Washington Post Remembers Central American Poet Claribel Alegría
"Reality marks you. You can't shut yourself away." Claribel Alegría said, in a 1991 conversation with The Economist about her experience writing from Latin America. The author of poetry, prose, and "testimony"—she witnessed and condemned atrocities throughout Central America. The Washington Post's Harrison Smith posts this remembrance:
Claribel Alegría was the daughter of a Nicaraguan rebel, a firebrand physician who was nearly killed by U.S. Marines for his opposition to his country’s puppet government. She inherited a legacy of defiance, becoming a leading poet of suffering and anguish — a walking “cemetery,” as she sometimes described herself, for the voices of people killed by Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and by the crossfire of Nicaragua’s long-running civil war.
Ms. Alegría, who was 93 when she died Jan. 25 at her home in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, was one of Central America’s most celebrated writers. In more than 40 books of poetry, fiction and historical “testimony,” she blended lyric poetry with prose that chronicled her own personal tragedies as well as the political violence that plagued her home countries of Nicaragua and El Salvador for decades.
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Ms. Alegría received early support from José Vasconcelos, a prominent Mexican educator who helped her emigrate to the United States, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, a Nobel Prize-winning Spanish poet who became a teacher and mentor.
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