To tear a piece off my shadow

Refugees, Refuge, and Human Displacement. Ed. Ignacio López-Calvo and Marjorie Agosín. London: Anthem Press, 2022. , 2022

This essay addresses refuge as a poetic space, a place of emotional experiences, expectations, and anticipations in the writings of Hispanic women authors. Building on Gaston Bachelard’s "The Poetics of Space" (1958), it addresses the actions and reflections about the search and exploration of shelter in the act of writing in the works of Teresa de Cartagena, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Soledad Acosta de Samper, and Gabriela Mistral. They wrote about searching for a place, within or beyond the literary text, to provide safety and survival from the jealousy and rejection of detractors and prosecutors. In their writings, one reads refuge as a literary topic, a desired personal goal, and as the act of writing.

2015

Legacy, 2002

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 2018

The Writer’s Chronicle 43.1, 2010

Mester, 2021

Gavea-Brown, 2022

The poetry of immigration is multifold. Common themes include adjusting to new customs in a new land, while trying to maintain old traditions, as well as longing, loss, and a kind of nostalgia often associated with the Portuguese word saudade. A curious thing, this saudade. As a third generation Azorean Portuguese American, I always associated this word with a "longing for lost things," which is how I defined it in my poem, "Saudade" (Anderson, 2013). My bilingual, book-length poem, Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana, has been described as filled with a longing for that which I had never known, for a past I never had. (Anderson et al., 2020) However, after a recent conversation with my friend Rui Faria, head of the Azorean Emigrants Association in Ribeira Grande, São Miguel, my perspective on the word expanded. For Rui, saudade was not about longing for what was lost, but rather a longing to see someone or someplace again. "We often signed our letters 'with saudades,'" he explained, "meaning, 'until I see you again' or 'until we meet again'" (Private conversation, 2022). What a difference! I now understand that for those of us whose families left our ancestral homelands-specifically, in the case of those from the Azores or mainland Portugal-our feeling of saudade is different from those whose families didn't leave. Of course it would be different for those who stayed behind. This makes sense and, not to belabor the point, poets of the second, third, and fourth generations who may be further removed from that homeland, may feel that longing for what was lost more profoundly than others. For me, whose Azorean Portuguese heritage was denied me by my first-generation grandfather's desire to be an American rather than a hyphenated American, I have long felt something was missing and have now embraced what I found there with the zealousness of a convert. Millicent Borges Accardi, a first-generation Portuguese American had a similar experience, although she grew up with the traditions and foods, and a father whose first language was Portuguese, she has said in an interview that she was not "Portuguese" but "American," and consequently, she didn't learn the language as a kid (Stafford, 2011). It wasn't until she visited Portugal, attending the DISQUIET Literary Program in Lisbon, that she reconnected with her roots in a meaningful way and started exploring them further. Her family came from Terceira in the Azores. For many of us with Azorean ancestry, no matter how distant, the connection feels so deep it's almost as if it is part of our DNA-the connection to the land and the sea compels us to write about it, it becomes part of us. This inherited cultural identity links us to what Vitorino Nemésio (1932) called an "elemental love," a love that is based on impulse rather than reason.