Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu
Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Critical Theory at the University of Western Ontario
She is a prose writer and an essayist, a Professor of Complit & Polisci at the University of Cluj, a cultural animatrix, a historian of violence and the gulag, and, to propose this (pilgr)image to the factotum, a formidable poet who said things no one else had the guts or flair to say in Romanian lit. She is not chained to Romanian: she’s free in it; she writes in English like a native (see her “Letter to the American Poets” in this volume) and in Spanish like a lover. A few months before JFK was caught in the magic bullet’s dance of death, she was born in Transylvania (the slow land, not Dracula’s), and was left to wander the earth dressed stylishly to the bone. This would do for the infomaniac bent on canned knowledge.
Hey! Open the can and Ruxandra Cesereanu will jump out! She is the smile bearer to the unsuspecting, the devotee to the passerby, the quick one to the dead-on commoner. But: Rux is the witch whose pointy hat hides snakes, apples and a fragrant breeze that’s the parachute of the soul forgotten behind in the messy fall from paradise. She undulates on the page’s seas. Her lines are feline, not straight. Let the kitty out at night and she’ll graze stars and come back a tiger. These lines’ wavy shapes link A & B in passing through the cosmetic survival of the life they barely had. Her lines shoot at you, candid reader, to get—and get you—somewhere not here, for “here” is missed, shot through with bullets. “Safe” is for the weak. Yet, as no-thing and -body is safe—mom’s womb, blown open to material threats, forgot how to protect—these lines are for the strong. En poétesse, Rux is a tiger.
And the jungle is rich: there bodies are left undevoured by souls; eyeless, toxic demons roam free beyond the palm trees of freedom; the other demons’ infrared eyes pierce manneristically the entrails of whatever; virginity never was. Through the Maelstrom of this tidal cornucopia, the fascinating tiger’s skin calls to be seen. A moment after your eye sees it, the other one glimpse at the lateness of warnings. The wavy tiger’s spots threaten with urgency. You, candid reader, must face it—it, the defacing tiger skin! For you’re now on shaky ground, on the mapquake’s hash that Aristotle the pharmacist holds in a jar labeled “energeia.” Between her passing selves—the lion and the panther—you ain’t the leisure to be A or B. As soon as you see the tiger writ, you are it […]