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The portrait and the mirror: A biography of Honduran poet Clementina Suarez
Abstract
Born in Juticalpa, provincial capital of the Department of Olancho, Honduras in 1902. Clementina Suarez left her hometown at age twenty-one. Once on her own, she began to publish her poetry and to develop a life-style unique for a Central American woman in the early decades of the twentieth century. She lived and worked throughout Central America, in Mexico, New York and Cuba, gaining notoriety for her rebellious, woman-centered poetry, her bohemian life-style and her activities as a dedicated promoter of Central American art and literature. She gradually became a living legend in Honduras, in part because of the numerous verbal and visual portraits of her created by writers and artists from all the countries where she has lived. This is the first full-length biography of this matriarch of Honduran letters. It differs from other portraits of Ms. Suarez in its length, its point of view and its narrative strategy. Told from the perspective of an outsider observing and interacting with another culture, it begins with a brief history of the Suarez-Zelaya family, followed by a retelling of Ms. Suarez' life that is broadly chronological but that weaves together her past, present and future with a reading of her work that foregrounds her use of poetry as a workshop in the construction of herself. The theoretical concerns that inform this biography question the representational possibilities of language, particularly that discourse intended to describe one's self to another, while the biographical praxis responds to the feminist imperative to attend to the female subject and reinscribe her in her many contexts--social, historical, geographical, literary, feminine. Consequently, the narrative constructs an inconclusive portrait of the subject, drawing on such sources as personal interviews, gossip, autobiographical texts and poetry-as-autobiography, as well as the more conventional material found in archival and bibliographic sources. The result is a life-story that attempts to leave the legend intact while bringing the woman to life.
Subject Area
Latin American literature|Womens studies|Biographies
Recommended Citation
Gold, Janet N, "The portrait and the mirror: A biography of Honduran poet Clementina Suarez" (1990). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9110143.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9110143