Olga Orozco’s Elegy

A grief-stricken daughter calls out to her deceased mother asking if she can see her—“Si me puedes mirar”—and thus recognize her pain. This title appears in Olga Orozco’s Los juegos peligrosos (1962), an elegy in which a poetic voice (in this case a daughter) laments the loss of her mother, the woman who recognized and valued the self-identity of her child. The summons and lamentation of the poetic voice harken back to ancient funeral rituals that served to escort the dead into the afterlife and aid the living in the grieving process. The role of poetry—elegies in particular—served as therapeutic practices when performed in funeral rituals for mourners and communities. This essay examines Orozco’s modern elegy as a performance and explains how the performative aspects of elegies allow the poem to serve as a purveyor of space in which a grief-stricken daughter is able to both account for the loss of self-identity due to death, and also use the textual space to reengage the relational dynamics that allow self-identity an opportunity for repair. This current study relies on cultural criticism, performance studies, and relational psychoanalysis to unravel the performance of healing

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Daughter · Elegy · Grief · Identity (music) · Literature · Performative utterance · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Sorrow · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology · Theatre and Performance Studies

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