Silencio by Clyo Mendoza

Clyo Mendoza’s Silencio is an enchanting work of dreamlike, at times even psychedelic, poetry that inherently resists any attempt to read it as a linear narrative using pure logic. It takes some patience, plenty of pauses, and ample mental silence for the reader to allow themselves to be carried away by the rhythm, lyricism, the interlaced memories of multiple people (or even animals or natural phenomena), and the raw feelings and textures that arise from this work. In many ways, I think this book of poetry challenges conventional ways of reading, insisting that the reader reads it the way it wants to be read. I grasped its essence rather well, but I knew even as I was reading it that I was not giving it the mental space it deserves, so even a second or third reading will be revelatory to readers.

At the heart of Mendoza’s poetry here is Agueda, a young girl who has been imprisoned by her father for questioning the circumstances around her mother’s death, as well as the prevention of an appropriate burial for her. Spiritual, physical, emotional, and linguistic colonial violence permeate the text alongside narco-trafficking and femicidal violence. There is grief, abuse, pain – how do you bury a jawbone? What can you do when your loved one is disappeared? They did not disappear, just vanish. They were made to, forced to. What does one do with all this soul-weary suffering?

But there is also rebirth, the reckless passion of young love, the transcendence one feels when in nature, the insistence of indigenous survival. The world in Silencio is simultaneously embodied – filled with bodily sensations and functions; mother’s milk, urine, blood, bones, ash – and disembodied; dreamlike, ephemeral. It is a roller-coaster experience, quite frankly.

I wanted to read this after having read ‘Medea Sang me a Corrido’ – a superb work of feminist-Mexican literature, and I wanted to read more works that dealt with similar themes. Mendoza’s work fits that, but it is also so different, which made the reading process very rewarding. As always with translated fiction, I reached a point where I wished I was a native reader so I could fully grasp what I was reading, but I think MacSweeney’s efforts to bring this work to English speakers are incredible. I really hope we get to see more translated literature like this one brought to light in the Anglophone world!