Poesía de resistencia "Yo vengo a ofrecer mi poema" - Octava lectura


Antología del XV Encuentro Internacional Mujeres Poetas en el País de Las Nubes




Poemas de Antonieta Villamil en páginas 18-20.  Poemas de la versión inicial de:  Monólogo de la que murió a golpes y Zapatos Verdes. ANTOLOGÍA MUJERES POETAS EN EL PAÍS DE LAS NUBES del XV Encuentro Internacional. Editada por Emilio Fuego.  México 2007.

Anthology of The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival - October 7-11 2004.


The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival took place in October 7-11 2004. The book is the official festival anthology and features all 28 of the poets appearing at the festival. The theme of the festival is human rights. The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology edited by Mark Pirie, Ron Riddell and Saray Torres.

Antonieta Villamil's poems on pages 87 to 91. The poems are unfinished versions of poems originally written in English: 

A poem is the last frontier of resistance. Letter to the brother errased without trace, The sweatlodge, Tunka Tipi or the stone people’s house, Cumbia dance of freedom.


 

A POEM:

A FINGERPRINT

 

December 31, 2001

 

 

A digital

instant taken

of human experience

 

The DNA           of memory

 

A poem:            the power to

show us           in a fraction

of the present

 

the future embedded in the

mirror image of its past

 

A poem:           the last

frontier

of resistance.


Includes: B R Dionysius, Brentley Frazer, Melissa Ashley and Paul Hardacre from Australia; Antonieta Villamil (Colombia), Cecilia Guridi (Chile), Karin Bellman (Sweden), Frank Pervan (Croatia), Cristina Galeata (Romania), Peter Cooley (USA), Louise Warren (Canada), Fleur Adcock (UK), Michael Harlow, Apirana Taylor, CK Stead, Alistair Paterson, Richard von Sturmer, John O'Connor, Leonard Lambert, Brian Potiki, Keith Thorsen, and David Chan (New Zealand).

Title

The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology

Editors

Mark Pirie, Ron Riddell and Saray Torres

Category

New Zealand Poetry

Format

Paperback

Extent

114 pages

ISBN

0-476-00886-7

Price

NZ$24.95

Release

October 2004

New Zealand, Dissident Voice* #7 - Rhymes of Resistance or Poems of Privilege?

The basis for this rant stems from a single event. I attended a poetry reading at the recent international poetry festival held in Wellington. Antonieta Villamil from Colombia was our draw card; the program indicated that her poetry was fuelled by the oppression and victimization of people opposing the Colombian regime. There were four other poets, a guest poet from India and three from NZ. The session began and the compeer announced that this festival had an underlying theme of human rights. Villamil delivered a strong, impassioned, and engaging recitation, utilizing song and second voice to add dynamics.

Villamil's reading regarding human rights presents a socially connected voice. I love poems that can stir emotion, artistic endeavor and linguistic acomplishment... 

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In the early 80's, within the field of music, there were a few performers that included elements of social commentary and analysis into their work. Songs such as ‘Riot Squad', ‘There is no depression in NZ', and ‘Don't go' were all grounded in some local context. However, since the mid 80's and the redirection of the economy, artistic content has lost that focus.

To my thinking, artists and creative workers have a responsibility to take the situations which surround our environment, complex or otherwise, and reinterpret them back via poems, song, painting, theatre, or any other form of media available. Globally, and historically, artists and entertainers are a central part of a community rather than a perceived segregated elite. And it has not always been a safe career option. Poets have been murdered by various states for publicly presenting opposing or dissenting views, musicians have been banished and outcast, and dance and theatre groups have travelled and engaged local communities, placing themselves at personal risk, to inform, educate, and present alternatives in the days before the internet.

It seems that the greatest social statement of recent days is Dobbyn's tune ‘Loyal'. The national psyche was fed into the groupthink sheep wringer, branding loyalty and indicating patriotic enthusiasm as only being expressible by supporting a rich man’s boring boat race. Globally, when Gulf War II started, many mainstream American artists united to oppose the Bush regime across the artistic spectrum. The same cannot be said for here. Don McGlashen from the Muttonbirds is the only prominent NZ musician who has been actively visible in the anti-war movement. Where are the rest? Why has it taken two years for artists to mobilize for Zaoui?

What are artists responses to the foreshore and seabed confiscation, G.E., civil unions, NZ involvement in Iraq, gender politics, Steven Wallace, or any other situations that need exploration in one form or another? Without these conscious actions, provoking discussion, we become prone to forgetting. Shallow, consumer driven art does not make for deep, evolving, and inspirational cultures. It is a continuation of the disposable mindset that pervades current thinking.

