words and death
Suicidal poetry

Elena Fonseca

They are women, they are poets, they belong to the twentieth century (although one of them was born in 1892) and they voluntarily ended their lives. The idea of death is present in their works, at some times like an exorcism, by naming it so often to keep it away, at other times with all its macabre weight, at yet other times as a signal, a "prophecy", but always accompanying them, like a guard dog.

The choice of Alfonsina Storni, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ana Cristina César and Sylvia Plath is one of many we could have made. We could have included Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, her "suicidal" entry into the convent and her provoked death. Or Virginia Woolf, with her pockets full of stones to prevent her from getting out of the river. Or Camille Claudel and her long exile/burial. Or Delmira Agustini and her tragic death. Or Anne Sexton and her suicide. All bearing the weight of having broken the silence and taken on so much truth. As much as they demanded from their words. Because the second half of the twentieth century, combative and feminist, brought with it the huge struggle between what is said and what is not said, that is, the power struggle.

All poets, be they men or women, plan that search for the perfect word, but for women it is more serious as they have to coin words, they must set a precedent by talking of their subjectivity, their daily life. And between one challenge and the next, they die or kill themselves.

There is a fragmentation in the writing of these twentieth century creators that talks to us women directly and that shows us that it is no longer that solid, global, masculine identity that literature had presented us with so far. The feminine imagination has made incursions into the structure of literary situations to remain there. And these, the suicide poets are the tip of the iceberg of our fragmented identity. Their lives were spent on this.

They left their lives, but they also left us with their prodigious words. Access to freedom has its price. On writing, on placing the exact word, on leaving the essential silence, they are building a new language, a language based on infinite experience never before recounted.

Alfonsina Storni (Argentina, 1892 - 1938)

(You go, Alfonsina, with your solitude...
sleeping Alfonsina dressed like the sea") Félix Luna.

At twelve years of age she wrote her first poem, sad and centred on death. She left it for her mother to read, under her pillow. The following morning what she received was a spanking.

She was small, thin, with prematurely white hair, very smiling green eyes, happy, dirty mouthed and very ironical, "she was of poisonous sympathy." She switched rapidly from laughter to sadness, "shedding light and shadow".

She was born in Switzerland by chance during a family visit. She grew up in San Juan, Argentina with her three brothers, an alcoholic father and serious economic problems. She graduated as a teacher and soon settled in Buenos Aires, where the literary vanguard appreciated her works, making her a member of their group and spoiling her. Some time before she had fallen in love with a married man (no biography gives his name), and at the age of twenty had a son by him, called Alejandro.

"I have a son who is the fruit of love, of love without law
as I cannot be like the others..."

And again:

"I am like the wolf
I have broken with the flock
and I went to the mountain
tired of the valley"

She travelled to Uruguay frequently where she had many friends and in 1938 gave a famous lecture, together with the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral and the Uruguayan, Juana de Ibarbourou. Her fame was increasing but her neurosis was too "my nerves are skin deep" she confessed to a friend.

In 1935, she found a lump in one of her breasts, it was cancer. It was successfully removed but she refused radiation therapy, she drew into herself, hardly going out. A few months before, her friend, the Uruguayan, Horacio Quiroga had committed suicide. "To die like you Horacio, sound of mind, like in your stories is not so bad, a well timed bolt of lightning, and the party is over..." Her grief, although she hid it, was increasing.

One Tuesday, 25 October she was seen walking along the La Perla beach in Mar del Plata at one o'clock in the morning. Two hours later her body was found floating on the water. A few days before she had sent a poem to the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación: "I am going to sleep".

(...) I am going to sleep, my nurse, put me to bed
Put a lamp at my head (...)

So you can forget...Thank you. Oh, a request.
If he phones again
Tell him not to insist, that I have gone out."

It May Be

Maybe all that my verses have expressed
is simply what was never allowed to be;
only what was hidden and suppressed
from woman to woman, from family to family.

They say that in my house tradition was
the rule by which one did things properly;
they say the women of my mother's house
were always silent - yes, it well may be.

Sometimes my mother felt longings to be free,
but then a bitter wave rose to her eyes
and in the shadows she wept.

And all this-caustic, betrayed, chastised-
all this that in her soul she tightly kept,
I think that, without knowing, I have set it free.

Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina, 1936 - 1972)

"Little sentinel, once again you have fallen through the slit of the night", Olga Orozco in "Pavana para una Infanta Difunta".

Her parents were Russian immigrants in Buenos Aires. She studied philosophy and at 24 went to live in Paris where she met surrealist poets and wrote for literary journals.

Little is known of her childhood, except from her writings:

"Dark and sad, childhood has gone...
I remember the sun of infancy, infused with death."

