Rosa's Conversations

Buen día:
Después de 12 años difundiendo autores y lecturas y compartiendo algunos de mis proyectos e intereses, este es el último post de Rosa’s Conversations.

Aunque esta página seguirá abierta por si alguien busca contactarme, empieza un nuevo capítulo en mi vida y me decido por fin a escribir.

Pueden seguirme ahora en Substack como Bilingual Writings:
https://open.substack.com/pub/rosaines/p/beginnings?r=z4441&utm_medium=ios

Gracias por su interés. Han sido una gran compañía y confío en que nos volveremos a encontrar. Mis mejores deseos hoy y siempre —Rosa

LUNES DE LECTURA

Hoy dejamos de lado nuestro "Lunes de lectura" para brindar un AVISO DE SERVICIO PÚBLICO 🌷
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19jCPomXqN/

LUNES DE LECTURA
Escribo (y pronto encontraré una forma de publicar fuera de FB 🙈). Aquí, en honor de marzo, Mes de la Historia de la Mujer, un ensayo que escribí el año pasado:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tener-un-hijo-plantar-%25C3%25A1rbol-escribir-libro-how-do-i-modern-figueroa-6vjde?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR04aRcNP2KVYSxM-Ycy_TLQ2wjjIaX7j1qVsKZb9p43IRHK6_m0FMQ9IbM_aem_c8csLw05dkC3-4nO8oYS7g

TENER UN HIJO, PLANTAR UN ÁRBOL, ESCRIBIR UN LIBRO… HOW DO I TRANSLATE IT TO MODERN TIMES? 1. No hacía falta que un político me hiciera notar que, pasado el umbral de los cincuenta, inmigrante y sin hijos, se empieza a cuestionar mi lugar en la sociedad.

Joyas
A new way of walking: Book Hunting through my neighborhood! Little Free Libraries rock❣️

Little Free Library

LUNES DE LECTURA
Descubrí a Sara Mesa el año pasado gracias a una de mis estudiantes. Sus historias no juzgan, sólo observan con amor nuestras imperfecciones, nuestra humanidad en fin. Una mirada desgarradora. “Mala letra” cuestiona el aprendizaje, nuestro concepto de lo que está bien y lo que está mal. Yo tampoco aprendí a tomar bien el lapicero, a mucha honra ya en aquel entonces, aunque hoy sepa que podría hacerlo si quisiera.

LUNES DE LECTURA
Hora de empezar con los libros que voy leyendo este año. El primero es Atusparia, de Gabriela Wiener, nombre del colegio en el que estudiamos y que honra la memoria del líder campesino huaracino que se rebeló contra el abuso de las autoridades de su tiempo.

Babelia dice: “La autora escribe sobre la izquierda o la historia política de Perú como quien reescribe una relación amorosa desde el despecho”.

Personalmente, me alegro que Gabriela sacara a la luz una historia de la que aún queda mucho por explorar.

Aquí el inicio, extracto tomado de penguinlibros.com:

EL COLE
Los rusos son para mí personas blancas que huelen a pescado. Cada vez que desembarcan en nuestras costas con sus descomunales redes de arrastre dan un manotazo al ecosistema de la corriente de Humboldt para hacer millones de conservas de anchovetas como parte de sus planes quinquenales. La flota soviética, torpe, siberiana, merodea por los mares del Pacífico en busca de cardúmenes de jurel, caballa y merluza.

Ya sabemos que cualquier cosa que hagan los rusos puede desequilibrar la vida en el planeta y los gringos harían otra película. En la práctica, estos marineros de manos gruesas y pelo rubio lustroso podrían no estar pescando ejemplares de mero de profundidad sino efectuando labores de espionaje para la red de inteligencia de la Armada Roja. Dicen que sus buques están equipados secretamente con alta tecnología para obtener información de las flotas mercantes de Occidente y seguir influyendo en política exterior.

(…)

—-
Retrato de Pedro Pablo Atusparia, por Etna Velarde.

LUNES DE LECTURA
Cerramos con broche de oro el Mes de la Historia Negra en Estados Unidos.

Toni Morrison (EE.UU. 1931-2019), Premio Nobel de Literatura 1993

BELOVED (fragmento/excerpt from penguinrandomhouse.ca)

"124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny band prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

'Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t.'

And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue. Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color. Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life's principal joy was reckless indeed. So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted, for her. Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behavior of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air. For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light.

Baby Suggs died shortly after the brothers left, with no interest whatsoever in their leave-taking or hers, and right afterward Sethe and Denver decided to end the persecution by calling forth the ghost that tried them so. Perhaps a conversation, they thought, an exchange of views or something would help. So they held hands and said, 'Come on. Come on. You may as well just come on.'"

