Cenizas

Central to Cenizas, the starkly beautiful debut by Salvadoran American poet Cynthia Guardado, are the destructive legacies of El Salvador’s long civil war, which raged from 1979–1992. Of particular interest to Guardado (who was born in Los Angeles), are the varied experiences of war across subsequent generations of Salvadoreños: the firsthand experiences of fighting by militants as opposed to the secondhand stories received by their expatriate children. But linguistic and geographic distances collapse under the weight of shared cultural trauma. In “What My Name Carries,” the speaker guards the true purpose of her visit from an immigration officer: “I don’t tell him // I’m here to write about the war.” Instead:

I tell him my tío is dying
& give him the address

of a priest—grief the only
language between us—
to explain why I’ve come here.

In other poems, the speaker draws on documentary art in an attempt to capture the experience of war, as in “Reflejo,” one of two ekphrastic poems that invoke photographs by Donna DeCesare:

a boy plays with the carcass of a bomb,
its broken container the aftermath

from attacks on his village. the placard says 1988;
he is the same age as me when i board planes

in & out of war. 

Though the speaker sees this history as her own, her access to a shared past is always mediated. In “Call Me Refugee VII,” the speaker climbs a popular hill, where the “screams of children” take on new resonances juxtaposed against carnival rides and family photos, as “[r]emnants of the dead / fester beneath / layers of earth,” and we are asked to imagine: 

a captive’s clasped hands,
their hooded heads unveiled
at the threshold of this ridge;
listen closely, oye bien el ruido
de sus cuerpos arrastrándose
todavía buscando al cielo.

The untranslated Spanish that Guardado deploys in this poem and throughout the work, serves as both a bridge for Hispanophones and a potential barrier to entry for others. These competing gestures toward opacity and legibility make for compelling, transfixing poems.