Feminismo en la poesía de Claribel Alegría

Abstract

Claribel Alegría is an important Central American essayist, novelist, poet, and feminist. She was born in Nicaragua, and then raised in El Salvador because of the exile of her parents by the dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. During her childhood she was influenced by the deaths and disappearances of many Nicaraguans during the Somoza dictatorship as well as the aftermath of the massacre of over 30,000 peasants in El Salvador. These violent and turbulent events inspired her writing. Many scholars have analyzed and celebrated her most famous novels for their political and social commentaries; however few have investigated her poetry. My research gives a more complete picture of the works of Claribel Alegría through the analysis of five books of her poetry. This investigation revealed that Claribel Alegría not only deals with themes of social and political justice, but also themes of feminism. In her poetry she questions the official history, and instead demonstrates events through a woman’s lens, criticizes traditional gender roles in both the public and private spheres, and changes images of women in famous literary works to empower them and treat them as literary subjects, instead of literary objects.