A poem for my father

Margery Vibe Skagen

Soledad Marambio is a poet and translator, and earned her PhD in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In her postdoctoral project at the University of Bergen, she is working with the late writings of Sylvia Molloy, Silvina Ocampo and Aurora Venturini. Her project, "The fragmentary writings of Venturini, Ocampo and Molloy: Late pieces against death", focuses on how these Argentinian authors explore ideas of temporality, decline and fear as a way of knowing and owning the process of ageing. Marambio argues that with old age, these authors became freer and more experimental, defying conventions for writing fiction and non-fiction, disturbing the notion of tight-knit and univocal life narratives.

Please tell us a little bit more about your research project. What is so interesting about these three Argentinian female writers? How did you get interested in them?

My father read to me, repeatedly, the work of three women poets. These were canonical poets in a Latin American culture inclined to canonize male writers. But beside these poets, I grew up reading mostly male writers. At some point in my life, I realized that I had a strongly biased personal library and started to actively read women writers and I was taken aback by the freedom and challenge to conventional rules – maybe male rules? – of literature that I found in most of them. In between all this I had the huge privilege of having Sylvia Molloy as a teacher in a creative writing program that I took years ago in New York. I’d say that, through her and because of her, I first read Silvina Ocampo. And I found Aurora Venturini’s work after reading about her mysterious and ferocious persona in a series of interviews and articles that appeared after she became a literary sensation when she was 85 years old. In these Argentinian writers I found creative freedom, courage to write the way they wanted and about what they wanted, and, also, a long and productive creative life. They seemed to have taken ageing as a moment in life in which they could ignore conventions and peer pressure. And in that freer space, they take, as elderly women, steps that are usually associated with younger (and mostly male) writers: They challenge established conventions, they experiment with different styles and untried paths.

You made a documentary last year, Pieces of memory: conversations with Sylvia Molloy which will be shown at the festival. Could you say something about your motivation and personal and intellectual experience from the process of making this film? I know you were inspired by Chantal Akerman’s last conversation with her mother in No Home movie. Is there any connection to be made here?

When I started working on the aging project I re-read Molloy’s work and discovered many new things about it, how her writing changed with time but without changing her subjects. On the contrary, all her preoccupation about memory and its relation to identity and selfhood, became even more urgent, and also more intimate. I thought that a film was a perfect medium for rendering that process: A record of her voice, the sounds of her life and her memory, especially because she reflects a lot about the images and sounds of the past, how we bring them with us. And I guess the main connection with Akerman’s marvellous and deeply moving film is the urgency of the record, the need to restore the archive and start filling it with these incredible women that have shown us a path (for creation, for life as well). 

Your book of poetry, Chintungo, is dedicated to your father. In which way is ageing - knowing and owning the process of ageing - a motive in your poems about him? (the poetic I’s ageing as well as the third person character’s ageing)

I started writing it when I was pregnant. And I guess it was in that moment, when I realized that I was going to be the mom, the parent, that I also realized that I was ageing, and that my mother and my father were old. And I thought about them as the persons they were before us, the children, and I had so many questions… I wanted to fill in the gaps, to restore our family’s archive. At the end, I didn’t get all the answers because I didn’t ask all the questions. I understood that it was not all about knowing. Ageing, I think, has just as much to do with embracing the gaps. This is what this book is about… I think. 

About Chintungo… Chintungo is a nickname that my aunt made up for my father when they were kids. For me, it forever relates to Las Cruces, the small coastal town some 100 kilometres West of Santiago de Chile where he spent his childhood. He was a kid in the 1930s and was raised in a very poor family, in a very poor town, in a world very different from mine. This poem is about my father – the one he was as a child and the one he was as an old person – and myself.

In a Third City

between his and mine 
I observe in his ears the years that have passed. 
The shoes that drag in the streets  
tell the same story
time in the knees that don’t rise as before 
and in those ankles so thin they’re barely there
out doing again what he did as a child 
the skinny kid with the broken shoes 
Chintungo in the ankles and in Las Cruces afar.

I try to take him by the arm
I want him to lean on me, for it to seem casual.
He pretends not to notice, clasps his hands behind his back
raises his knees higher
picks up the pace.

We walk quietly on a sidewalk without shade.

We go on like this until we become slow
and the silence changes
makes itself comfortable, at home, Sunday after lunch.
I think about offering my arm again
but I imagine his body evading me and
I hide my hands in my pockets.
I ask if he’d like to get some tea.