the Central American communities in the U.S. You reference your childhood much in Catrachos, but I feel like it’s often indoors. Were there many Hondurans where you lived?

Roy G. Guzmán (RGG): Miami often gets talked about as this cosmopolitan city, as sort of Mecca of Latin America, right? The Miami that I grew up in was very different than sort of what you see in Texas, what you see in California, where there’s much more solidarity not only among Central Americans but also between Mexicans and Chicanxs people. That’s something that I did not grew up with in Miami. Miami, at least in the nineties, it was much more Caribbean. I grew up with a lot of Dominicans and Cubans. And I think that when it came to the Central American diaspora, many more Nicaraguans. We saw many more Nicaraguans because they were considered political refugees. This is important. There were many Cubans, and they were seen as political refugees. There were Nicaraguans, and they were also seen as political refugees. Then there was us. We were basically seen as immigrants that had made this transition because of economic instability, and so I felt like a second-class citizen. I was less desirable than the political refuge. The other thing was that many Hondurans I grew up with were undocumented. Add that to the equation. This means that our communities were very disconnected. So, I grew up in a place that treated me as an afterthought. It wasn’t until I left Miami and I moved to Chicago, for my undergrad, that I was exposed to a very different kind of resilient. There are conversations that I never had in Miami and suddenly I had, the minute I left. And off course years later when I ended up coming back to Miami, after my master’s, to teach, I was incredibly aware of the power dynamics, the imbalance, the issues with, not just representation, but visibility and invisibility. I was able to understand shame, internalized racism. I was able to understand things like white privilege. I was able to understand anti-Central American discrimination.

JGE: You arrived to Miami in the mid-nineties, right? This was before Hurricane Mitch devastated a large part of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua as well. After Mitch, did you see more Central Americans arriving to your community?

RGG: Not as many. But I did live the impact of the hurricane. My family, obviously, as part of the diaspora, one of the things that we do as Central Americans in the U.S. is we send money back to our families. So, after the hurricane we had to make sure that our family had a consistent form of funding, so they could get by. Our family would also tell us that they would see bodies left and right, bodies floating in the rivers, or people’s businesses completely destroyed. READ MORE…