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childhood the shape of clouds,
Vacuum kite
one two three
for all my Sundays
Football and patriarchal rituals.
From the book: Childhood is the certainty of dirty, broken and dead things by Denisse Buendía.
Mexican writer and activist Denisse Buendía (Cuernavaca, Morelos, 44 years old) found in poetry a way to exorcise her greatest fears and her own and shared pain. She had a grandmother, a mother and several aunts who devoted themselves to housework throughout their lives, and thanks to the plans of these destinies, from an early age she was able to meet other women who showed her a revolutionary way of seeing and living in the world. When women’s rights were still discussed in Mexico, it was scandalous and unimportant. She is the author, along with Alma Karla Sandoval, of The Wolf Is Not Here: A Story and Guide for Boys, Girls, Parents and Educators, which seeks to prevent and protect their families from the number of potential threats to warn. that girls and boys are exposed without their voices being sufficiently heard and recognized.
In 2007, Buendía wrote his first collection of poems entitled Animal Days (University of Guanajuato), “in an attempt to get rid of romantic love and in which he already begins to deal with the theme of family, fathers, etc.” ” Her grandmother and one of her aunts had worked in the homes of women like Betsie Hollants, a Belgian journalist and former nun who came to Morelos in the 1960s and founded the first women’s library in the city of Cuernavaca 52 years ago. The library received the called the Center for Exchange and Human Development in Latin America (CIDHAL) and now continues to exist as a civic association. Thanks to this family and professional exchange, she also lived together with other relevant names in feminism, such as Itziar Lozano or the Mexican Sylvia Marcos. “I have been with They lived with them and they talked to me all the time about autonomy and other concepts of feminism. They were very revolutionary for their time and for my childish understanding of eight or ten years old. And at the age of 15, I started going to CIDHAL as a volunteer with boys and girls, HIV orphans, and since then the theme of childhood has been like a poetic debt for me,” she says.
In 2019 and after the publication of Vocabularia y Feministario, Denisse Buendía returned to a concept that she had developed several years earlier in her poetry: that of the wolf as the figure that most clearly represents “the pedophile patriarchy”, the main aggressor Childhood: “We know that patriarchy exists and we know that the majority are pedophiles, but let’s say that as such it is not established as a concept that needs to be addressed.” We are based on the children’s round “We will be in the forest play as long as the wolf is not there…” and the main idea is to point out that there is no homogeneous profile of a perpetrator or a predator, because we generally believe that a rapist or a murderer, a woman murderer is a crazy one or lost his mind at some point and didn’t know what he had done – that’s why they called it a crime of passion, because it was just a moment of madness – and over time we’ve found out that it’s not just about that “To wait a moment, but rather that this is a systematic thing that the state itself maintains with impunity in the face of these problems,” he explains.
Covers of feminist dictionaries, publications by Alma Karla Sandoval and Denisse Buendía.
The Wolf Is Not There: A Story and Guide for Boys, Girls, Parents, and Educators. Previously, he went through several sessions in public and private schools involving parents, boys and girls, educators and the educational community to learn how to combine the information they wanted to share and receive so that the content of the stories in the book for everything was useful and understandable. “In this guide we suggest that there is no one-size-fits-all way to be a wolf, that a wolf can be closer to us, and that abusers and wolves recognize childhood abandonment and commit this violence in the name of love and protection. “ Because there are wolves who are sexually abused through violence, but there are also wolves who expand their territory for abuse, they gain the trust of the little ones, and for the same reason we rarely ask children how they feel and why they “feeling this way.”
According to Buendía’s argument, the “wolves” or potential aggressors identify their victims’ vulnerabilities in childhood and act from there. Family silence is one of the strongest aspects in the emergence of this violence, an invisible agreement concluded within the family nucleus in which a collective decision is made not to talk about it. “Trust is a main factor. We don’t teach children to say no. And in adult life, childhood obedience is the most important tool for survival, so we tell them, “Don’t ask and do as I tell you.” And that invalidates their decision-making ability. It is important to talk about it because children’s lives depend on it and I don’t want to say that they are murdered, but we cannot allow sexual abuse within families to be something that happens and is not talked about .” .
The dangerous illusion of the family as a safe place
The poetry collection “Childhood is the certainty of dirty, broken and dead things” begins with the text entitled “Taxonomy”, a family portrait about some of the silences agreed upon at home: “I think this poem breaks the traditional Image and The family is romanticized as a refuge and a safe place, and it can also give us the idea that the family can be the darkest and most uncertain place one can touch. “The Sacred Bond,” as Buendía calls it, is also about how children are forced to do whatever adults they trust ask of them, without asking questions or giving them self-care tools that they can Bring places of greater safety.
In Mexico, just over a quarter of the population – nearly 32 million, according to Inegi – is made up of boys and girls up to 14 years old. Although they make up a significant proportion of the country’s population, they are the most vulnerable, the poorest and the least heard. Buendía knows this data well, she has shared much of her work and personal experiences with orphaned and vulnerable children and she is sure that this “adult-centered” world must begin to reinvent itself and really listen to the voices that are build it. Future from a young age: “I see a lot of resilience in childhood, a lot of tools that they develop for survival: play, imagination, imagination.” I have seen many people who are passionate and dedicated to supporting childhood. But I also believe that we need social programs, funding and budgets to take care of this, because if we are able to take care of childhood, inequality gaps and expressions of violence can be reduced when we are young and adult. “
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