Writing

Everything writes around us, writes Marguerite Duras, in that enormous essay that I think is entitled Writing or something like that. I think I have read it two or three times and that is why it seems strange to me that I cannot remember it with due precision. As if my memory were not working quite right. Forgive me for that and let us just say that I agree with that, certainly, “everything writes around us.” That is how I assume it and I start from the fact that it could not be any other way. We write to explain ourselves and to give a certain order to the reality that arises with our will; or without it. I write this while drinking a cup of coffee accompanied by three little rolls filled with a very sweet piloncillo. I do not know who made them, nor who in the family brought them home and put them on the table. Of course I would like to know whose hands kneaded that dough, shaped it into little buns, put them in the oven and stood there watching for them to take on that beautiful honeyed color, the same one that makes them look so appetizing. I like the sound of the word honeyed. Just saying it sweetens my palate. When I have these kinds of sensations, I feel like scrutinizing that relationship that the body establishes with language and I wonder to what extent I can name what I feel, imagine or think. Feeling, imagining and thinking always go hand in hand. Although, for now, my only purpose is to gather the eighteen hundred or two thousand characters that I need to fill this space. I am not in the mood to become discursive, because all writing requires an emotional and intellectual balance; which I, at this moment, do not possess. I am inhabited by a restlessness and I cannot find the words to name it. I suppose it has to do with my inability to explain – explain myself, explain ourselves, explain ourselves – what happens in the city I live in and makes me move or we move – I assume there are many of us – from one place to another with fear on our backs and with the ever-present feeling of not being able to get to where we are going or where we are starting from. This leads me to ask myself many other questions.

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Ernestina Yépiz. Poet and narrator. Master in Literature, graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM; and a graduate in Political Sciences, graduated from the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. She is the author of the poetry collections La penumbra del Paisaje, Los delirios de Eva and Los conjuros del cuerpo; of the short story collection El café de la calle Mulberry and the novel El sueño de Paloma Sanlúcar. She is included in the General Anthology of Mexican Poetry, by Juan Domingo Argüelles; Una fiera lentísima (a sample of Sinaloa poetry); Cuentos de dulce voluptuosidad, among other collective publications. She has also created the anthologies: La desnudez de las palabras (The Nakedness of Words), a selection of Norma Bazúa’s poetry; Entre sombras (stories of suspense and darkness), a narrative by Amparo Dávila; Night Butterflies and Other Stories, a narrative by Inés Arredondo, among others. She is also the author of Eating in Los Mochis: The Kitchen of Feasts and Receptions. She is currently the director of literature and publishing at the Instituto Sinaloense de Cultura.

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