Aurora Levins Morales

Full of medical folklore and healing tales, Remedios presents the history of the many women—and cultures—who have met at the crossroads of the islands of Puerto Rico. Beginning with the First Mother in sub-Saharan Africa more than 200,000 years ago, Aurora Levins Morales takes readers on a journey through time and around the globe. We learn of Juana de Asbaje, author of the "Reply to Sor Filotea" in 1693, the first feminist essay written in the New World; Gracia Nasi, Constantinople's "Queen of the Jews"; the African-American activist and warrior of words Ida B. Wells; and the unlikely martyr and symbol, Ethel Rosenberg. Levins Morales weaves in her own story of pain and healing, ameliorated by the restorative power of memory, and bears witness to a larger history of resistance and abuse by women and men. This historical memoir revives our connection to the forgotten lore of our grandmothers, featuring explanations of the medicinal properties of herbs and and foods such as rosemary, ginkgo, and banana. With love, joy, and defiance, Levins Morales offers Remedios as testimony to those barely recorded or known to history, the women who shaped our world.

"Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales are mother and daughter--feminists and radicals, Puerto Rican and American and Jewish--patterning their voices into a call and response across generations, geography, politics, and cultures."--Jacket.

Inapropiadas/inapropiables, desubicadas en los mapas disponbles de la identidad y la política, sin poder adoptar ni la máscara del "yo" ni la del "otro" de las narrativas occidentales modernas. Fronterizas, intrusas, extranjeras, de conciencia antagonista y diferencial reclaman el privilegio sin garantías de partir de posiciones sociales múltiples y contradictorias en cuya tensión y conflicto se producen unos conocimientos y prácticas políticas reflexivas y críticas que se escapan de la autocomplacencia y las narrativas universales. Posiciones que declarándose mestizas e impuras, parciales y situadas, no se encaraman ni en la seguridad romántica de una pretendida pureza identitaria, ni en supuestos universalismos homogeneizadores sustentados en un capitalismo heteropatriarcal racialmente estructurado. Trabajando desde la articulación no reductora de múltiples y diferentes diferencias constitutivas de género, "raza"/etnicidad, sexualidad, clase, nacionalidad, los textos recogidos en este volumen evitan los planteamientos que jerarquizan y fijan a priori las posiciones unitarias de víctimas y opresores como elementos necesariamente excluyentes.

"Aurora Levins Morales was born in rural Puerto Rico in 1954, of Puerto Rican and Ashkenazi Jewish parents. A lifelong feminist and radical, artist and activist, storyteller and historian, her writing bridges the gap between the intimately personal and the global, between sensual experience and theory. In Kindling she explores the meanings of sickness and healing, suffering and pleasure, through the story of her own body, of all our bodies, of the body of the planet. Kindling is a collage of prose poetry, poems, essays, performance pieces and memoir, exploring the rich complexity od living in a physical and social body. From 19th century bomba dancers to the environmental causes of epilepsy from eugenics to the Cuban health care system, from the sexuality of the chronically sick and tired, to a broader interpretation of taking back the night, Levins Morales writes with passion and insight, self-revelation and global, historical perspective. "Aurora's writing is itself alchemy, balancing emotional nuance with rich historical context, simultaneously speaking in an intimate personal voice and for a collective we. She offers us vulnerable, power-filled lyricism that moves the audience to new understandings of their own lives as she claims her body's pleasures and pain. Her writing moves me like no other." Patty Berne, Cofounder and Artistic Director, Sins Invalid "Medically, 'kindling' refers to the way bodies can be sensitized by small, repeated exposures to chemicals or electric shocks. Aurora Levins Morales' essays and poems about the human body's responses to oppression describe both the kindling of disease and of consciousness, fragments of tinder that ignite into a blazing awareness of our bodies as sites of struggle and transformation." Casimira Fuentes O'Neill, M.D."--Amazon.com.