I may have missed others involved in working with social campaigns and my criticism is not intended to attack people's actual efforts. When I mention McGlashen's effort I'm talking about the most mainstream of NZ performers. I have not seen such involvement from others such as Dobbyn, the Finn brothers, Shihad etc in social causes. I also acknowledge that there are areas of creative exploration where issues are explored in depth such as Hip Hop artists like Upper Hutt Posse, labels such as Dawn Raid, painters such as James Robinson and Robyn Kahukiwa, the Skate Board poets, satirical writing like the now defunct Babylon Express, and a number of other independent practitioners within NZ.

The combination of creative aesthetic and social commentary does not equate to loss of artistic integrity or quality, more so the opposite. It broadens the scope of the audience, links history with today, delivers critique and information in accessible formats other that academic tomes. And by this critique I am not suggesting that art needs to only be overtly political in content, the subtlety and nuances of personal exploration are as important as the broad social analysis. Art can be informative and entertaining at the same time. It requires commitment, a perception outside the self and ability to interpret wider issues with personal responses, and a willingness to engage others in dialogue.

– Mr Sterile & D.S. Lunchbox, speakers who curiously trace the history of globalization back to the Trilateral Commission. Here in New Zealand, I have seen white environmentalists accuse Maori of “reverse racism” for daring to assert their rights to protect indigenous flora and fauna under threat from bioprospectors and the TRIPs agreement. At other international conferences on globalization, activists have dismissed Indigenous Peoples' perspectives on globalization as “narrow” and “nativistic”, arguing that they do not attach enough importance to class analysis.

Naturally we feel outrage at security clampdowns against popular Mobilizations in Auckland, Vancouver, Seattle, Melbourne, Quebec City and Washington DC. But shock and surprise? Colonial governments hav always used police and military as an army of occupation against Indigenous Peoples. State-sanctioned abuses against indigenous communities have long been a dime-a-dozen but have frequently failed to register with many folk.

I have heard the fairy story, told with passion, authority and a touch of nostalgia, by non-indigenous New Zealanders, North Americans and Australians who speak earnestly of the freedoms and democratic rights enjoyed in their countries. Apparently things were pretty good until the neoliberal ideologues and big business seized control, opened up the economy, started hocking everything off to the transnational corporations, and saw Joe and Jill Citizen dispossessed of things that they thought were theirs. So say dozens of activists, academics, politicians as they state their opposition to the neoliberal agenda. This version of history begins when globalization started impacting non-indigenous peoples. The words “democracy” and “sovereignty” crop up time and time again in their talks, and in anti-globalization literature and campaigns in these countries. What do such appeals to democratic traditions, concepts and values mean when they ignore past and present-day realities of colonization in these countries?

While attending the 1997 Peoples Summit on APEC in Vancouver I remember being struck by how speaker after speaker attacked transnational corporations, and identified them as the driving force behind APEC, yet utterly ignored struggles like that of the Lubicon Cree Nation in Northern Alberta – the next province – against gas, oil and timber transnationals invading their unceded territory with the complicity of the Canadian state. Nor did the fact that a “liberal democratic” government of Canada, like the one which through hosting APEC hoped to influence Asian trading partners with “Canadian values”, had sent more armed forces against Mohawk people defending their lands in the 1990 standoff near Oka, Quebec than it sent to the Gulf War rate a mention. But then again, the Vancouver Peoples Summit itself was part-funded by the same NDP British Columbia provincial government which in 1995 initiated a massive military operation at Gustafsen Lake only a few hours’ drive away, against a small group of Indigenous Peoples defending their sacred lands.

Many critics of globalization play down the role and relevance of the nation-state, attributing power almost solely to transnational corporations and international institutions like the Bretton Woods triplets. Yet this takes the focus away from the nature and power of the state and even romanticizes it. Such global campaigns run the risk of distracting people's gaze from long-standing injustices underfoot. In delegitimizing these global actors we must be very aware of the dangers in uncritically legitimizing nation-states which are themselves based on the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. We cannot ignore the centuries of resistance by many indigenous nations against incorporation into the colonial state. We cannot ignore the colonial foundations of the countries in which we live. To do so is to mask the true nature of our societies, and the extent to which they are built on colonization and exploitation.

How can Indigenous Peoples be expected to validate, affirm and seek incorporation into national or international movements dominated by non-indigenous activists, organizations and agendas which are reluctant to address domestic issues of colonization with the same vigor and commitment that they put into fighting transnational capital or the WTO?

Of course some important alliances have been forged between Indigenous Peoples and non-indigenous organizations confronting globalization. Many (usually small, under-resourced) activist groups struggle hard to draw the connections between corporate globalization and colonization, to support local indigenous sovereignty struggles and educate non-indigenous peoples about these issues.

