Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos ed. by Gisela Heffes (review)

Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos is an insightful collection of essays that explores multiple experiences of (im)migration and their effects on the creative process. By presenting the reflections and experiences of a diverse group of dislocated Hispanic writers—primarily Argentine, Peruvian, Mexican, and Spanish—the collection’s fifteen engrossing essays investigate, examine, and define a “poetics of displacement.” Rather than focus on a specific generation of writers defined by their dates of birth, nationalities, or émigré experiences, the richness of Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos is precisely its multiplicity of voices that converge in “un momento de confluencia, una suerte de sinergia” (19).

In the introduction, editor Gisela Heffes explains that the collection grew out of the 2011 Rice University symposium Poetics of Displacement: Latin American Émigré Writers and The Creative Imagination. This conference brought together such renowned writers and scholars as Sylvia Molloy, Sergio Ramírez, Cristina Rivera Garza, Sergio Chejfec, Alicia Borinsky, and Arturo Arias, all of whom wrote essays for the present volume. Heffes also situates Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos within a genealogy of the more relevant works on displacement that have been published since 2000, offering the reader a textual map of experiences of dislocation. Within this experiential cartography, the essays in this collection offer an innovative perspective on residing in—and writing from—the borderlands of various (post)national spaces in the aftermath of the 2010 Latin American bicentennial celebrations.

While the collection is not divided into different sections, in the introduction Heffes organizes the essays according to three main themes: the return experience, the departure experience, and the in-between experience. Although the essays seem to float between these artificial boundaries, such categories do offer a helpful tool for interpreting the volume’s disparate dislocated voices. In her personal essay, “Fotogramas de la fugacidad: El escritor en tránsito y la transitoriedad de la escritura,” Heffes also explains her use of the word dislocamiento in the volume’s title. While more common in the medical field, the word connotes both displacement and pain, which details for Heffes the experience of (im)migration, whether forced or voluntary.

The essays of Molloy and Rivera Garza stand out amongst those chapters focusing on the return experience. While both offer personal anecdotes, Molloy uses the personal to explore Argentine narratives of return, primarily in the literature of Borges, concluding that home is never how one remembers it, but rather, home is transformed into an imagined place. Rivera Garza also emphasizes the enigma of place in her personal testimony about a double return to Mexico and then to the United States in which she explores her accented life as a writer in her native tongue of Spanish and as a professor of creative writing in English. Chejfec’s “La música de las anomalías” and Borinsky’s “Vino de lejos. Mujeres: Madres, enemigas, cómplices, amantes” are more loosely related to the topic of a return migration. In his personal yet abstract essay, Chejfec traces his experiences of living as a foreigner, both internally and externally, through Argentina’s literature of exile. Borinsky’s analysis of the representation of women’s experiences of dislocation in Argentine tango lyrics and poetry is enlightening; however, her objectivity seems out of place compared to the volume’s more personal testimonies.

The experience of departure, the volume’s second major theme, is examined through the lenses of exile, intertextuality, and poetry in five engaging essays. José Antonio Mazzotti examines his experience of double exile: that of leaving Peru for the United States and that of being a poet and a critic. Similarly, Eduardo Chirinos explores the nomadic condition of poetry in “Para llegar a Missoula.” By describing his own odyssey from Lima, Peru to Missoula, Montana as a palimpsest, Chirinos considers the encounter between intertextuality, in the Kristevian sense of transposition, and exile. In “El Río Jequetepeque desemboca en USA,” Eduardo González Viaña also explores the notion of intertextuality. In...