By Greg Bem
And they bite,
more than anything,
the hand that feeds them.
The boys bite
even
the jugular of that girl
who is their mother.
(from “Gallery of Heroes,” page 41)
The contemporary Salvadoran poet Elena Salamanca’s defiant, political, and feminist text Landsmoder, recently arrived in English through the translations of Ryan Greene. It demonstrates that a masterpiece can be a short burst of shaped and honed and intentional energy. This historic document, both brimming with descriptive explication and symbolic reinforcement, is at once a book-length protest song and a feminist exposé, one that serves as a snapshot of Salamanca’s performance from over a decade ago, when she once occupied San Salvador’s oldest standing monument in the name of liberation and justice. The feminist performance, originally conducted in 2011, was published in book form in the original Spanish in 2012, and now, like the performance that inspired it all, it is a text that offers lessons on persistence and growth.
Salamanca’s performance shapes the text and the text shape the performance. A synchronicity of art and the act of artfulness. Here we are offered the opportunity to become introduced to both. Visiting the performance and revisiting it here in Landsmoder feels timely and timeless: the act of being upon the historic, patriarchal structures that belittle and dehumanize us with poetry in our fists is the reminder here. The book opens with a succinct introduction on Salvadoran history, leading the reader to learn about the historic and cultural contexts necessary to engage Salamanca’s response. It is a memoir and a biographical history. It is a love letter and an objection. The facets that make up Landsmoder transform it beyond itself: it is stepping off into the ether of brutality and resistance.
But we are not left in the shadows to assume and blindly follow the poems in their vacuums. No, Salamanca preps the reader thoroughly. The introduction includes an extensive description of the original performance, where the poet “decided to dress up like a first lady of the Republic . . . and to hold an official ceremony to celebrate the nation in the lead up to November 4th of 2011, the Bicentennial anniversary of ‘The First Cry for Independence,’ in one of the major historic plazas in the capital’s downtown.” (page 11). Disrupting the everyday within the symbolic plaza through spoken word and peculiar clothing and movement work, the poet opened the poetic text and challenged the status quo with anti-patriarchal, anti-militarist calls and critiques, many viscerally captivating.
Landsmoder is a dog. She is a mammal thrashed by history: a dog or a she-wolf, forever birthing, malnourished and despised.
(from “Introduction, page 10”)
Following the introduction and translator’s note, the book opens with a quote from the late Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton’s 1969 poem “The National Soul,” which raises up the symbol of the dog, central animal, and motherly figure symbolic to the entirety of the text. Following are the six poems of various lengths with various numbers of sections that vitriolically spawn Salamanca’s scathing utterances. The poems flow in a linear sense, evoking the performance through which they were first given life, and they also jump and claw at the reader individually. Moments upon moments within the poems pop up, and their significance is balanced with the shortness of the book’s 64 pages.
Walk,
boy,
I’m your love,
crawl,
bloody your hands,
bloody your knees,
stain this ground.
I’m your fatherland,
boy,
and I sentence you to this one love.
(from “Body of the Nation,” pages 44-45)
To read text as text. To read text as performance. To read text as directive. To read text as all the above. Landsmoder, which translates to “mother of the nation,” as a pun on Landsmorder, “murderer of the nation” (page 8). To be flipped, to be cared for, or to be murdered, to be removed. To be compelled and invited to participate: these twists and turns, reframing, thanks to the poet. Salamanca’s work carries a significant layering of dualism: dual audience, dual directions, dual times, and dual spaces. As the book unfolds, so does its remarkable dualism of access: ease and complex at the same time. It all emerges as a process, for the reader, in the bounds of education and activism.
I won’t keep constantly repeating that the flag is
the shroud that will cover me in death.
The ground is cold
and the flag is
a napkin I’ll use to wipe the blood off my lips
after devouring the bird.
(from “Academy of Déclassé Spanish Señoritas,” page 31)
It should be stated that the physical book is elegant, with colorful text and photographs in a scarlet hue that reflects the passion and concern of the author. The physical book is also cunningly engaging, as it is divided into two forms, half is devoted to Spanish and the other to English. The format is symmetrical: one language reads from the cover to the middle of the book, totaling 64 pages. Close the book and flip it upside down, encounter the other language in 64 additional pages. This kinetic bilingualism is on the surface simplistic, yet the simple symbolic act of a swap or rotation or the swing of a pendulum bears its own power and empowering, inviting the reader to participate in a more private, personalized performance.
“My hope is that this charge will transfer, and that you, when reading, will feel these poems asking for more than the page.” (from “Translator’s Note,” page 18).
Salamanca’s work is not new to translation, having been brought to English, French, German, and Swedish, and yet it is important to comment on the exquisite arrival of language in Landsmoder. Greene’s translations are far from lofty, the poetry hitting upon a vernacular poetics that is accessible and engaging. His translator’s note is far from the typical commentary on the challenges of moving text to text (though Greene does include a bit of healthy reflection). Instead, Greene’s piece dives a bit deeper, and brings the power of language and its translation into the context of El Salvador’s authoritarian rule and the realm of countering the despotic. And in front of everything is Salamanca’s voice, energy, and commitments to combat through poetry, through text, through the breath. In front of everything is where suffering leads us: uprising and countering.
You can find the book here: https://notacult.media/books/p/landsmoder
Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on the sacred and unceded land of the Spokane Tribe: South Hill, Spokane, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Exacting Clam, The International Examiner, and more. He is a proud union supporter and finds many of his hours stretched across mountains and water bodies. Learn more at gregbem.com.
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