Sustaining the Gaze

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

Nela Rнo, an Argentine-born resident of Fredericton since 1977, is a
poet, fiction writer, artist, and literary critic.

The most substantial of these three volumes is The Space of Light, a
selection of 29 poems and six short stories covering the 1980s to 2004.
The collection as a whole is a work of anti-oppression (political,
cultural, sexual), and a call for resistance and survival. The six
stories are a mixture of allegorical and poetic prose, lyrical love
stories, political suffering and involvement, domestic violence, and the
like. The poems, often musical with their different rhythms and voices,
are rare testimonials of the integrity, courage, and resistance of the
usually abused and exploited female protagonists. The possibility of
hope of light and joy runs through the collective and individual lives
of these suffering women.

In Tunnel of the Green Prow (originally published in 1998), we hear the
first-person voice of the prisoner of conscience, who represents all
women who have been imprisoned, abandoned, battered, butchered,
tortured, and finally exiled (or murdered). But the word, which becomes
the poem, leads to a kind of survival and liberation (in an inner space)
and transcends the captivity and even the threat of death, as Amanda
Castro points out in her brief introduction. Even those who do not
survive transcend death because they are remembered with love.

Sustaining the Gaze captures in all its evil and cruelty the
humiliation, rape, and murder of a group of Guatemalan women during that
country’s brutal civil wars. Based on the 1983 testimony of refugees
and reinforced by Brian Atkinson’s stark photographic images of brave
women fighting in the Izca jungle (1994–97), this slim volume is a
harrowing but salutary document that captures the essence of Nela
Rнo’s poetic attempts to condemn oppression and sing the courage of
all brave women survivors.