Erotica and exile: Peri Rossi is celebrated for Poetry Day in Uruguay

Montevideo, 21 Mar Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi was honored by the country's National Academy of Letters in an activity framed on the International Day of Poetry where the poet's verses dedicated to exile and female eroticism were the protagonists. The author, based in Barcelona for half a century and awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2021, was celebrated this Monday through a meeting at the Cultural Center of Spain in Montevideo, in which various academics, literary critics and Uruguayan poets participated. As highlighted in the presentation by the president of the National Academy of Letters, Wilfredo Penco, Peri Rossi, who is the third literary figure in the South American country to win the most important award in Hispanic literature, after Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994), in 1980, and Ida Vitale, in 2018, has made her mark on Uruguayan literature. “She is a writer for whom we have great respect and great interest, because of the variety of her work, which in 1971 also ventured into poetry with an emblematic title such as Evohé,” said Penco, who gave rise to Uruguayan writer and academic Rafael Courtoisie as moderator of the meeting. For his part, researcher Néstor Sanguinetti presented a paper by professor and critic Gabriela Sosa on the poems that Peri Rossi wrote following his exile, which, like that of authors such as Mario Benedetti (1920-2009) or Onetti, was due to the country's civil-military dictatorship (1973-1985). Specifically, the presentation dealt with the “intelligent exile” that the Spanish-Uruguayan Fernando Aínsa attributed to Peri Rossi as it separated himself from a poetry of exile attached to his personal experience and “opted for a proposal of universal scope”. He also referred to the symbolic character of the Uruguayan woman, which in the verses of her “State in exile” appealed to nautical figures to represent exile. For his part, the critic Luis Bravo spoke about the erotic poetry of Peri Rossi, whom he described as “the Uruguayan Sappho”. Although she mentioned that in her poetics “sexual discrimination is sometimes exposed in the parody to the male gaze”, Bravo said that despite being a lesbian, she “unmarked” herself from the labels of sexual identity and bet on “the freedom of the body of desire.” The critic pointed out that the Uruguayan poetry maintained “that thinking irreverence that characterizes her” and exemplified this hint of satire present in her work with a short poem entitled “September 11" as a key to his self-definition to see art as “always transgressive”. “On September 11, 2001, while the twin towers were falling, I was making love,” Bravo recited, whose intervention led to a recitation by Peri Rossi in the voice of Uruguayan poets Valentina dos Santos, Regina Ramos and Graciela Estévez to close the event with an audiovisual.