Abstract
So a neighbor—did he catch me flying low?—invites me to throw together a few lines on our responsibility to Africa, particularly meridional Africa, just like that, at once. You have a fine plume, he tells me, before I manage to bury my head, like an eagle or a parrot. And even just like that: how could I fail to respond, to provide what is called response? How could I fail to respond before a neighbor as before Africa, before a neighbor, and, therefore, with Africa—but, even before that, in the name of what or whom? Out of simple human responsibility in a general sense? (My neighbor had just returned from South Africa, where he had participated in a meeting of The Charter of Human Responsibilities, an alter-globalization initiative.)
To a memory with no reminiscence
Humberto Díaz Casanueva
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Notes
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961), 89.
Pablo Neruda, “Towards the Splendid City” [Hacia la ciudad espléndida.], Nobel lecture, The Nobel Foundation. Stockholm. Dec. 13, 1971.
Andrés Ajens, La última carta de Rimbaud, (Santiago: Intemperie, 1996).
Violeta Parra, Décimas, Autobiografía en vers, (Santiago: Sudamericana, 1998), 182.
Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, Voiles, (Paris: Galilée, 1998).
Gabriela Lavarello, Artistas Plásticos en el Perú, 1535–2005 (Lima, 2005).
Zacarias Alavi Mamani, “correspondencias,” Jacket, 32 (April 2007), http://jacketmagazine.com/32/k-corres.shtml.
Chus Pato. Hordes of Writing, trans. E. Moure (Exeter, UK: Shearsman, 2011).
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© 2011 Andrés Ajens
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Ajens, A. (2011). How Can We Fail to Respond?. In: Poetry After the Invention of América. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230370678_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230370678_14
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