Monday, October 27, 2008
A Very Strange Poem Indeed
"Pentachrome" by J. de Burgos is one of the strangest poems that I've ever read. One thing that stands out in my mind when I first read this poem was how she starts each stanza (except the first) by saying "Today I want to be a man". When she says this, I think that she may be a man trapped inside a woman's body (perhaps only for a day since she did specifically say "Today" and not "every day") or possibly a schizophrenic. She talks about how she wishes to be Don Quijote or Don Juan, who are both fictional characters from Spanish literature in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. According to Wikipedia, Don Juan is used synonymously for "womanizer", especially in Spanish slang. Don Juan is also known for seducing women and enjoys fighting their champions. By saying that she wants to be like this man goes against everything that woman during this time period were probably trying to fight for. I cannot tell if this poem was written for shock-value or whether she wrote this from the depths of her heart, hoping to get some strange message across to her readers. It also surprises me that she talks about how she wants to "abduct Sor Carmen and Sor Josefina, conquer them, and rape Julia de Burgos". That's only slightly confusing how she talks about how she wishes to rape herself, unless she truly does want to move into the other's shoes (Don Juan and Don Quijote). This poem may have been written to insult womanizers or other anti-women's rights people at the time, but initially, this poem seems to serve purely as shock value for it's unsuspecting audience.
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2 comments:
I felt the exact same way as you did, Campbell. After reading this poem, I actaully began to question whether or not it actaully was Julia de Burgos writting this poem. As a civil rights activist for women, one would think that she would be totally against these common actions of men. One of my thoughts as to why Burgos would make such a statement "Today I want to be a man", is that probably she was just tired that men do not get scolded by their actions, but rather praised, as heroes. Burgos states in her poem that men are made into heroes, even though they are the "boldist bandits...mock the convents...and rape Julia de Burgos". Maybe this is why Burgos makes such a bold contradicting statement. When I read this, the message that I was recieveing was that Burgos was tired of trying to act perfect in society in order to fight for womens rights, while men were doing bad actions and treated as heroes. In other words, as you said Campbell, I also think this poem serves as a "shock-value" and trying to get a very important message across to her readers.
Personally I think it was a work of satire. The "shock value" is, imho, used to make you question the patriarchal ideals of masculinity that she referenced previously in the poem, and see that she's actually decrying that all of these things are accepted (and celebrated) in men, to expose the toxicity of patriarchal gender ideals. Her reference to Don Quixote concretes this, as idealized representations of "masculinity" in literature caused him to lose his mind. She addresses both sides of the gender roles in patriarchal society and their negative effects on both genders in this and "to jdb." She was actually ahead of the feminists of her time by showing the ways in which patriarchy is harmful to men, as opposed to just focusing on women.
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