Customer Reviews

Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal, with a Selection of Her Poems

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Great true stories from any of the 21 countries of Central and South America (not even counting the Caribbean) are dismayingly scarce for English language readers. Stories specifically about women's lives are even more scarce, making "Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal" exceptionally welcome. Author Kathleen Weaver has written the biography of a poet who was also a fervent progressive activist for women's rights and social justice throughout Latin America. Magda Portal's life is described in a clear prose that is sound and scholarly and refreshingly free of academic jargon. This should prove compelling to anyone interested in feminism, political activism, Latin American history and the political upheavals that were a forerunner to all the current democratic reforms in Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

Born in 1900 near Lima, Magda Portal grew into maturity during those decades when social revolution was sweeping through most of the hemisphere, and sweeping her along with it. As the leading womens' organizer of the APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), she worked with such outstanding intellectuals and artists as Carlos Mariategui, Haya de la Torre, Diego Rivera, and Cesar Vallejo.

In my experience it is unusual to find woven into a serious book of international political history and analysis the personal, intimate story of an individual, in this case a female poet torn between the political and the personal. Her tormented love life is conveyed, her being forced into exile and prison, and her ultimate terrible betrayal - all are vividly described. I can't begin to judge the poetry or the translations, but I can certainly say that "Peruvian Rebel" adds to history a dramatically rounded portrait of an authentically remarkable woman participating fully in the exciting history of her time.

This is an in-depth study of a feminist activist and poet well known in Peru but not yet here. Kathleen Weaver did years of digging to give us the political context. Many of Latin America's intellectuals and writers had to flee repression and dictatorship. What they learned abroad - and then in many cases brought home - is one fascinating theme of this book. Magda and her friends put a Peruvian stamp on European ideas, however. Magda's love life is here as is her devoted life as a mother and, blessedly, her poems, translated by an an expert, for Kathleen Weaver is herself a poet.

I hope that the press will bring this book out in paper soon so that many more may have access to it.