As If The Empty Chair / Como si la silla vacia
by Margaret Randall
978-0-916727-80-2 || 9780916727802 Cost: $30.00
Hand-sewn, Japanese stitch , 80 pages
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ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-159-7 / Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-160-3 / Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-161-0
Critical Praise for As If The Empty Chair / Como si la silla vacia
- Los poemas de Margaret Randall, tocan las fibras más íntimas de la sensibilidad humana. Por ello que la conmoción que producen deja al lector: sin aliento. ¿Cómo recuperar la historia de tanto dolor? Quizás las palabras de Margaret nos ayuden a mitigar recuerdos, sin olvidos, sin mentiras, con justicia y verdad.
Margaret Randall's poems touch the most intimate fiber of human sensibility. This is why the emotion they produce leaves the reader breathless. How can we retrieve the history of so much pain? Perhaps Margaret's words will help us sift through memory with forgetting, without lies, with justice and truth.
— Profesora Susana Mallo, Decana de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de la República (UDELAR), Montevideo, Uruguay
- These twelve exquisite poems depict, with razor-precise clarity, the realities of the "disappeared" in Latin America and the emotional devastation of the families left behind. As human beings, we can find the strength to bury our dead, grieve for them always, and yet somehow move on. Not so with our disappeared loved ones: every moment is filled with the horror of what they must be suffering in some secret torture cell. We never escape from their screams, and we never stop trying to find them. As Margaret Randall so vividly writes, "We cannot move on, for where would they find us when they stumble home?"
Estos doce magníficos poemas hablan, con la claridad y precisión de un cuchillo, de las realidades de los desaparecidos de América Latina y de la devastación emocional de las familias que quedan atrás. Como seres humanos, encontramos la fuerza de enterrar a nuestros muertos, llorarlos siempre, y de alguna manera seguir adelante. No es así con nuestros amados desaparecidos: cada momento se llena del horror de lo que deben estar sufriendo en alguna celda secreta de tortura. Nunca escapamos de sus gritos, y nunca dejamos de tratar de encontrarlos. Como Margaret Randall escribe tan vívidamente, no podemos seguir adelante, porque ¿cómo van a encontrarnos cuando vuelvan trastabillando a casa?
— Jennifer Harbury, author of Searching for Evarardo
- An empty chair: material reminder in daily life of histories suspended in the subjunctive mood, between institutions of the state and family, when once vibrant citizens were disappeared by the tens of thousands. Margaret Randall has written a meditation on that specific form of government-sponsored terrorism in Latin America, and the perverse structures of feeling it insinuates long after the crimes were committed. How do we survive a past rendered immutable by so many missing bodies that ghost the present with "senseless hope"? The fine translation into Spanish by Leandro Katz and Diego Guerra provides another afterlife. Margaret Randall reasserts her lyric powers to convey a grace of mind in the social song that tells us "you are never at home / when a part of that home / has been taken."
— Roberto Tejada, author of Exhibition Park and National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment
- The whole book is designed in such a wonderful manner -- the binding and the clear presence of the numbers seems to me to honor the numbers of dead and the effort to hold their memories. Someone once complained that the artwork I have made about painful subjects -- murders, abortion, violence -- look beautiful and peaceful. But I do not want to replicate violence, I want to explore how people who have suffered loss or violence find ways to continue their lives and to change. I feel like this book of poems is part of that ethos. I am happy to have it.
— Sabra Moore, artist (Abiquiu, NM)
- Beautiful object (the layout, the binding, the paper, everything about it) and stunningly beautiful poems, so much pain and grief distilled into [Randall's] verses, and so many small details and gestures that speak volumes of that experience, and of the compassion and deep sadness [Randall] obviously bring to witnessing of it. I choked up all the way through.
— Louise Popkin, translator (Harvard University)
- I read As If the Empty Chair last night and found it beautiful and moving. The poems are among the strongest of [Randall's] I have ever read; I love the interplay of voices and perspectives, and the quiet grief that pervades them all. And I love the bilingual presentation, and the photographs -- it is just beautiful! I am going to treasure this book.
— Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, writer, professor at Simon's Rock
- ... how powerful, how penetrating and sensitive, and clearly how so very necessary are these words ... that come through [Randall's] heart and hands like through no one else, words that will never let us forget the disappeared, and those who live with the never ending pain of an untouchable loss. I was immediately struck how the stitch binding adds the human touch to the collection, the reminder of the missing touch of the disappeared, like the fabric of personal history through textiles located within the arpilleras. I didn't anticipate this level of meaning and connection, such a perfect "binding"! The photographs [are] also perfect, just the right amount not to overwhelm, but to take us deeper.
