Elena Poniatowska's Complete Acceptance Speech for Cervantes Prize in Literature

Dear Readers: If you don't already know Elena Poniatowska, please allow me to introduce the Grande Dame of Mexican literature. Yesterday, King Juan Carlos of Spain awarded her the Cervantes Prize for Literature. 

I have translated her acceptance speech because it is a remarkable statement about her personal journey ... from her arrival in Mexico as an eight-year old, French-speaking little girl to her ever-increasing conscious awareness of the fullness, subtlety and complexity of Mexican culture.

Commenting on the speech, a Mexican friend wrote of "the nobility of our Elenita ... she is our voice." Giving voice to the voiceless is Poniatowska's deliberate intent. In her speech, she echoes sister recipient, Ana Maria Zambrano, also an exile, as seeking in her writing, " ... to go beyond life itself, to be in other lives."

It is a remarkable statement, intensely human and tremendously insightful about the people of Mexico. I hope you enjoy reading it.

- Jenny 

Elena Poniatowska receives Cervantes Prize
wearing huipil handcrafted in Oaxaca
(Photo: Reuters)

Proceso: Elena Poniatowska

Mexico City - Majesties, Mr. Prime Minister, Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, Lord Rector of the University of Alcala de Henares, Mr. President of the Community of Madrid, Lord Mayor of this city [Madrid], state, regional, local and academic officials, friends, ladies and gentlemen.

I am the fourth woman to receive the Cervantes Prize, created in 1976 (thirty-five men have received it). María Zambrano was the first, and we Mexicans consider her ours because due to the Spanish Civil War, she lived in Mexico and taught at the Nicolaitan University in Morelia, Michoacán.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, wrote that perhaps the most pressing need of the human soul is watering its roots. For María Zambrano, exile was an incurable wound, but she was exiled from everything but her writing.

The youngest of all the poets of Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century, Cuba's Dulce María Loynaz, the second woman to receive the Cervantes, was a friend of García Lorca; and she entertained Gabriela Mistral and Juan Ramón Jiménez at her farm outside Havana. Years later, when they suggested that she leave revolutionary Cuba, she responded how could she leave since Cuba was an invention of her family.

I met Ana María Matute, at El Escorial in 2003. She was beautiful and skeptical, and I felt an affinity for her obsession with childhood and her fiercely rich imagination.

Maria, Dulce María and Ana María; the three Marías, buffeted by their circumstances, did not have a saint to turn to; nevertheless, as of today, the women are of Cervantes, like Dulcinea del Toboso, Lucinda, Zoraida and Constanza. Unlike them, many gods have protected me, because in Mexico there is a god under every stone, a god for the rain, one for fertility, another for death. We rely on a god for everything, rather than on only one so busy something can go wrong.

In the seventeenth century, on the other side of the ocean, the St. Jerome nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [1651-1695] knew from the outset that the only battle worth the pain is knowledge. José Emilio Pacheco rightly described her:

"Sor Juana / is the quivering flame / in the night of the millstone of the viceroyalty [Spanish colonial period]."

Her response to Sor Philothea de la Cruz is a liberating defense, the first statement by an intellectual against whom censorship was exercised. In the literature there is not another woman who upon observing the lunar eclipse of December 22, 1684, might have tried out an explanation for the origin of the universe. Sor Juana did it in the 975 verses of her poem "First Dream" [Primer sueño]. Dante had the hand of Virgil in order to descend to hell, but our Sor Juana descended alone and, like Galileo and Giordano Bruno, she was punished for loving science and reprimanded by prelates who were tired of being inferior to her.

