NIHIRA Fukumi (University of Tokyo)
“Confusion and Fusion in Migracione”

In 1979, Mexican poet Gloria Gervitz (b. 1943) began writing a series of poems entitled Migraciones, a collection that she has continued to revise and expand upon since that time. Migraciones is her only poem—her “lifework.”

The first-person narrator of Migraciones reminds the reader of Gervitz herself. She often writes of a family reminiscent of her own. Gervitz’s family migrated to Mexico from Eastern Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. The poet’s complex background—her Jewish heritage and her life in Mexico—defines the narrative of Migraciones; it is also evident in the language of the poems, which at points strays from Spanish into English (and even includes prayers in Yiddish).

In Migraciones, the poet presents a number of boundaries, linguistic and otherwise. The collection’s title is highly suggestive, not only of the women in the narrator’s migrant family (i.e., her mother and grandmother), but also of a repeated movement between the self (“Yo,” I) and the other (“Tú,” you), a confusion created by the presence of the other, which is represented by several characters throughout the poems. In Migraciones, the apparent boundaries are gradually dissolved, as represented by the free-flowing presence of water and light.

In this presentation, I will consider how Migraciones is formed by its transformation—its repeated revision and expansion—in connection with the dissolved boundaries (between the self and the other, between memory and invention) represented throughout Gervitz’s poems.



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