SOUTH AMERICAN PROGRESSIVE FEMINIST:
Kathleen Weaver On The Life of Magda Portal

Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal, published by Pennslyvania State University Press, is listed in OPEN EXCHANGE's Healthy Living Marketplace. Biographer Kathleen Weaver will discuss her book at a Poetry Flash event with Stephen Kessler at Moe's Books on November 17.

BOB BALDOCK: Let's disclose at once that we're married, Kathleen, and have been since you first decided to write this book some twenty years ago.

KATHLEEN WEAVER: I had no idea know what I was getting into. Twenty years? Really? Doesn't that make it seem like I'm really slow? Don't forget I was teaching during much of that time at Berkeley public schools and then at Berkeley City College. And we were traveling...

BB: it just testifies to your persistence. And now a fine university press has published your book.

KW: Penn State University Press, yes, is publishing Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal.

BB: Magda Portal was...

KW: Magda was a seminal Latin American feminist, a writer, a revolutionary activist and a poet, almost entirely unknown in the US. She is just beginning to attract the attention so very few Latin women ever get here.

BB: Why is that? Why don't they get more attention?

KW: You know perfectly well. Much of the North American population is disinterested in almost anything foreign. Frieda Kahlo is known, Isabel Allende, Eva Peron, maybe Tina Modotti. Isn't that about it? For women?

BB: I'm asking the questions. Tell us about Magda Portal.

KW: Well, since her death in 1989, there has been a certain groundswell of attention. A good biography in Spanish by Professor Dan Reedy was published by the Flora Tristan Center in Lima, Peru.

There is definitely new interest. Googol shows more than half a million entries for Magda.

BB: And how was your interest sparked?

KW: In the 70's I was co-editing The Penguin Book of Women Poets. With Carol Cosman and Joan Keefe and a few others, I was doing research in the magnificent U.C. library here, in their poetry in Spanish section, trying to confine myself to the poems of Latin American women. That's when I first encountered Magda's work. I liked it immediately. Her poems – especially the early poems in the Vanguard style, were influenced by the surrealists of the 1920's, like Vicente Huidobro, a member of the Dada group in Paris, and Cesar Vallejo. This was fresh for me, and far from the work of Alfonsina Storni and Gabriella Mistral. Right away I tried to get in touch with her. I was told she was dead. But then we connected, and we corresponded.

BB: And you actually met her?

KW: Yes, but much later. In 1981, after Magda won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Women's Conference

in Mexico City, she said she was coming to San Francisco. I offered to meet her. She stayed here with Zoila Maxwell, who'd been her former Aprista companera—as well as a fellow political prisoner.

BB: Aprista?

KW: A member of the APRA Party - the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana – the oldest surviving political party in Peru - although it tried mightily to become a continent-wide force. It still exists, but in a very different way.

BB: And meeting Magda, how was that?

KW: Janet Rigg and I met her. Janet was a professor at Dominican College in San Rafael. We got to spend days with Magda just walking around, talking, in Sausalito and San Francisco, in the streets, in cafes. Always talking. We showed Magda the Golden Gate Bridge, of course, and we went all the way out to Point Reyes. Then we sat together for hours in the UC language archive. Please understand that for us to have time with this absolutely dedicated, politically astute woman was an overwhelming privilege. I mean, feminist theory was being talked about in radical circles and on campuses in the US, of course, but Magda - this tiny 82 year-old activist - she was vivid reality itself! And her spirit was still very far from elderly. Only five feet one and probably weighing less than a hundred pounds, so very petite, so conventional in appearance, yet she had been thoroughly immersed in all those decades of directly confronting all the many forms of sexism and reactionary politics throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. She had been in jails and riots and exile. We wanted to know everything about her. We were just completely enthralled. Magda had been and still was this deeply conscious, intrinsic part of women's struggle for equality. Here was one of the original heroic participants helping us recover lost history! I scrambled to get it all recorded. She had no English whatsoever, and we wanted to know everything her.

