Beasts Behave in Foreign Land - Softcover

Sanabria, Ruth Irupe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597097632 ISBN 13: 9781597097635

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2017

Synopsis

Winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s second collection of poetry, Beasts Behave In Foreign Land examines the internal landscape of a family confronting the psychological and emotional aftershocks of genocide and exile. Drawing on her personal experience during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976 to 1983), these poems emerge from the defining moment in which she had the opportunity to testify in the trials against the Fifth Army Corps in Bahia Blanca, thirty-seven years after soldiers kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned her parents. Weaving metaphor, ekphrasis, and voice, Sanabria’s poems pay tribute to the ways women in her family use art, music, and testimony to process the unspeakable and confront profound loss. Written in two sections and set in various cities throughout Argentina and the United States, the poems in Beasts Behave in Foreign Land explore the insistence and resiliency of love.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s first collection of poetry, The Strange House Testifies (Bilingual Press), won second place (Poetry) in the 2010 Annual Latino Book Awards. Her second collection of poems received the 2014 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Award and will be published in 2017. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Women Writing Resistance and U.S. Latino Literature Today. She holds an MFA from NYU and a B.A. in English and Puerto Rican & Hispanic Caribbean Studies from Rutgers. She works as a high school English teacher and lives with her husband and three children in Perth Amboy, NJ.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Seconds before Giving Her Testimony, the Witness Requests a Glass of Water to Quell the Voices Planted in Her on the Day the Soldiers Came for Her Family

“Begin with: this is the only picture I have of the three of us together.”

        “Put that away! The carrion needs to rest.”

“Don’t be a pussy. Look at the photo.”

        “Now that’s that face of a mother who would rather be anywhere else but at her
daughter’s first birthday.”

“Do you even know the names of the soldiers on trial?”

        “Your mother shaved her legs and wore a dress that day.”

“Don’t mention your father. For his sake.”

        “Tell the judges how mirrors grow down your mother’s spine; how her neck is the
        Long bending neck of an old adolescent, a new mother, a narcissist.”

“Don’t be a self-absorbed cunt. Focus on the grenades, the helicopters, and the
moment of kidnapping. Keep the mommy issues for your bourbon.”

        “How do you say ‘Your Honor’ in Spanish?”

“Since we’re on the topic of honesty, you should mention that your mother never loved
your father like that. She needed him. To get out of her father’s house. Sadly, she got
knocked up on her honeymoon.”

        “First of all, no one wants to hear how you two are as warm and fuzzy with each
        other as a pair of frozen steaks. Even if it is relevant to the case.”

“And squeeze as much eloquence as you can from your Spanish.”

        “Your mother braided all of her resilience into your umbilical helix of breath and
        memory. You’ll do fine.”

“Focus: the flashbacks, the exile, the silence.”

        “Bleh. The skeletons are on parade. Again.”

“Testifying validates the historical and political significance of the individual’s
experience. However, in trials like these, for crimes against humanity perpetrated by
military forces against its own citizenry, an insular approach to understanding one’s
narrative in which one delineates her testimony from the collective ‘I’ as critically
important is problematic. The witness knows that once her turn on the stand is
through, what she has offered will be absorbed into a larger, stronger mass that will
outlive her. The witness has betrayed the nacreous silence, which, for decades, she
labored over. She might feel disoriented, even embarrassed, by the sudden release and
exposure of what obsessed and defined her most.”

        “What the fuck?”

        “Hasta la muerte, camarada.”

“The Judges are listening. Speak.”

About this edition

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1597097632
• ISBN 13: 9781597097635
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 84