Ajy Tojen by Raquel Jodorowsky

Description

Raquel Jodorowsky (Iquique, Chile, 1927 – Lima, Peru, 2011) was the first daughter of a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant couple who settled in Chile during the 1920s, escaping from persecution in their homeland. She was the older sister of artist, filmmaker and author Alejandro Jodorowsky. Her childhood was spent in the province of Tocopilla, and she began her literary career in Santiago by winning a youth poetry contest and the Municipal Prize in 1949. Shortly thereafter she won a scholarship from the Peruvian Ministry of Education to study anthropology at the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, where she settled for the rest of her life. She lived in Peru for more than fifty years and obtained Peruvian nationality in the 1950s. Between 1961 and 1964 she toured the American continent, especially Mexico and Colombia, with the purpose of promoting her work in poetry and painting. She was associated with the Generation of the 50s in Peru, which counted among its ranks writers and poets such as Blanca Varela, Jose Maria Arguedas and Julio Ramon Ribeyro, among others. During the 1960s she was a close collaborator of the Nadaísmo movement in Colombia, and along with writers Gonzalo Arango, Jotamario Arbeláez and Jaime Jaramillo Escobar, was one of the most celebrated poets of the landmark Festival de Arte de Cali in 1964. She was also a frequent collaborator of the bilingual poetry collective El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, founded by American poet Margaret Randall and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragon in Mexico City in the early 1960s. There she published her conceptual oneiric poetry book Ajy Tojen in October 1964, as number 12 of the journal El Corno Emplumado. El Corno had created an important nexus between the North American Beat generation and Latin American poets during the 1960s, and it is in this way that Raquel meets Allen Ginsberg in Lima, where the Beat poet had arrived and was preparing to follow the route traced together with William Burroughs in The Yage Letters (1963). The friendship between Jodorowsky and Ginsberg is one of the most fascinating chapters in the cultural becoming of the poetry of the Americas in the twentieth century. Part of Jodorowsky’s work, characterized by its experimental, oneiric and surrealistic style, has been collected in anthologies published in Spain, Germany, Italy and Argentina. Most of her work, however, was only published in limited editions and has long been out of print. Her last years in Lima were spent between book fairs, poetry recitals, meetings with writers, poetry readings and presentations, and she was the recipient of several tributes, as well as a growing interest in her work shortly before her passing in 2011.

Margaret Randall (New York, 1936) is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. Born in New York City in 1936, she has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the turbulent 1960s she co-founded and co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years out of Mexico City published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities. Margaret was privileged to live among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, share the rebellion of the Beats, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, live in Cuba during the second decade of that country’s revolution (1969-1980), reside in Nicaragua during the first four years of the Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visit North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the US. American war in that country (1974). She has publlished over 150 books, spanning genres such as poetry, essay and memoir. In 1984, Margaret came home to the United States, only to be ordered deported when the government invoked the 1952 McCarran- Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, judging opinions expressed in some of her books to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” The Center for Constitutional Rights defended her, and many writers and others joined in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of citizenship. She won her case in 1989. In 1990 she was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression; and in 2004 was the first recipient of PEN New Mexico’s Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism. In 2017, she was awarded Cuba’s prestigious Haydée Santamaría Medal. The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque awarded her an honorary doctorate in letters in 2019, and she was also recipient of the Creative Bravos Awards from the City of Albuquerque in 2020.

Pedro Casusol Tapia (Lima, 1986). Writer, journalist, researcher and teacher. He has published the book of short stories Cat Food (Borrador, 2008) and the novel Once quince (Paracaidas, 2009), which were well received by the critics. In 2010 he was part of the Peruvian delegation invited to the 10th Luxembourg Book Fair. Since then he has written for several Peruvian magazines and publications. Between 2010 and 2013 he conducted extensive research on the trips made by the American poet Allen Ginsberg to Peru in the 1960s, interviewing writers such as Walter Curonisy, Raquel Jodorowsky and José Miguel Oviedo, among others, which resulted in the essay “Visiones Divinas”, published in English and Spanish by the platform of the European Beat Studies Network (EBSN). Between 2015 and 2016 he conducted a new research, this time on the cult poet Maria Emilia Cornejo, which brought as a result Soy la muchacha mala de la historia. Poemas de María Emilia Cornejo (Paracaídas, 2019), a book that contains an comprehensive essay on the life and work of the Peruvian poet. He has a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and has published the novel Barranco City Mon Amour (Narrar, 2021) and the collection of short stories El número fantasma (Lima Lee, 2022). Since 2020 he has written a weekly column in the periodical Hildebrandt en sus trece.