Panic Signs

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

In “Disobedience and the Bear Hunt,” one of the short stories in
Panic Signs, the narrative voice explains that “the only reality is
language” but that through a “careful imposition of language”
regarding certain issues, “meaning ceases to exist.” However, Peri
Rossi is profoundly aware of the infinite potential of language, of the
“hidden meaning of things,” and in this collection of stories and
poetry she reads the signs that reveal the violence, brutality, and
vicious stupidity of repressive military regimes, and the protest,
resistance, and rebellion signed by the people oppressed.

There are multiple tensions in this work, some generated stylistically
by the mixture of prose and verse, some by the constant flux and flow of
an ever-expanding/shrinking, illusory, contradictory (ir)reality, and
some—the most and the worst—created in the rigid but always slippery
space where oppressor and oppressed meet. Peri Rossi warns us to be
vigilant, to be critical of a single reading (“a world governed by one
reading would be unbearable”), to be wary of power relationships, to
be open to reading the signs and the plurality of meanings possible in
the interpretation of our existence. She writes about the panic and
terror inspired by military regimes and reveals our individual and
secret wells of panic and terror. With irony, drama, lyrical and absurd
imagery, humor, and mordant satire, she reads and writes a fantastical,
allegorical interpretation of life under a repressive regime.

Rowinsky-Geurts and Borrбs’s translation of Indicios panicos is
simply transparent. So often the shadow of the translator inevitably
lingers in a word or a phrase, but in Panic Signs we hear only Peri
Rossi and all the voices who speak or who cannot speak in the face of
oppression. This translation is an invaluable addition to the
still-too-few English versions of Peri Rossi’s work.