BB: She was more than you expected.

KW: That's an understatement. I expected the thoughtful poet I'd been exchanging letters with. I mean, I knew her as an exceptionally articulate feminist and a gentle poet. Just that. And suddenly here was a major revolutionary figure of this hemisphere! I'd had no idea whatsoever of the depth and extent of her involvement in full revolutionary struggle. For decades Magda had been Director of the APRA Women's Command!

BB: So you wrote as fast as possible... while walking around?

KW: There was some of that, but mostly we did formal interviews, two full afternoons, using this dinosaur reel to reel tape machine. We filled four tapes. Magda went over all of it, adding to it, giving it the skeleton of a real autobiography. This was terrific source material.

BB: About then you were also translating the writing of Sandinista Comandante Omar Cabezas and...

KW: Yes, I was finishing the translation of Omar's book, Fire From the Mountain,The Making of a Sandinista for Crown Publishers here.

BB: And you had just finished translating Cuban poet Nancy Morejon's poems.

KW: Yes, for Black Scholar Press. "Where the Island Sleeps Like A Wing." Beautiful poems.

BB: And you had begun translating some of Julio Cortazar's essays.

KW: That was later.

BB: They got published by WW Norton in a book called "Nicaraguan Sketches."

KW: That was later. You're drifting. Can we get back to Magda?

BB: Okay, so you had recordings and probably an armload or two of notebooks full of first-hand testimony.

KW: I was only intending to translate Magda's poems, maybe also some of her prose. She'd written a novel, and there were her essays.

I wanted to publish this wonderful long interview with her. But then I discussed this with Eduardo and he....

BB: Eduardo Galeano, the very great Uruguayan writer.

KW: Yes. He said that in his judgment Magda's poetry was much less significant than her powerful radical life itself, her social revolutionary life - so fiercely hated in some quarters and so highly esteemed in others through at least half of this hemisphere. He thought that was the real material to work with.

BB: Eduardo supported your writing her story.

KW: Emphatically. Then Magda died in 1989. She was 89 years old.

Her loss was very powerful for me. I wanted people to know about her. Apart from the sheer drama of her life, In many ways she still offered important lessons to the current women's movement, partly because her own progressive organization, the APRA, had betrayed its own basic principles. Really awful. It had reverted back to relegating women to second class status. Magda gave up entirely on the party in the 50's, totally disgusted with it, and totally frustrated about her inability to retain the party's original integrity. I definitely wanted her story out there for all the women struggling with the same issues – and yes, okay, the men too – contending with sexism.

BB: Why did the APRA Party betray its basic principles?

KW: It's not that unusual. I've tried to describe how it all came together and had terrific momentum, and then fell apart. AP
RA made every mistake in the book, so to speak - as progressive movements so often do. That is why they so rarely come to power,

And so often falter when they do, and why it is so difficult for them to remain functionally together. Living confrontationally can destroy the revolutionary fighter. All that frustration and persistent indignation

just burns up their patience and their inner personalities. Jose Maria Arguedes even committed suicide. He was an Aprista.

BB: We're seeing some betrayal of progressive principles right here right now.

KW: We certainly are! Feeling the full extent of the failure here can give you a faint Idea of what it was like for Magda. Of course, her party had come so much farther, and with unimaginably more effort over a much, much longer time span. You know, as part of the APRA revolutionary platform, Magda wrote a Declaration of Women's Rights, which included a demand for universal women's suffrage, for all women to be allowed to vote at age 18. But the men in her party soon persuaded her this was not a good idea. They were afraid if women had the vote, they'd elect reactionaries.

BB: Why would they do that?

KW: Because of the influence of the Catholic church on them. The priests. They were afraid. Magda agreed.

BB: You went to Lima to research her.

KW: That's right. I found my way to Magda's family in Lima, to her sister, and stayed with them. I slept in Magda's own bedroom. I worked in her study with her files. 

BB: How does the APRA Party tie in with the Bolivarean Revolution?

