Always Rebellious / Cimarroneando

Reviews/Quotes

Su primer poemario H (1962) era una nueva proposición llena de sangre joven. Era el grito de una mujer negra, joven, (…) que había emigrado a La Habana para huir de la miseria rural de Jovellanos, su pequeño pueblo matancero: “Pobrecitos que éramos en casa. / Tanto/ que nunca hubo para los retratos; /los rostros y sucesos familiares/se perpetuaron en conversaciones”, de modo que su pobreza fue ancestral y rica en experiencias. Callada, consagrada al trabajo cotidiano, en su universo reconcentrado e intransferible, nos ha dejado extraordinarios poemas en donde esta matancera fija su origen de plantación azucarera, su amor a su familia negra y, por ello mismo, a los ancestros llegados a esta tierra en barcos negreros. Georgina Herrera escribe siempre tal como caen las lluvias torrenciales de las Antillas. Nancy Morejón La Habana, 20 de febrero, 2014 Georgina Herrera no solo es dueña de una de las voces más humildes y desamparadas de la poesía cubana sino que es ella misma una de las mujeres más humildes y desamparadas de la isla, solo iluminada por el fuego de su poesía… Fuego que desgarra y alumbra uno de los caminos más íntimos de la poética contemporánea cubana: los caminos de la soledad, de los sacrificios permanentes que ha heredado una raza y la voluntad de comenzar de nuevo cada mañana del mundo. Roberto Zurbano La Habana, Callejón de Hammel, Julio de 2005 … Georgina Herrera continúa entre nosotros una de las más hondas raíces de la creación poética femenina en Cuba: la poesía del dolor, del desgarramiento, su origen y sus consuelos es en H como lo fue la Avellaneda y Luisa Pérez de Zambrana en el siglo pasado, el centro de este cuaderno que surge, tal vez con demasiada ternura, en el panorama literario como un enigma hermoso. Eliseo Alberto Diego La Habana, Cuba Internacional, diciembre de 1974 Her first book of verse GH (1962) was an entirely new approach, full of young blood. It was the cry of a black woman, a young woman, (…) who had come to Havana to flee the rural misery of Jovellanos, the small town of Matanzas where she was born. “We were so poor in my house./So much so /there was never enough for portraits;/family faces and events/were preserved through conversations.” Thus, her poverty was inherited and rich in experience. A quiet woman, immersed in her daily chores, in her own private and enigmatic universe, she has left us extraordinary poems in which a humble country girl lays bare her origins in the sugar plantations, her love of her Afro Cuban family, and her love of her ancestors who arrived to this land in the holds of slave ships. Georgina Herrera writes, always, like the torrential showers that fall here in the Antilles. Nancy Morejón Havana, February 20, 2014 Georgina Herrera is not only one of the humblest and most forsaken voices of Cuban poetry, but also one of the humble and forsaken women on the island, yet she is illuminated by the fire of her poetry... a fire that lights one of the most intimate paths of contemporary Cuban poetics: paths of loneliness, of permanent sacrifice inherited by a race and by a will to begin anew everyday. Roberto Zurbano Havana, Callejón de Hammel, July 2005 Georgina Herrera continues in our midst as on of the deepest roots of feminine lyrical creation in Cuba. Her poetry of origin, pain, heartbreak, and consolation, like that of Avellaneda and Luisa Pérez de Zambrana in the previous century, is the center of this chapter—perhaps too full of tenderness—that rises out of the literary panorama as a beautiful enigma. Eliseo Alberto Diego Havana, Cuba Internacional, December 1974 ||| REVIEWS: Letras femeninas: Review by María del Mar López-Cabrales. Herrera, Georgina. Always Rebellious: Cimarroneando / Morejón, Nancy. Querencias: Homing Instincts https://cubanabooks.wordpress.com/2015/05/28/screams-of-pain-and-pride/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23649629-always-rebellious-cimarroneando Review by “Erica”: This book is wonderful. The poems are what I think of as representational lyric confessional; descriptive without much figurative or abstract language, they are almost portraiture. Representational in two senses: in the artistic sense in that it intently recreates images of the world surrounding the poet, like representational painting; but also in the sense of Neruda's "voice for those who cannot speak", the role of the poet to remember, to bear witness to oppression, inequality, suffering, hardship, and also joy, rebellion, resistance, and beauty, to represent the experiences of their people (identified by aesthetics, class, race, religion, or any other number of concerns). Hererra's exquisitely "humble" language (described thusly by the introduction), emerges not just in the language choices made by the translator (simplistic, unadorned), but in the grammatical struture. Straightforward statements, descriptions, very little figurative language, but never tedious, never anticipatable. The cadences of the lines are compelling, and complex in a way that contrasts with the lovely unornamented, language: "There is no trap I have not escaped. They have never found traces that lead to my refuge."