Movements to expose and oppose corporate globalization have a very real potential to mobilize support from non-indigenous people for meaningfully addressing the issues of colonization in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA. We should be challenging the jurisdiction of these colonial settler state governments as they move to sign international trade and investment deals, in the light of their continued denial of Indigenous Peoples' rights, jurisdiction, and title.

The centuries-old culture of colonization holds the key to understanding and defeating the current wave of globalization. If we understand how “democratic” governments like Canada can sanction the ongoing assault on Indigenous lands and communities it isn't hard to understand why such governments subscribe to free market international trade and investment policies.

In determining the values and foundations on which we build alternatives to the neoliberal agenda our movements must be prepared to examine our own propensity to oppress. We cannot build alternatives to globalization on the rotten foundations of the denial of occupying indigenous lands and the ongoing suppression of Indigenous Peoples' rights. “The colonizers are always building rotten foundations and expecting us to step into a completed building” says Sharon Venne.

If anti-globalization activists and organizations do not address these questions with some urgency then I fear that the growing resistance to neoliberalism in the global North risks being as inherently colonialist as the institutions and processes which it opposes. Our usage of the term colonization will be little more than empty rhetoric if our analysis does not acknowledge the context in which corporate globalization – and the  worldwide opposition to it – is taking place.

Those of us active in anti-globalization struggles in Canada, the USA, New Zealand and Australia need to examine our role in the colonization and globalization of the earth. Only then can we seriously talk about liberation and real alternatives to the neoliberal agenda. 

-- Aziz Choudry #Aotearoa Dissident Voice - New Zealand's most unrespectable revolutionary rag. Aotearoa Dissident Voice is a free volunteer-run magazine that aims to provide an open space for the free flow of anarchist and libertarian left news, analysis and creativity. www.dissidentvoice.org.nz edcollective@dissidentvoice.org.nz

Poetas Sin Fronteras del poeta y editor Ramiro Lagos: Mares de espejo mágico en cantoleo de duendes.




POETAS SIN FRONTERAS, editor Ramiro Lagos, publicado por editorial Verbum, España 2000. Poemas en versión inicial de Antonieta Villamil en las páginas 347-355. 
 
Volátil y efímera. 
Naufragio de rostro. 
Oda al pasto. 
Ausencia de luna. 
La coraza.
 
Más allá y sin fronteras, la poesía de Antonieta Villamil
Por: Ramiro Lagos.

Mas sobre mi antología internacional, “Poetas sin fronteras”, tengo que agregar que esta obra ha pretendido integrar las voces dispersas de la poesía emigrada, unida a otros cerebros fugados hacia el logro de metas superativas. Se incluyen también algunos poetas escapados de los feudos líricos o de los círculos elitistas que los discriminan como es el caso de esta inmensa poesía más allá y sin fronteras en "mares de espejo mágico en cantoleo de duendes" de Antonieta Villamil.
 
Más que antología es un manifiesto de voces internacionales cuya trascendencia procede del hecho de que casi todos los poetas sin fronteras son didácticos de literatura. Lo que quiere decir que su cátedra de poesía conlleva de por si un compromiso con la dialéctica de la crítica o de la autocrítica ampliamente expuesta o debatida en la academia universitaria o en el simposio. 
 
La amplitud de su apertura literaria a la luz de la crítica analítica o de la apoyatura erudita, lejos está de ese academicismo oficial y oficioso y de ese lirismo evasivo de quienes aún siguen creyendo que la poesía es un privilegio de sus feudos o de sus codificaciones literarias y no de la gran audiencia como la del Canto General. Contra los "falsos brujos” de la poesía se pronuncia Pablo Neruda tildándolos de “vendedores de hacinados detritus” “cadáveres de la moda", y los interroga: “Qué hicisteis ante el reinado de la angustia frente a este oscuro ser humano?”

Con Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Nicolás Guillén y Miguel Hernández, se rompieron los muros fronterizos entre poesía y pueblo y ya con Ernesto Cardenal se movilizó en Nicaragua una vanguardia democratizadora de la poesía, antagónica a los dictámenes de la élite.

Rotos ciertos cánones impositivos, la poesía de apertura o la que deliberadamente alterna con otras formas de expresión, bien sea empleando el lenguaje coloquial o la forma métrica, busca encontrar en el alma de la palabra su poder de transformación lírica, o su vanguardia social con una “Juana Pueblo” en marcha. 
 
