Humans
- Chely Lima (author, artist)
- Margaret Randall (translator)
ISBN
978-1946031044
LCCN
2017904591
Page count
242
Keywords
Poetry, Essay, Biography, Archive, Translation, Dual Language, Spanish, Spanish-English, Spanish To English, Queer, LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQ+, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIA+, Cuba, Cuban Spanish, North America, Mythology, History, Gender
Publication date
2017
Language(s)
Spanish, English
Publication media type
Print Document
Translation
Dual-Language
Publication series
Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts
Kin(d)* Texts & Projects
Lo Que Les Dijo El Licantropo / What The Werewolf Told Them
“Here is the strength of poetry for the world. Is it possible this book exists? I cannot be the only one who realizes I have been waiting all my life to read Chely Lima! The poet driving their own body in the trunk through the vast vulnerable fields of becoming human the way they want to become human in an inflexible world. Many thanks to Margaret Randall for these beautiful translations of one of the most brilliant books in many years! Chely Lima is here! Everyone tell everyone!” — CAConrad
“These are poems of astonishing courage and compelling craft. Their language sizzles on the page. The poet’s familiarity with history and his penchant for plumbing its most significant myths imbue these texts with a special richness. The myths come from the Greeks, Hindus, Germanic fairy tales, those drum beats brought to the New World by Africans during the ravages of the Middle Passage, and stories from indigenous America. Chely also creates some myths of his own.
“These poems are also gender-transgressive, revealing a personal journey as painful as it has been liberating. And it is a complicated journey. We cannot say the poet is only a man or that he was once a woman; such binary notions are themselves being challenged here. Body parts and the uses to which they are assigned in our inadequate society are routed from their comfort zones, made to look at themselves in a succession of mirrors and confronted head on. Chely refuses to play by society’s hypocritical rules — in his life or work.
“The poem called ‘Recognition’ begins: ‘I am digging up my face, / which is to say all the faces of my tribe. / With difficulty I haul them from obscurity / and hang them from the insulting stakes / marking each of their graves, my grave.’ And the poem ends: ‘I am rebuilding with one clenched fist / in my pocket. Rebuilding my tribe, / my face unmasked for the first time.’ Chely’s power lies in being willing to take the reader to the depths of his agony while at the same time permitting us to glimpse a future, a way out of suffocation that is woven of his ability to imagine a world in which acceptance and dignity bloom.” — Margaret Randall, from the Introduction
About the Contributor(s)
Chely Lima is a queer North American poet of Cuban origin. He writes prose, poetry, theater, journalism, scripts for film, radio and television; and is also a photographer. He has published numerous books in Cuba, Spain, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador — among them Lucrecia quiere decir perfidia (Ediciones Bagua, Madrid, 2015), Triángulos mágicos (Editorial Planeta Mexicana, 1994; Eriginal Books, USA, 2014; and Ediciones Territoriales, Cuba, 2015), Discurso de la amante (Imagine Cloud Editions, 2013), and Confesiones nocturnas (Editorial Planeta, 1994), all of these novels. His books have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Esperanto and Czechoslovakian. His monologues and works for the theater — for children as well as adults — have been performed in Cuba and Ecuador (he lived in the latter country from 1992 to 2001). A rock opera and a cantata were performed in Cuba's National Theater in the early 1990s.
Lima also also taught classes in a variety of artistic mediums and in several countries. In 2006 he went to California, where he had an internship at the M. H. de Young Museum of San Francisco. Since 2008 he has lived in Miami, Florida, where he has given workshops at Miami Dade Collage and other institutions. He has also written theater reviews for El Nuevo Herald. Currently he is entirely dedicated to his own writing, and occasionally works with beginning authors.
Margaret Randall is a feminist poet with a long history of social activism (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, as well as the United States). More than 150 published books reflect her personal experience and generational struggles. She has also translated much poetry by others. In Mexico, she co-founded El Corno Emplumado, a bilingual journal that published more than 700 writers from 35 countries. Returning to the US in 1984, the government ordered her deported, claiming her writing subversive. She won her case in 1989. Among her recent awards are the Poet of Two Hemisphere Prize (Quito, Ecuador 2019) and the 2020 George Garrett Award given by AWP.
