Democratic Confrontations: Aesthetic and Civic Engagement in the Poetry of Carmen Naranjo

Abstract

The revolutionary poetry of the Costa Rican writer and politician Carmen Naranjo (1928-2012) repeatedly confronts the idyllic portrayal of her country as devoid of social conflict. Within a political climate strained by Central America’s leftist liberation struggles and polarizing Cold War tensions, her lyrical rebellion and her political affiliation also place her at odds with the region’s intellectuals and poets whose visions for achieving social justice remained committed to socialism and militancy. Naranjo’s use of the guerrilla-poet poses a critical need to analyze the parameters of her revolutionary aesthetic within a privileged space of democratic practice and discourse. This dissertation explores the relationship between poetry and democracy through six major collections in which I trace the effect produced when the aesthetic forms of revolutionary struggle are transposed to a non-revolutionary context. My research provides an avenue for the inclusion of the Costa Rican social democratic perspective in the overall history of committed literature in Central America. I draw on recent theory bridging aesthetics and the polity to identify a dual literary and political commitment in Naranjo’s verse that goes beyond protesting the injustices of a particular regime or state apparatus. Rather, she protests the language which misrepresents democracy’s core: the people. Thus, Naranjo forges political views within the lyric through radical resistance to signifiers, intense interrogation directed to spaces of silences, and through making visible that which ruptures community, painfully (mis)represented in the collective subject “we.” The lyric voice confronts the words and symbols that have lost their meaningful and radical content, stamped by a post-revolutionary conformity that clings to the Second Republic’s narrative of democratic exceptionalism. I argue that this confrontation is an aesthetic and political endeavor that sustains the activism of the lyric self, thereby offering a model of civic engagement that is intimately tied to the creative process, or what I refer to as Naranjo’s “poetics of democracy.”