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Maria Josefina Teodora Plá Guerra Galvany, better known as Josefina Plá, (1903 - 1999), was a female poet, playwright, journalist, art critic, sculptor, ceramist, and historian, born in the Canary Islands, Spain and naturalized as a Paraguayan. Her father, Leopoldo Plá, worked at a lighthouse. She was the firstborn in a family of seven children.
Josefina is considered one of the main representatives of the 40s Generation and one of the precursors of feminism in Paraguay. Her innovative personality brought modernity to Paraguayan art and literature in the 20th century and guided several generations of writers and artists. She is considered the main artist and intellectual of Paraguayan culture in the 20th century. Her artistic and literary domain encompasses creation, research, and teaching.
Personal life
Since childhood, her life has been nomadic, between one island and another. This restless back and forth prevented her from attending school, but she completed her studies for free up to a commercial bachelor's degree, from the age of eleven. Her father's library was her guide, perhaps her only roots, and from a youthful age it served as an anchor to establish her literary repertoire and her vocation. When we talk about childhood and libraries, it is not difficult to think of Marguerite Yourcenar, the Belgian writer who was born in 1903, the same year as Josephine, and who also frequented her father's countless bookshelves. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Already at the age of six, Josefina discovered the universe of Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Homer, Benito Pérez Galdós and others. The girl, who was already spelling at the age of two, also reads in French and began writing at the age of four, when she sent a letter congratulating the New Year to her maternal grandmother.
"I didn't know, poor me, that that letter was a symbol, a sign or a premonition announcing that my destiny was to write my whole life, year after year, day after day", says Josefina about the fact, remembering that writing It was compulsive in her, although her father forbade it - since “literature does not give anyone a future”.
Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Literature, your only anchor
An official state firelighter does not live in just one lighthouse. That is why little Josefina's life was a continuous journey from one beach to another. Boat trips, to follow urban life and resolve bureaucracy or buy supplies, were constant on her journey. What multiple directions could she have imagined with the tracks that the boat she came and went left in the waters? Her blue eyes blended with the color of the sky and were lost in the clouds that took on the whiteness of seagulls. Up and down, twists and turns of starry nights. A daily ritual, until dawn, was the repetitive future of those days. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Until a transfer from her father determined that the family left the Canary Islands to continue to various cities such as Guipúzcoa, Almería, Murcia, Alicante and Valencia, places where she spent her adolescence. From these landscapes she would have the image and memory of the sea; that sea that compared in opposition to the river in the story La mano en la tierra (The hand in the ground), from 1952, represents, as a kind of obsession, the impasses between the old and the new, one's own and the foreign, the feeling of belonging and that of exile in her written work: The memory of the sea immediately opens a wide blue-green and salty crack in her chest. She will never see him again: of that, she is sure. Never again (...) How far away all this is. (...) How God uses men when they believe they are using their agency. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
In 1924, on vacation with her family in Villajoyosa, Alicante, Plá discovered the Paraguayan sculptor Andrés Campos Cervera, whose artistic name was Julián de la Herrería (1888-1937). He was in Spain to study ceramics. They met a few days before she finished her studies and returned to Paraguay. Despite the separation, twenty months later, he asked Plá's father for permission to marry her. The ceremony was held on December 17, 1926. In 1927, Plá settled with her husband in Villa Aurélia, Asunción.
Although Paraguayan literary historiography does not talk much about her life before arriving in America, her romantic relationship with her future husband might not have been fostered if it were not for the coincidence of their creative spirits, with the intellectual background that characterized them. The young woman already had a vast literate culture before going to Paraguay, which she had read about in an atlas illustrated with engravings from the 18th century. She had already published her first literary expressions in some Spanish newspapers such as Almería and Alicante and in magazines such as Donostia. She was a person in constant motion, whose only anchor or haven were letters. If her father could have been wrong in the path he chose for her, he was not wrong in his goal: Josefina was destined to appear in newspapers and history books. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
She was not very well received in Paraguay; they called her a “newbie gypsy.” For decades she was placed on the sidelines of the city's provincial and conservative social circles, who disapproved of her way of acting. But this did not stop her from developing a rich artistic and intellectual production.
At the beginning of her career, she dedicated herself to journalism. During the Paraguayan and Bolivian War, she managed a magazine for the trenches. Critics consider that, together with the poet H. Campos Cervera, Josefina Plá is the initiator of a new stage in the history of Paraguayan literature. Although written under the influence of Rubén Darío's modernism (which also marked the production of his compatriot Manuel Ortiz Guerrero), Plá's first poems denote a new aesthetic that goes beyond this movement to register in contemporary times. With verses of great sensual and evocative power, her poetry attracted writers of the 40s Generation.
Border Patrol
Between comings and goings, Josephine's identity complexity was shaped, always between two houses, two nations, without completely belonging to either of them, as Stuart Hall states about hybrid beings. This is reflected in her verses:
My passport for blinds sealed it.
I don't know what my true homeland is.
And I constantly wander a border
that not even their own dreams crossed.