Sor Juana relied on telescopes, astrolabes and compasses for her scientific search. Yet within the culture of poverty, unexpected treasures are also amassed. Jesusa Palancares, the protagonist of my novel "Hasta no verte Jesus mio" [Here's to You, Jesusa], had nothing more than her intuition to peek through the only opening of her house to observe the night sky as a grace without price and without possible explanation. Jesusa lived at the edge of the cliff, so the starry sky in her window was a miracle she tried to decipher. I wanted to understand why she had come to Earth, for what reason was all this that surrounded her, and what could be the ultimate meaning of what she saw. Believing in reincarnation, she was sure that many years before she had been born as a bad man who had disgraced many women and now had to pay for his sins among thistles and thorns.

2

My mother never knew what country she had given me when, in 1942, we arrived in Mexico aboard the "Marques de Comillas," the boat by which Gilberto Bosques saved the lives of many Republicans who fled to Mexico during the government of General Lázaro Cárdenas. My family was always train passengers: Italians who ended up in Poland, Mexicans living in France, people from the U.S. who move to Europe. My sister Kitzia and I were little French girls with a Polish surname. We arrived "to the enormous life of Mexico," as José Emilio Pacheco would say, of the people of the sun. Since then we have lived transfigured and enveloped in, among other enchantments, the illusion of turning inns into castles with gold bars.

The certainties of France and its desire for always having a reason paled next to the humility of the poorest Mexicans. Barefoot, they walked under their sombrero or rebozo [women's shawl]. They hid so the shame in their eyes could not be seen. In the service of the white ones, their voices were sweet and sang as they asked:

"Might it annoy you to show me how I might serve you?"

I learned Spanish in the street with the cries of hawkers and with a few couplets that always related to death.

"Sweet orange / Celestial lime / Tell María / not to lie down. / María, María, / now she laid down, / Death came / and took her away."

“Naranja dulce,/ limón celeste,/ dile a María / que no se acueste. / María, María / ya se acostó, / vino la muerte / y se la llevó”.

Or this one, which is even more frightening:

" . . Cuchito, Cuchito / killed his wife / with a little knife / the same size as he. / He tore out her guts / and was selling them. / - 'For sale: Tripe / of a bad woman!' "

"Cuchito, cuchito / mató a su mujer/ con un cuchillito / del tamaño de él./ Le sacó las tripas/ y las fue a vender./ —¡Mercarán tripitas / de mala mujer!”

Even today feminine guts are being sold. Last April 13 in Ciudad Juárez, two women were killed with several gunshots to the head: one was 15; the other was over 20 and pregnant. The first body was found in a dumpster.

3

I remember my amazement the first time I heard the word "gracias." I thought that its sound was much more profound than the French "merci." It also intrigued me to see a map of Mexico with several areas painted yellow and marked with the text:

"Zone for Discovery."

In France, the gardens are a handkerchief, everything is cultivated and at hand's reach. This enormous and fearsome secret country called Mexico—where France would fit three times—lay brown and barefoot before my sister and me, and it challenged us:

"Discover Me!"

The language was the key to entering the Indian world, the same world that in 1981 Octavio Paz spoke of here in Alcala de Henares, when he said that without the Indian world, we would not be who we are.

How was I going to move from the word Paris to the word Parangaricutirimícuaro [Michoacán]? I enjoyed being able to pronounce Xochitlquetzal, Nezahualcóyotl and Cuauhtémoc, and I wondered if the conquistadores had realized who it was they had conquered.

Those who gave me the key for opening Mexico were the Mexicans who walk about in the street. Since 1953, appearing in the city were many ordinary characters similar to those that Don Quixote and his faithful squire met on their road, a barber, a goatherd and Maritornes, the landlady. Earlier, in Mexico, the postman wore a brushed blue uniform and cap; now he no longer blows his whistle to announce his arrival, he just takes the mail from his battered backpack and pushes it under the door.

Earlier, too, the knife sharpener also appeared pushing his large whetstone mounted on a cart, which was a product of popular ingenuity, without any need of a grant from the National Council for Science and Technology. He dampened the stone with water from a bucket. When he turned the stone, the knife threw out sparks and left in the air the hairs split in two; the hairs of the city that in reality is nothing but his wife who is filing her nails, brushing her ​​teeth, brushing rouge on her cheeks, who considers sleeping, and when he sees her old and faded he does her the great favor of taking advantage of inserting a long, sharp knife in the back of the trusting woman. Then the city softly weeps.

