Poetic memory as a garment

Abstract

In this article I reflect on the life and work of the Alicante poet Francisca (Paca) Aguirre and propose that writing was her revenge in the face of the terrible orphanhood and poverty that the post-war period brought her. What her writings evoke dialogues in this text with the story of another woman of her generation, my grandmother. In the first person, I propose enormous coincidences between two parallel lives, war wounds in two continents, that resisted one with her voice, the other with her word, in order to transmit to the generations that follow homeopathic doses of post-memory that cross from North to South and from East to West several generations.  The result is an intergenerational dialogue where the poetics of mourning proposed by Francisca, la Paca, Aguirre serves as a pretext for an autobiographical exercise of homage and memory on song and verse as subaltern historiographical sources.