Antígona González
by Sara Uribe/Translated by John Pluecker
Antígona González is the story of the search for a body, a specific body, one of the thousands of bodies lost in the war against drug trafficking that began more than a decade ago in Mexico. A woman, Antígona González, attempts to narrate the disappearance of Tadeo, her elder brother. She searches for her brother among the dead. San Fernando, Tamaulipas, appears to be the end of her search.
But Sara Uribe’s book is also a palimpsest that rewrites and cowrites the juxtapositions and interweavings of all the other Antigones. From the foundational Antigone of Sophocles passing through Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa, Leopoldo Marechal’s Antígona Vélez, María Zambrano’s La tumba de Antígona all the way to Antigone’s Claim by Judith Butler. And this book’s writing machine includes testimonies from family members of the victims and fragments and fragments from news stories that provide accounts of all these absences, all the bodies that we are missing.
About The Authors
Born in 1978 in Querétaro, Sara Uribe has lived in Tamaulipas since 1996. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in Philosophy; she received the Carmen Alardín Regional Poetry Prize in 2004, the Tijuana National Poetry Prize in 2005 and the Clemente López Trujillo Poetry Prize in 2005. She has been a grantee of the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (2006-2007) and of the Programa de Estímulos a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico (2010 & 2013). She has published Lo que no imaginas (2005), Palabras más palabras menos (2006), Nunca quise detener el tiempo (2008), Goliat (2009) and Siam (2012). Her poems have appeared in periodicals and anthologies in Mexico, Peru, Spain, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, translator and co-founder of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena. His work is informed by experimental poetics, radical aesthetics and cross-border cultural production.
His texts have appeared in journals in the U.S. and Mexico, including The Volta, Mandorla, Aufgabe, eleven eleven, Third Text, Animal Shelter, HTMLGiant and Fence. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Antígona González (Les Figues Press, Forthcoming), Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press, 2012) and Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). His most recent chapbooks are Killing Current (Mouthfeel Press, 2012), Ioyaiene (Fresh Arts, 2014) and An Accompanying Text (She Works Flexible, 2015). His book of poetry and image, Ford Over, is forthcoming in 2016 from Noemi Press.