But no weeping is more shocking than the lament of the sweet potato venders who left a scrape in the soul of Mexican children, because the sound of their carts resembles the haunting whistle of a train that stops time. Busy making furrows in the cornfield, he might raise the head and let the hoe and shovel drop so he can show his son:

"Look at the train. The train is passing. There goes the train. Someday, you will travel on the train."

4

Tina Modotti came from Italy but could well be considered the first modern Mexican woman photographer. In Spain in 1936, she changed her profession, and she accompanied Dr. Norman Bethune as a nurse in performing the first blood transfusions on the field of battle. Thirty-eight years later, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra stood up against a new form of torture, the disappearance of persons. Her protest precedes the uprising of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with the white handkerchiefs on their head for every missing child:

"Alive when you took them, alive we want them back."

The last surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington, could choose to live in New York next to Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim's circle, but even without knowing Spanish, she preferred to come to Mexico with poet Renato Leduc, author of a sonnet about an era that I'm thinking to write about later if I am given life to take it on.

What is learned as a little girl remains indelible in the consciousness. I went from the Castilian colonizers to the magnificent world discovered by the conquistadores. Before, the United States might have hoped to swallow the entire continent, but the indigenous resistance raised shields of gold and plumes of quetzal feathers; then in 1994 it raised them even higher when the women of Chiapas, who for years had been humiliated and furtive, declared that they wanted to choose their man, to look into his eyes, to have the children they wanted and not be changed by a bottle of alcohol. They wanted to have the same rights as men.

In "The Labyrinth of Solitude," Octavio Paz writes:

"Who goes there?" 

"No one."

Many Mexicans are looked down on. If asked, the maid replies,

"No one." 

[If pressed for an answer:]

"And you, who are you?"  

"No one, well, nobody," she again replies.

It is not said either to make themselves less or to hide, but because it is part of their nature. Nor does this nature say what it is, nor is it explained to themselves, it simply breaks out.

During the 1985 earthquake, many punk youth—the ones who paint their eyes black and color their hair red, wearing jackets and bracelets covered with studs and nails—these young people arrived at the stricken places, where buildings had collapsed into sandwiches, and they spent the entire night with picks and shovels removing debris that they later hauled away in buckets and wheelbarrows.

At five in the morning, when they were leaving, I asked them for their names, and one of them answered me:

"Well, just call me Juan."

It's not only that he didn't want to be singled out, or that he was afraid of rejection, but because like millions of the poor, their silence is also a silence of centuries of neglect and marginalization.

5

Mexico City has the dubious privilege of being the largest city in the world: nearly 9 million. The countryside is empty. All come to the capital that blackens the poor, throws them into the ashes and scorches their wings. But their strength has no limits, and they come from Patagonia to climb aboard the train of death called "La Bestia" [The Beast] for the sole purpose of crossing the U.S. border.

In 1979 in Colombia, Marta Traba published a "Homérica Latina" [Latin Homeric] in which the characters are our continent's losers: those on foot, those who scavenge in the dumpsters, those who pick through the waste of the lost cities, the crowds that trample each other to see the Pope, those who travel in crowded buses, who cover their heads with palm-frond sombreros, who love God in the land of the Indians.

Behold our characters, those who take their already dead children to be photographed in order to convert them into "holy little angels," the crowd that breaks down fences and collapses bandstands at military parades, that suddenly and effortlessly defeats all ill-intentioned 'good neighbor' policies, this anonymous mass, dark and unpredictable that is slowly populating the grid of our continent; the people of bedbugs, fleas and cockroaches, the miserable people who right now are swallowing the planet. And it is this formidable mass that grows and transcends borders, that works as porters, the young men as lackeys and shoeshine boys—in Mexico we call them boleros.