KW: In the 19^th century Simon Bolivar led a fight against Spain for the liberation of a number of South American colonies that are now countries – like Peru and Equador, Venezuela, Bolivia of course. Maybe Colombia. The Bolivarean Revolution is something of a continuation of that today, a widespread movement for social democracy, led mostly by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Much of that energy and those specific ideas came straight from the Apristas

in the early 1920's in Peru. I think it was a time comparable to the 60's here in the U.S. – very heady, very high-spirited, brimming on potentially tremendous changes. Spiritual regeneration was needed and was happening. Wondrous upheaval was possible – exactly as experienced in Russia also in the 20's, and certainly during the Mexican Revolution.

KW: Shortly after the Panama Canal opened, the students in

Peru, very backward, experienced this enormous change. Marxist and anarchist theories suddenly swirled throughout the new free universities. Committed professors were teaching in these impromptu universities for free. There was no tuition, and students themselves were teaching the indigenous workers and mestizos – imbuing them with liberating, exhilarating possibilities. One basic APRA ideal was for Peruvian Indians to be fully integrated into the new revolutionary society. This was an extension of the Bolivarean ideal. Lands and industries were to be nationalized. The enormous plantations were to be broken up and given back. All the church lands were to be confiscated. The Apra platform called for shutting down all the monasteries and convents, following the socialist tendency to rigorously separate church and state. They Apristas wanted a modern, technocratic welfare state.

BB: Magda was then in her early 20's.

KW: Yes, she was born in 1900, and she got just entirely swept up in this amazing social movement. Jose Carlos Mariategui - the brilliant Marxist writer who was establishing an intellectual foundation under all of the populist energy, along with Haya de la Torre of course - he befriended Magda. She became part of his inner circle. Along with Cesar Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet.

BB: Was Magda writing poetry then? Or mostly swept up in politics.

KW: Both. She was traveling high into the Andes, talking in Incan villages, urging them to get involved. And she was talking to

urban intellectuals as well, to other poets, trying to persuade them to

identify with the multitudes of people, not the ivory tower. She was

this young, impassioned voice for social regeneration. After awhile she even publicly renounced poetry writing, so she could study economics. Of course the authorities came after her, over and over again, but Magda kept traveling throughout Latin America's cities and rural villages promoting the APRA ideals. Outside factories and in plantation clearings she called for revolutionary nationalism, for an internationalist spirit, for full opposition to capitalism's exploitation and to Uncle Sam's depredations. She demanded full equality for all women and of course for the suffering indigenous populations everywhere.

BB: It's clear how Magda got so involved in revolutionary politics. But how did Kathleen Weaver get so engaged in all of this?

KW: That's not important.

BB: You grew up in Illinois.

KW: Well, partly, but then I married Allan Francovich and...

BB: Allan was a documentary filmmaker, brilliantly talented too. He made "Gladio" for British television and the classic anti-CIA film "On Company Business."

KW: Yes, we worked together on that with Philip Agee. It was really all propelled by the CIA coup in Chile, when Salvador Allende was

overthrown. Allan had grown up in the Andes. His father worked for

Cerro de Pasco, the U.S. mining firm in Peru, and Allen felt so connected with the mineworkers' kids, with their misery and really with all the poverty and squalor of the high Sierra. He had this incredible passion for social justice.

BB: And he brought you into that world.

KW: I was ready. We both got engaged with Chile Solidarity work, and we both wanted Americans to understand...

BB: North Americans.

KW: Yes, of course. We wanted them to understand what their government was doing to other people in so many places.

BB: Which it just keeps doing. Then Allan died, peculiarly, but that is another story. Finally, Kathleen, you want to talk about any new projects?

KW: Well, I'm still writing poems, as you know, and I would like to get published an anthology of Cuban poets I've translated. It's called O Tropics!, and it is not really very political at all. One of the finest Cuban poets, for example, mostly loves Emily Dickinson.

BB: As we all should. Bravo to all poets! Thank you.

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