Virginia Quarterly Review, The

In Memoriam: Charlotte Kohler 1908-2008

The Revolution Is

Shea retraces the path of the revolution from Fidel Castro's landing spot in the deep south to Santa Clara in north-central Cuba, where Che Guevara sealed the victory. Using the route as a loose guide through the island, he spends a month traveling away from the big cities to see the country Castro created. Details of his travel are presented. Among other things, he opines that to look at Cuba and to really see it, requires acknowledgement of US policies in the region.

Tropical Depression

Cuba has the highest rate of depression and suicide in the the New World. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the island fell into its own Great Depression, which Fidel Castro euphemistically dubbed "the Special Period in Times of Peace," and suicide spiked to more than double the already-high rate of 1959. While the worst of the 1990 is past, Cubans have become accustomed to levels of uncertainty and scarcity in which they remain traumatized. Here, Navarro details the impact of the Special P...

An Individual History

A poem is presented.

Patria Y Muerte

Reyes discusses his father's memories in Cuba. His father, Jose Reyes, and uncle Tom, decided to return to Cuba after forty-six years of exile. Nothing from his father's childhood can be revisited without a piling on: his uncle's imprisonment, his grandfather's humiliation in seeing a life's work confiscated, the death of his brother, the separation from his parents, and the gentle nightmare of waking up, day after day, year after year in exile.

Cuba, Where Art Thou?

A poem is presented.

Che Sat Here

Ugarte discusses the making and marketing of Argentine revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After his defeat at the hands of the Bolivian authorities, his well-washed body was displayed like a battle trophy. Che has taken over the country. It's Oct 2007, and there are observances of the fortieth anniversary of his death--roundtables, bookshows, concerts, speeches--all over Bolivia.

The Bones of Mendihuaca

Fishbane discusses the countrywide death of Columbia's dirty war. No one in Colombia debated that the paramilitary had been both criminal and brutal, except perhaps the paramilitary bosses themselves, who continued to tout a right to wartime self-defense--at all costs. Perhaps the most visible symbol of this brutality is the massacre at Mapiripan, a riverfront town in Meta province where, over several days in Jul 1997, more than a hundred paramilitary fighters hacked, tortured, dismembered, a...

The Criminal Record

Sellers-Garcia discusses how she finds her uncle's records in Guatemala's secret police archive. Mario Silva Jonama had been a member of the democratic government ousted by a CIA-led coup in 1954; and had been one of the Guatemalan Party of Labor leaders "disappeared" by plain-clothes police in Guatemala in 1972.

Faces Fleshed in Green

While visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia's capital city of Phnom Penh, Binh Danh studied closely the mug shots of former prisoners. Here, Robert Schultz's poems and Binh Danh's images which form a narrative of the dark hells of Cambodian genocide are featured.

The Dice Player

The life and work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is discussed. Darwish was born in 1942 in the Western Galilee in the village of Birweh, before it was razed in the 1948 war that would lead to Israeli independence. As a young man, he joined the Israeli Communist Party and wrote poems and editorials for left-wing newspapers. His vocal activis, brought intense scrutiny from the Israeli government. Meanwhile, suffering from arterial disease, Darwish suffered a heart attack in 1984 followed b...

His Indomitable Self

Wiegers talks about Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who to the end was uncompromising in his faith that language might hold good, that it can hold its own against the forces that seek to dehumanize nations, and that independence resides in the individual, "indomitable self." His later poems seem to demonstrate not only a resistance to forces at work against the Palestinian people and their culture, but also a resistance to the attempts at pigeonholing him as a symbol for the Palestinian cause. Althou...

The Eternal Traveler

Naddy talks about Mahmoud Darwish's poems, which exemplify the sense of cryptic playfulness that Darwish tried always to create. In his final poems, he narrates from a perspective that became strangely archetypal for him. Moreover, one of his collections is called Unfortunately, It Was Paradise--an elegant phrase to summarize the paradox of the exile, the reason that a homeland cannot be forgotten, regardless of its state of ruin.

His Own Elegy

Joudah talks about Mahmoud Darwish's poem entitled "The Dice Player." Among others, Darwish wrote the poem as his own elegy.

The Dice Player

A poem is presented.

A Braid of Garlic

A poem is presented.

Pop-Art Radovan

Kenarov tours the haunts of Radovan Karadzic, the "Butcher of Bosnia." Karadzic--the Supreme Commander of the Bosnian Serb armed forces, President of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, architect of the Siege of Sarajevo, and mastermind of the Srebrenica massacre--dodged justice by pretending to be a faith healer and relying on the residual vicious patriotism that fueled his rise.

9 Sencu Iela

Toutonghi returns to his grandparents' home in Latvia to dig for the heirlooms they buried in their basement in 1944 as the Russians approached. He rationalizes that his grandfathers' letters as artifacts seem to indicate something entirely different--that the future exists in the present moment.

All Souls Night

A poem is presented.

Empires of the Mind: Sere, Guantánamo, and the Legacies of Torture

Morris narrates his military training experience at Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE). He states that when he was in the school he lived like an animal--hooded, beaten, starves, stripped naked, and hosed down in the December air until he went hypothermic. He says that to be a prisoner is to be an unwilling citizen of an independent republic with an inscrutable body of laws, a body of laws whose logic is never explained to ones and seems to evolve moment by moment at the whim of ones c...

In Memory of Xiong Huang

A poem is presented.

Epoch

A poem is presented.

The Ashes

A poem is presented.

A Murder Most Mysterious

Wilkinson reviews The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale.

God-Hunger Redux

Spaar reviews A Metaphorical God: Poems by Kimberly Johnson, Hallelujah Blackout: Poems by Alex Lemon and Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy.

Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos

Eldred reviews Cuba in American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos by Louis A. Perez Jr.

Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America

Martinko reviews Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America by Elisa Tamarkin.

White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America

Luebke reviews White People, Indians, Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America by Colin G. Galloway.

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

Peterson reviews The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

Barbaro reviews Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani.