Carmen Berenger / Bobby Sands: that reversible Fragment, that Poem is me, each of us

Abstract

This article proposes an interpretation of Bobby Sands faints on the wall, the poetry book by Carmen Berenguer, whose rebel writing interrupts the alienated time of Thatcherism and Pinochetism. Those authoritarian, conservative governments that demonised the working class are confronted by poetry, transforming words and bodies into a poem of death (perhaps) and into the possibility (perhaps) that allows to think about the present and revaluate our past. From Eyrean people towards Chilean people, the book poeticises an ethic of reversibility of closeness and distance, which commits the being-with that the poem thinks. Delay, captivity, deprivation and revolt against dictatorial and authoritarian violence. Resistance through Sands’ hunger strike that joins the voices of protest of Chile in the eighties.