Nina L. Molinaro

"They cut off my voice
So I grew two voices
in two different tongues"

-- Alicia Portnoy

"Physical pain has no voice,
but when it at last finds
a voice, it begins to tell
a story." --Elaine Scarry

One of the most visible and prolific writers of Central America,
Claribel Alegría is also a vocal commentator on the political turbu-
lence that has characterized that region for the last several decades.
Alegría considers herself first and foremost an activist, aspiring to
convey the difficult and ultimately destructive realities of Nicaragua
and El Salvador, two countries engulfed by what she terms "fratricid-
al tragedy" ( Forché 1984, 12), a tragedy controlled, in turn, by
foreign imperial interests, namely the United States. Living in
voluntary exile for much of her adult life, Alegría essentially views
her writing as the act of collecting ghosts ( Yúdice 1985, 953), a
position made manifest by her attitude towards language; in an
interview with Forché ( 1984, 11), she observes that "all too frequent-
ly I feel that words are growing sterile, that I am reconstructing and
extrapolating a memory, an empty evocation of the themes that I
prefer to deal with." Her comments also aptly summarize one of the
challenges posed by testimonial literature: to make undeniably
objective, and hence referentially valid, to the reader, the subjectivity
of another person (or community), whether that subject be the
author, the author's assumed persona, or a fictive character. John

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