— Robert Schweitzer, Art Curator (Scranton, Pennsylvania)
- Como Si la Silla Vacia arrived ... it gives me the chills, tears of emotion. It is spectacularly elegant, quiet, gorgeous to hold. The letterpress, wording, binding... choice of photos. Dimensions.... Dignified deep red titling, of course this most human of colors.... This reminds us book's origin was meant to be held in the hands, before reading begins. Book as object (now an art form in which artists purposely remove reading from book purpose) this book brings together content and craft in elegance and silence. I just love it. LOVE it.
— Jane Norling, artist (Berkeley, California)
Reviews
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San Antonio Express-NewsSept 25, 2011
Reviewed by Robert Bonazzi
Margaret Randall, poet, writer, photographer, activist, has authored 80 books during the past 50 years. As If the Empty Chair is her third recent poetry collection from Wings Press. This handsome limited and signed edition of 400 copies—designed, printed and hand-sewn by Bryce Milligan—presents heartbreaking poems about the "disappeared" victims throughout Latin America during the 1970s-1980s.
In the Introduction she writes of "a new form of state terrorism" that "took root and spread" and became "known as disappearance: paramilitary forces aligned with national dictatorships, themselves supported and funded by a succession of U.S. administrations ... kidnapped people from their homes or plucked them off the streets. They were never seen again. They became the desaparecidos of popular discourse, mourned in homes and communities, immortalized in song and poem. Disappearance. Disappeared. Strangely passive words to describe such brutality. From the rich Latin American lexicon, we might have invented a word that better fit the crime. What happened instead was that this word shed passivity and took on new meaning, one instantly and painfully recognizable to anyone living on the continen...."
Randall's poems focus on families who lost loved ones rather than on the horrific violence that "disappeared" over 150 thousand victims. From "At Exactly the Right Time": "Disappeared is a word/like some sleight of hand:/the rabbit that won't come out of the hat,/the macabre magic trick gone bad.//All those frantic days and nights/ making the rounds of prisons,/hospitals, morgues,/then making the rounds again,//a routine that kept them alive/until hope tripped on its own feet/and memory turned inside out,/ blurring the contours of his face.//She remembers a time before hope/had to claw its way to the surface:/her baby brother/still laughing...//Then she remembers to forget./ No body. No tombstone/she can cover with flowers,/no goodbye."
"Disappeared"—that haunting word offering no closure—"unable to describe/its burden of loss" for "sons and daughters,/lovers and workers/who still walk the scarred streets/of a city peopled by ghosts,/whispered conversation,/truncated songs/whose fading words/can only be read on old walls/or echo inside the heads of those who remain://still searching, still in love."
"Another Dimension" begins "Macabre vectors twist memory/their dance mutes a history/where some humans//live swollen with power/that erases others." In light of this horror, we hear the opposite viewpoint in "As If the Empty Chair": "Can't we just put it behind us, those untouched ask//Can't we just move on..." and the response to heartless questions: "as if the empty chair/isn't tucked beneath table rim,/that side of the bed isn't barren and cold/or the mirror reflecting a single face,/doesn't taunt these lives/we inhabit//without those plucked/ from the air we breathe..." because "Without them/we cannot move on,/ for where will they find us/when they stumble home?"
The International Court proclaimed that "forced disappearance" as a systemic attack on civilian populations qualified as a crime against humanity in 2002 and the United Nations adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance in 2006. Too little and too late, since such laws have had minimal effect in finding victims and bringing the guilty to justice. "The vast majority of victims of the crime of forced disappearance were kidnapped, illegally detained, tortured, murdered and their corpses hidden" or "their bodies often dropped into the ocean from helicopters," writes Randall. "But there is a vast emotional distance between knowing this intellectually and having a body to bury and mourn." These crimes "not only punished the man or woman fighting for social justice, it also punished their families, communities, and nations.... Hope is that most tenuous but tenacious of human emotions. Without a body, hope refuses to die."
These painful poems give hope in the midst of despair. "Do I get out of bed this morning/yet again? Do I wash my face?/Do I speak?" For Margaret Randall and all those who have lost loved ones, and fight for justice, the answer must be yes, always yes. Reading this book can be one way to declare our hope. The poems are simple and powerful in both English and Spanish. The photographs and the feel of this hand-made book are exquisite. Embrace it, as you would a lost loved one.
Robert Bonazzi writes the Poetry Diversity column for the San Antonio Express-News, and is the author of numerous books, including Maestro of Solitude: New Poems and Poetics.
About This Author
Read more about Margaret Randall HERE.
