My efforts to analyze the role of resistance and resilience in Salvadoran writing is both rooted in and inseparable from my own identity and relationship to these stories. My work to gain a better understanding of the country\u2019s history, political climate, and particularly, of the Salvadoran Civil War, is as central to my academic project as it is to my understanding of myself, my family, and culture. This work is also foundational for my creative work, as I am someone that is not only invested in studying Salvadoran writing, but also a Salvadoran-American woman writing in the same tradition of the writing that I am researching and analyzing. What this brings to my literary analysis is a consciousness for how my own positionality and lived experiences shape my understanding and interpretation of these literary works.<\/p>\n
I first came across Javier Zamora\u2019s work in The Wandering Song\u2014<\/em>an anthology in which one of my own poems appears. Eager to read more work by contemporary Salvadoran writers, I went through the anthology\u2019s author biographies and researched the writers whose work had been published. I was drawn to Zamora\u2019s work after reading his poem titled \u201cEl Salvador\u201d on the Poetry Foundation website. The poem also appears in Zamora\u2019s poetry collection, Unaccompanied<\/em>, which narrates his experiences migrating from El Salvador to the United States at nine years old. Zamora\u2019s \u201cEl Salvador\u201d<\/a> personifies the country so as to begin a conversation that addresses the intricacies of the speaker\u2019s relationship to it:<\/p>\n Salvador, if I return on a summer day, so humid my thumb kiss your pumice breath, please don\u2019t let cops say:\u00a0<\/em>he\u2019s gangster.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The poem is ultimately driven by the question of return, as the speaker analyzes his positionality in relation to the country\u2019s sociopolitical climate. His characterization of Salvador\u2019s face as volcanic evokes a recurring trope common to Central American writing that draws upon the isthmus\u2019s geographic landscape to describe Central America and its people\u2014a trope that my own writing has reflected. When the speaker begs, \u201cplease don\u2019t let cops say: he\u2019s gangster,\u201d <\/em>he begins a discussion of both criminalization and the militarized police force in El Salvador and focuses on that to convey his relationship to the country.<\/p>\n In my own positionality as a U.S. poet born to Salvadoran immigrants, my experience is a generation removed from homeland and has created a disconnect that I seek to bridge through both my studies and my poetry. This positionality means that when I sat down to write my own version of an \u201cEl Salvador\u201d poem in my sophomore year poetry workshop, drawing from my own experiences was limited to envisioning El Salvador primarily through the perspectives of my six-year-old and ten-year-old selves (the ages during which I had visited El Salvador). Unlike Zamora and other Salvadoran writers like William Archila, Leticia Hern\u00e1ndez-Linares, and Alexandra Relegado, my own life is rooted in the hyphen between my Salvadoran-American identity. I do not carry the same stories that these writers emphasize in their works, but I do maintain a consciousness for this via the stories shared within my family.<\/p>\n I read, write, and analyze Salvadoran literature through the lens of my own upbringing in U.S. culture and education as well as with understandings of my cultural heritage and family history. My personal connection to the work that I am studying shapes my scholarship in crucial ways: it is the reason for which I am able to engage directly with specific cultural references and experiences described in the literature I study. As I move forward with my research, it is as important that I consider my positionality and personal connection to the work, as much as it is that I engage critically through theoretical frameworks and approaches.<\/p>\n Zamora, Javier. “El Salvador”\u00a0Poetry,\u00a0<\/em>November 2016.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My efforts to analyze the role of resistance and resilience in Salvadoran writing is both rooted in and inseparable from my own identity and relationship to these stories. My work to gain a better understanding of the country\u2019s history, political climate, and particularly, of the Salvadoran Civil War, is as central to my academic project … Continue reading Writing From the Hyphen: Studying Salvadoran Literature as a Salvadoran-American Writer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3612,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145910,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-blog-posts","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3612"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0will clean your beard of <\/span>\u200asalt, and if \u200aI touch your volcanic face,<\/em><\/p>\n