And again:
"A memory of my childhood when I was an old woman
...flowers died in my hands..."

She was not fat, but she was "plump" which did not please her, so she sought another body that was more like her poetry. She wore clothes three sizes too large and lived on pills to lose weight, her friends called her "the Pharmacy". She would have liked to build a poem with her body, but she was unable to do so, although she did so with her person, a much greater challenge. "Not to call things by their names. Things have dentated leaves, lustful vegetation".

When her writing did not sustain her any longer she arranged her death. The death she had written so much about "My search for a pure language is the proof of my impotence." "...I write against fear, against the wind with claws, I write against the cold and fear. I write in vain."

On 25 September 1972, while she was spending a week end out of the psychiatric clinic where she was confined, she died of an intentional overdose of Seconal, at 36 years of age.

Julio Cortázar, her friend, calls the poem he dedicated to her "Aquí Alejandra": "Little animal, here, against this, here, side by side with words, side by side I clamour for you."

Ana Cristina César (Brazil, 1951 - 1983)

The biography devoted to her by Italo Morriconi is called "La Sangre de una Poeta" (The Blood of a Poet).

She dictated her poems to her mother before she could write and at the age of 8 published them in the Literary Supplement of a Rio de Janeiro newspaper.

She studied literature, communication, travelled to England, translated Sylvia Plath, acted in films.

Her poetry is "a mixture of crystal, heavy metal and taffeta" says Armando Freitas Filho. With a constructed and carefully structured language she sought to reach the limits of the word through daily life. To reach it, she "needed to breathe the rhythm of a challenging pulsation". And it was thus she lived art and life, radically.

Italo Morriconi, who was her partner for three years, wrote her biography "La Sangre de una poeta", in which he tells us about some of the aspects of her life, with much modesty over details he considers as unnecessary but in which he recounts Ana Cristina César's struggles against the Brazilian military dictatorship in the seventies, and also her conflicts with the masculine structure of the intellectual elite. He also describes the intensity that marked her life.

A life she ended by committing suicide at the age of 32.

"I am not identical to myself
I am and I am not at the same time in
the same place and on the same
point of view
I am not divine, I do not have a cause
I do not have a reason to be
My own end:
I am the surrounding logic itself."

Sylvia Plath (United States, 1932 - 1963)

"Red was your colour..." Ted Hughes in "Birthday Letters".

At the age of 8 a poem of hers was published in the Boston Herald. She had a younger brother and her childhood was marked by her father, constantly present in her works, in spite of the fact that he died when she was eight. One of her best known poems and perhaps the most bitter one, "Daddy" describes him with hatred: "Daddy, I should have killed you, you died before I had time..." During her time at High School she is described as happy, vital, enthusiastic. It is also said that she was a perfectionist in all she undertook and when she could not achieve perfection she became depressed.

With much financial effort she managed to enter a University where she had affairs with companions that she describes in her Diary. Her Diary is a mirror of her struggle for freedom as a woman: "I want to sleep out in the open air, travel to the West, walk freely in the night." Her sexual relationships as equal to equal to which she feels she has a right, are a source of anger and of sarcasm.

Later came the depressions, the psychiatric treatment, confinement in clinics, electroshocks, to the point of temporarily loosing her memory. In the Bell Jar, her most famous, autobiographical work in prose, we find her state of mind translated with great precision.

When she met the already famous English poet, Ted Hughes, she described him as a "violent Adam", because of his voice, she said and also his eroticism. They got married and had two children. The relationship was stormy and soon they separated. Sylvia Plath did not feel recognised either as a poet or as a writer next to him, to the extent that some people did not even know she wrote.

Sylvia Plath gassed herself at 31 years of age.

Twenty-five years later, Ted Hughes published "Birthday Letters", a book of poetry reliving with the precision of a man in love, the likes, colours, loves and fears of his wife.

"Red was your colour
If not red, white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you
Blood red. Was it blood?
Was it red ochre, for
Warming the dead?"

Bibliographic notes

Melba Guariglia, "Cuando las palabras no alcanzan", Journal.
Luiza Lobo, "El Nuevo Milenio y la reconstrucción del Canon en la Literatura Latinoamericana de Mujeres, 1997.
Graciela Ravetti, Alfonsina Storni y Alejandra Pizarnik, los bordes del sistema. U. F de Minas Gerais,1998.
María Moreno, Radar, Page/12, 2000.
R. Bula Piriz, Alfonsina en mi recuerdo, Ed. El Galeón, 1997

Elena Fonseca is a Uruguayan feminist, member of the Cotidiano Mujer collective.

Translated from Spanish to English by Victoria Swabrick

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