After returning from an American university, novelist José Agustín declared:

"There, they believe I'm an up and coming shoeshine boy."

It would have been better if he had said "a shoeshine boy come to less."

We are all coming to less, all underprivileged; our strength lies in recognizing it. Many times I have wondered if the great mass that comes walking slowly and inexorably from Patagonia to Alaska today wonders to what degree they depend on the United States. Instead, I believe that their cry is a war cry, and it is overwhelming. It is a cry whose first literary battle has been won by the Chicanos.

6

Four Mexicans have preceded me: Octavio Paz in 1981; Carlos Fuentes in 1987; Sergio Pitol in 2005; and José Emilio Pacheco in 2009. Rosario Castellanos and Maria Luisa Puga did not have the same luck, and they also invoke José Revueltas. I know that seven now accompany me, curious about what I'm going to say, above all, Octavio Paz.

In closing, and because I am in Spain among friends, I would like to tell you that I had a great "platonic" love for Luis Buñuel because together we went to the Palacio Negro de Lecumberri [Black Palace of Lecumberri]—the legendary jail in Mexico City—to see our friend Álvaro Mutis, poet and seaman, war buddy of our indispensable Gabriel García Márquez. The jail, with its repeat prisoners called "rabbits," brought home to us a shared reality: that of life and death behind bars.

No event is more important in my professional life than this award that the Cervantes jury has awarded to the feminine Sancho Panza who is neither Teresa Panza nor Dulcinea del Toboso, nor Maritornes, nor the Micomicona princess beloved by Carlos Fuentes, but a writer who cannot speak of windmills because there are none now, and who instead speaks of ordinary wanderers and run of the mill folk who carry the bag of the underling, their pick and shovel, sleeping in good fortune and trusting in an impulsive chronicler to retain what they have related to her.

Children, women, the elderly, prisoners, students and mourners walk beside this reporter who seeks, as Maria Zambrano asked,

"...to go beyond life itself, to be in other lives."

For all these reasons, the prize turns out to be more surprising and, therefore, the need to express gratitude for it is also greater.

7

Financial power reigns not only in Mexico, but in the world. Those who resist, mounted on Rocinante and followed by Sancho Panza, are fewer and fewer every day. I am proud to walk beside the dreamers, the raggle taggle, the naive.

My daughter Paula, and her daughter Luna, are here today. He [King Juan Carlos] asked her:

"So, how old are you?"

Paula told him Luna's age, but Luna insisted:

"Before or after Christ?"

It is fair to clarify for my granddaughter, that I am an evangelist after Christ, that I belong to Mexico and a national life that is written and erased every day because the sheets of a newspaper last one day. The wind carries them. They end up in the trash, or dusty in libraries. My father used them to light the fire in the fireplace. Despite this, early in the morning my father asked if "Excelsior" [newspaper] had arrived, then headed for Julio Scherer García, and we read as a family.

Frida Kahlo, painter, writer and Mexican icon once said:

"I hope the exit might be joyful, and I hope never, ever to return."

Unlike her, I hope to return, return, return, and this is the direction that I have wanted to set for my 82 years. I intend to go to heaven and come back hand in hand with Cervantes to help him, as a female squire, to give out awards to the youth who are, as I am today, April 23, 2014, International Day of the Book, here at Alcala de Henares.

In the last years of his life, astronomer Guillermo Haro would repeat the verses of Jorge Manrique on the death of his father. For hours he observed a jacaranda flowering and made me notice "how life goes on, how death comes so silently." I have made that stargazer's certainty my own, and I feel they are mine every year when jacaranda flowers cover the sidewalks of Mexico City with a purple carpet that is Lent, Death and Resurrection.

Thank you very much for listening. Spanish original

Related content on Mexico Voices Blog: Elena Poniatowska Accepts 2014 Cervantes Prize for Literature; comments by Spanish King Juan Carlos are noteworthy.