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Toni-Morrison

LUNES DE LECTURA
Seguimos con el Mes de la Historia Negra en Estados Unidos y, aprovechando que hoy se celebra Presidents’ Day, qué mejor lectura que uno de los libros del primer presidente afroamericano de este país, el número 44, Barack Obama (EE.UU., 1961).

A PROMISED LAND

Chapter One

Of all the rooms and halls and landmarks that make up the White House and its grounds, it was the West Colonnade that I loved best.

For eight years that walkway would frame my day, a minute-long, open-air commute from home to office and back again. It was where each morning I felt the first slap of winter wind or pulse of summer heat; the place where I’d gather my thoughts, ticking through the meetings that lay ahead, preparing arguments for skeptical members of Congress or anxious constituents, girding myself for this decision or that slow-rolling crisis.

In the earliest days of the White House, the executive offices and the First Family’s residence fit under one roof, and the West Colonnade was little more than a path to the horse stables. But when Teddy Roosevelt came into office, he determined that a single building couldn’t accommodate a modern staff, six boisterous children, and his sanity. He ordered construction of what would become the West Wing and Oval Office, and over decades and successive presidencies, the colonnade’s current configuration emerged: a bracket to the Rose Garden north and west — the thick wall on the north side, mute and unadorned save for high half-moon windows; the stately white columns on the west side, like an honor guard assuring safe passage.

As a general rule, I’m a slow walker—a Hawaiian walk, Michelle likes to say, sometimes with a hint of impatience. I walked differently, though, on the colonnade, conscious of the history that had been made there and those who had preceded me. My stride got longer, my steps a bit brisker, my footfall on stone echoed by the Secret Service detail trailing me a few yards back. When I reached the ramp at the end of the colonnade (a legacy of FDR and his wheelchair—I picture him smiling, chin out, cigarette holder clenched tight in his teeth as he strains to roll up the incline), I’d wave at the uniformed guard just inside the glass-paned door. Sometimes the guard would be holding back a surprised flock of visitors. If I had time, I would shake their hands and ask where they were from. Usually, though, I just turned left, following the outer wall of the Cabinet Room and slipping into the side door by the Oval Office, where I greeted my personal staff, grabbed my schedule and a cup of hot tea, and started the business of the day.

Several times a week, I would step out onto the colonnade to find the groundskeepers, all employees of the National Park Service, working in the Rose Garden. They were older men, mostly, dressed in green khaki uniforms, sometimes matched with a floppy hat to block the sun, or a bulky coat against the cold. If I wasn’t running late, I might stop to compliment them on the fresh plantings or ask about the damage done by the previous night’s storm, and they’d explain their work with quiet pride. They were men of few words; even with one another they made their points with a gesture or a nod, each of them focused on his individual task but all of them moving with synchronized grace. One of the oldest was Ed Thomas, a tall, wiry Black man with sunken cheeks who had worked at the White House for forty years. The first time I met him, he reached into his back pocket for a cloth to wipe off the dirt be-fore shaking my hand. His hand, thick with veins and knots like the roots of a tree, engulfed mine. I asked how much longer he intended to stay at the White House before taking his retirement.

“I don’t know, Mr. President,” he said. “I like to work. Getting a little hard on the joints. But I reckon I might stay long as you’re here. Make sure the garden looks good.”

Oh, how good that garden looked! The shady magnolias rising high at each corner; the hedges, thick and rich green; the crab apple trees pruned just so. And the flowers, cultivated in greenhouses a few miles away, providing a constant explosion of color—reds and yellows and pinks and purples; in spring, the tulips massed in bunches, their heads tilted towards the sun; in summer, lavender heliotrope and geraniums and lilies; in fall, chrysanthemums and daisies and wildflowers. And always a few roses, red mostly but sometimes yellow or white, each one flush in its bloom.

Each time I walked down the colonnade or looked out the window of the Oval Office, I saw the handiwork of the men and women who worked outside. They reminded me of the
small Norman Rockwell painting I kept on the wall, next to the portrait of George Washington and above the bust of Dr. King: five tiny figures of varying skin tones, workingmen in dungarees, hoisted up by ropes into a crisp blue sky to polish the lamp of Lady Liberty. The men in the painting, the groundskeepers in the garden—they were guardians, I thought,
the quiet priests of a good and solemn order. And I would tell myself that I needed to work as hard and take as much care in my job as they did in theirs.

—-
Visite: https://www.obama.org/presidential-center/

LUNES DE LECTURA
Seguimos con el Mes de la Historia Negra en Estados Unidos

STILL I RISE
By Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.