La palabra como surtidor semántico, como signo de polivalentes significantes, como depositaria de connotaciones explícitas o implícitas o como foco de sugerentes metáforas, se abre paso a través de la realidad sensible sobre las fronteras de sus limitaciones de toda índole, y es la gran sensibilidad del (a) poeta la que sale triunfante dentro de la trascendencia del lenguaje, sea este rítmico o coloquial.

Pero lo que más interesa a los poetas sin frontera es su amplitud espacial, su entorno humano, salvada su intimidad y también su libertad artística asociada a la expresión libre de su idearium.

La poesía de los poetas aperturistas, comprende la gran metáfora del viento convertida en libertad sin límites y las tropas de las montañas convertidas en estribaciones épicas. Comprende el lenguaje de las águilas y de los cóndores y también el de las palomas mensajeras. 
 
Comprende la diafanidad de las fontanas con sus rítmicas corrientes interioristas y también el vehemente lenguaje de las cascadas con su entorno de cristal de roca. Clásicos, neobarrocos o postmodernos, nuestros ríos no dan a la mar sino que se convierten en ciénagas o en lagos serenos o agrestes donde se reflejan las barbas de nuestros abuelos milenarios que conquistaron la tierra con poesía, desposeyéndola de sus alambradas. 
Allí los espejos mágicos cantan sus himnos, sus endechas, sus juglarías, sus cantos generales y sus cantes jondos con el advenimiento de los duendes.

Pinceladas Literarias Hispanoamericanas editada por Gloria Bautista Gutiérrez, New York 2004.




PINCELADAS LITERARIAS HISPANOAMERICANAS, New York 2004. 
Editada por Gloria Bautista Gutiérrez. 

Poemas de Antonieta Villamil en las páginas 343-346. Versiones iniciales de poemas en español: 
 
En point Dume.
Ayuno.
Entre las piernas de la muerte.
Humano mio.
Mi país niño dormido.
 
Comentario en inglés:
 
Spanning from before the Europeans arrived in Spanish America to the present, this anthology provides students with a deep and extensive appreciation of more than 600 years of Hispano-American literature.

The 57 selections in Pinceladas literarias hispanoamericanas represent both traditionally significant writers, as well as the writings of indigenous, female and afro-Hispanic authors that are not usually included in the official cannon. The result is a collection that gives students a unique and diverse perspective of the Latin American literary world, addresses the repercussions of Spanish colonialization, and presents a rich history of the different periods.

By combining biographies with literary commentary, the reader can connect each writer's personal history with their literary production, which in many cases is inseparable. 

La poesía de Antonieta Villamil:

Una voz profunda de la cultura

Antonieta Villamil convoca los manantiales de la memoria para rescatar la voz de quienes sobreviven la pérdida de seres queridos, bajo circunstancias violentas. Expresa una profunda preocupación por la situación que ha llevado a muchos países a una silenciosa violencia y recorre una irresistible variedad de latitudes, en torno al tema del proceso creativo, en un constante empeño por reafirmar el poder de la poesía ante un mundo que enfrenta permanentes transformaciones y deterioros.

Al leer la poesía de Antonieta Villamil, no puedo sino asombrarme ante la increíble capacidad sensorial de esta joven poeta latinoamericana. Su intensa voz es profunda y lírica, y nos penetra con inteligencia y sutileza. Su estilo recurre a los sueños, al subconsciente, a lo mítico y a lo sobrenatural para explorar los misterios de la realidad. Busca, encuentra, re-crea y pone en palabras una realidad que frecuentemente es de abstracciones inexpresables.

 En muchos de sus poemas, Antonieta Villamil le da voz a los desposeídos, a los desaparecidos y a los olvidados. En otros nos arroja en brazos de una retahíla que juega con la excitación, la seducción, la consumación, el desencanto, la violencia, la muerte y la persistencia del amor. Sin gritar ni hacer demandas, su poesía señala constantemente la lucha por la libertad de expresión.

Aporta la voz del lamento y la denuncia de seres que son capaces de acercarnos con descarnada honestidad al momento en que son violentados o a las circunstancias en que cometen un acto que los marca. Además, Antonieta Villamil expresa el choque cultural que se sufre al emigrar. Reitera el rol y el poder del poeta en nuestra sociedad: Ser la conciencia de la tribu y la voz profunda de la cultura.

Gloria Bautista Gutiérrez, Editora de Pinceladas Literarias Hispanoamericanas y Voces Femeninas de Hispanoamérica. Fragmentos de este ensayo fueron publicados en la Revista POETS WEST, Estados Unidos. Voz Disidente: AOTEAROA, Nueva Zelanda. Prensa Feria del Libro de Geitersburg, Washington, Voces en Tiempo de Guerra, documental y antología, Estados Unidos.

 


 

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