Il salto di Saffo: La poetica del frammento in Cherrie Moraga

Sappho’s fall: Cherrie Moraga’s poetics of fragment. In the poem “The Voices of the Fallers”, written by chicana poet Cherrie Moraga, and included in her collection of essays and poems Loving in the War Years, 1983, the images of love and poetic folly reflect the Greek poet Sappho's mythical jump off the cliff. For writing is, in Cherrie Moraga’s words, fear of a sudden fall off a precipice; yet, this push, this abysmal fall, is the very nurture and nature of poetic expression. Moraga’s voice dismisses the Catholic, phallocratic, and homophobic tradition, symbolized over the centuries, in the Mexican and Chicano tradition, by the sacred and venerated image of the Virgen of Guadalupe, an image which has always punished the body as the site of sinful obscenity. From her childhood memories of a visit to the sanctuary of the Virgen of Guadalupe, to the memory of the women of her family meeting at the deathbed of her grandmother, the poet Moraga tracks a single route of pain, sorrows, and submission for chicana women. Against this long-lasting tradition of sorrow, the image of Sappho proposes an alternative route, a dismemberment of the body which aims towards the recovery of a different, more liberated, configuration. This seems to be suggested also in the transgressive painting by the chicana artist Hester Hernandez, La Ofrenda, [the offering] 1990, with her religious offering and devotion to the Virgen of Guadalupe, impressed this time on the body of a young chicana, as an expression of her lesbian sensuality.