Alicia Partnoy is a survivor from the secret detention camps where about 30,000 people 'disappeared' in her country, Argentina. She is best known as the author of ‘The Little School’ Tales of Disappearance and Survival, that was published in Argentina in 2006 as La Escuelita. Relatos testimonials.
A poet, translator, and scholar, Alicia Partnoy has published the poetry collection ‘Little Low Flying/Volando bajito’, translated by Gail Wronsky and illustrated by Raquel Partnoy. Poems from her ‘Revenge of the Apple/Venganza de la manzana’ rode the metro in New York, Dallas, and Washington D.C., have been set to music by Sweet Honey in the Rock, and have been translated into several languages, including Hebrew.
Partnoy edited ‘You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile’, and from 2003 to 2006, she was the co-editor of Chicana/Latina Studies: the journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social.

Her work has been twice a Pushcart Foundation Writer's Choice Selection (Tobias Wolff and Bobbie Ann Mason), and has been listed in the London Times as a best-seller. Her poems, testimonial texts, and scholarship have been widely published in the U.S.A and abroad.
Alicia Partnoy served on the boards of directors of PEN, Roadwork, and Amnesty International U.S.A. She is an associate professor at Loyola Marymount University. Partnoy presides over Proyecto VOS, Voices of Survivors, and an organization that brings survivors of state sponsored violence to lecture at U.S. universities.

Biographical Data


They booted my homeland
out from under me
-- what they call exile --
that is, all of a sudden
the ground was gone
and distance lay everywhere before me


But one day,
before that happened,
they stripped me
of my freedom,
and then --
gasping for air,
surrounded by iron bars --
I felt
a little better than when
they grabbed
my daughter out of my aims:
on that day,
everything --the future -- was gone
(you could say I had too much of my own life)


And yet,
I still remembered the day the military
put my homeland behind bars:
on that day I had too much courage
and the fear was gone.


That's where it all began

Translated from Spanish by Richard Schaaf, Regina Kreger and Alicia Partnoy,
Revenge of the Apple, 1992

*

Song of the Exiled

They cut out my voice:
I have two voices
I pour out my songs
in two different tongues
They stripped me of the sum
two new suns
like two resplendent drums
I am playing
They isolated me from my people
and today my twin song
is returning like an echo
to my people And
in spite of the darkness
of this banishment,
today my poetry is aflame
before the mirror
They cut out my voice:
I have two voices


Translated from Spanish by Richard Schaaf, Regina Kreger and Alicia Partnoy,
Revenge of the Apple, 1992

*

Experiment


Take, carefully, a word,
the word 'fear,' for example.
Sprinkle it with the brackish
and bitter flavors of escape.
Squeeze it with iron fingers
into the mouth of the stomach.
Revulsion in the viscera,
no sure floor on which to stand,
a white tidal wave in the pupils,
the air ripped up by giant daggers.
…..If the experiment doesn't yield
results,
open the mouth wide and cough out: No!
at the invasion of jack-boots and shrapnel.

Translated from Spanish by Gail Wronsky,
Little Low Flying, 2005

*

Question Semi culinary


How do I de-exile myself without breaking
like a fat tomato in the salad
without bleeding all over the lettuce
in small golden seeds.
How do I de-exile myself
and smell tasty
and stay fresh and crunchy
like new bread.
How do I de-exile myself without being eaten.
How do I de-exile myself and come out whole.


Translated from Spanish by Gail Wronsky,
Little Low Flying, 2005