Author: Herrera, Georgina
Format: Kindle eBook
Number Of Pages: 170
Release Date: 23-11-2014
Details: Poetry of origin, pain, heartbreak, and consolation by Afro-Cuban Georgina Herrera.
This bilingual volume of poetry introduces the unique voice of Cuban writer Georgina Herrera, whose poetry is inspired by her African heritage and her childhood poverty and repression. Eliseo Diego calls Herrera's work poetry of origin, pain, heartbreak, and consolation. Herrera manages to transform her pain into central aesthetic components of her work, which point to a legacy of sorrow and sacrifice inherited. Though she indeed has suffered, Georgina Herrera possesses courage, energy, and a penetrating intelligence accompanied by a profound sense of dignity and an age-old wisdom that enable her to "take to the hills" and run away in order to go on and tell us of both "the truths" of her cultural memory and those of her mind, of her soul, and of her vast experience accumulated in 75 years full of anxiety, exclusion, violence, and discrimination. At the end, her self-definition is intimately related to validation of dignity and empowerment, challenging the representation imposed upon the black woman.
Of African descent, Georgina Herrera (April 23, 1936 -) was born in Jovellanos, the capital of Matanzas, to a family with great pride in its racial pedigree. From an uneducated background, she was brought up in an environment lacking in basic material resources, let alone books. This home was controlled by a repressive patriarchal hand with rules of obedience that discouraged thinking, and therefore, by extension, incomprehensive of this daughter's rebellious spirited and poetic inclination. Georgina never considered submission a viable alternative and her irrepressible cimarron rebelliousness led her to express an overflowing creativity. Her writing revolves around themes of gender, Afro-Cuban history, and the African legacy. Her work has been translated to various languages and has won much recognition abroad and in Cuba.