She would still travel a lot, but from those early years it is important to highlight the two times she returned to Spain with her husband. In June 1929, Josefina and Julián held a new ceramics exhibition, whose success, greater than that of the previous year's exhibition, allowed the couple to obtain sufficient funds to return to Spain. They traveled in October of the same year, with the aim of deepening this technique. They passed through Madrid, Vigo, Murcia and decided to stay in Manises, where there was an important tradition in clay art. From that time onwards, there are dishes made from dry rope with motifs based on indigenous themes. In 1931, an exhibition of these pieces was opened at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, with great approval from critics and the public. The following year, they returned to Paraguay. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
In 1934, once again, not without much effort, they returned to Spain. Julián would always be torn between the rigor of the most productive European artistic environment and the need to promote national art in his country. This trip was beneficial for the couple; From that time are the dishes that today make up the collection of the Museum of the Juan de Salazar Cultural Center of Spain, in Asunción. These works would arrive in Paraguay many years later because, with the end of the Spanish Civil War, Josefina Plá would be alone and without resources - not even to eat - and would be forced to leave the works stored in a museum, but not without securing the paperwork for someone day to recover them. Julián would never return to his small ceramic kiln in Asunción. A disease, easily curable in times of peace, killed him in times of war. His fiery Spirit, creative flame, and ember of modernity would be recovered by his wife, whom he affectionately called Mimí. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Between wars
In the middle of the Spanish Civil War, she returned to Spain and supported the republican side. Her husband's death meant her financial ruin and it was necessary to sell a collection of Paraguayan stamps so that she could pay for her ticket back to Paraguay. There she resumed her work as a journalist, writer, and theater director, while at the same time investigating new artistic fields, such as engraving and ceramics.
Of the famous phrases or aphorisms of Augusto Roa Bastos, the only Paraguayan winner of the Cervantes Prize, the statement that misfortune fell in love with Paraguay is one of the most famous. After experiencing one of the most prolific and independent economies in the region, the country was devastated by hunger and misery following the massacre of the Great War of 1870, also called the War of the Triple Alliance, but which some historians claim was quadruple, due to support English against Paraguay's economic progress. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
At the end of the conflict, few children, elderly people, and women remained, less than a third of the total population at the time. A painting by Pedro Américo, entitled The Battle of Avaí, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, is a clear testimony to the unequal conditions of this fight, as it shows the Brazilian army facing mothers and children, the elderly and other starving civilians. An army against a ragged people, armed with sticks and spears. To think that the shocking visual portrait was commissioned by the Brazilian government, by those who would possibly try to hide these details to highlight the bravery of their men. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
The battle of Avaí, by Pedro Américo. Rio de Janeiro Museum of Fine Arts
When Josefina arrives in Paraguay, four decades after the war, she feels the social and cultural backwardness in which the country has fallen. Although an entire romantic generation diverted attention from social problems by trying to exalt heroes and martyrs, rescue and build a positive image of Indigenous people. Rafael Barrett, another Spaniard who set foot on those lands, denounced hunger and exploitation in the interior fields and was one of the first to highlight the Paraguayan misfortunes, which were, and continue to be, a series of events - wars, coups d'état, countercoups, dictatorships, and corruption. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
When the couple returned from Spain in 1932, they encountered misfortune: the Chaco War, a conflict with Bolivian neighbors over territory in the northwest region of the country, which would last three years. Josefina became the first female war correspondent. The couple writes about the battles and the combatants. The theme becomes part of exhibitions that aim to give visibility to the country's situation. Years later, in the 1980s, Josefina would win the Unión Club Prize with the anthology of poems Los trinta mil ausentes (The thirty thousand absents) inspired by the Chaco War.
In 1933, a major exhibition was held in Buenos Aires, in which Paraguayan culture gained transparency, despite the war. In addition to Julián de la Herrería, Delgado Rodas, Alborno Samudio and Holden Jara participated. With men at war, Josefina is responsible for the entire editing and printing process of the newspaper. She also began preparing her first volume of poetry, El precio de los sueños (The price of dreams), published in 1934. In the same year she and Julián would return to Manises, without imagining that there they would have to live much closer to another war.
The Second World War was declared in 1939 and once again Josefina, now with Augusto Roa Bastos, keeps the country updated on what is happening, through the radio program Antes y después de la Guerra (Before and after the war), with five weekly hearings, on ZPX1 Radio Liviers. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Feminism and motherhood
One cannot speak of a woman who conquered space alone in a patriarchal society, ignoring the gender perspective, especially because such circumstances were perhaps those that produced the most contrasts in the Asunción scenario: the only woman in a newspaper, the only one to speak at Ortiz Guerrero's funeral, which would pave the way for others who would come later. Her words testify to this:
However, Josefina avoided being considered a feminist, as she was never part of movements that smacked of dogmatism and was beyond labels. She also made it clear that she did not want to address certain aspects: “don't think I'm Anaïs Nim,” she once told Marylin Godoy. This does not mean that she was not aware of gender and that she did not value the contributions of feminism, making her considerable criticism, which in some aspects may still be valid:
“Feminist movements have considerably evolved mentalities (...) However, feminist thought is still not defined categorically in the same way that any evolutionary movement is defined; the unification of purposes and the organization of entities that can be felt in some way for the benefit of economically, socially and legally neglected women.”
When addressing social issues, especially those related to poor women, she can be considered one of the most authentic Paraguayan feminists of her time. In her book of interviews with Paraguayan women, she chooses to tell the most stigmatized life stories: the woman who never married, the separated woman, the prostitute, the single mother. In the illustrations for this title, En la piel de la mujer (In the Skin of a Woman - 1987), she highlights phrases from her interviewees that serve as a denunciation of situations of submission and violence, in addition to questioning irresponsible paternity, so naturalized in a country that she had to emerge with long difficulties after the War of the Triple Alliance, repopulating by “daughter strength”, in the expression of one of the characters in her stories. Extracted from The imposible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
She had already published the book Aportes femeninos en la literatura Nacional (Feminine Contributions in National Literature - 1976) and her radio programs had specific space on this topic, in addition to publishing articles in the supplements or cultural sections of newspapers such as Informativo mujer and in the magazine from the Paraguayan Center for Sociological Studies: Enfoque de mujer, directed by Graziella Corvallán. Some of Josefina's titles are: Sobre el Poder Feminina (About Feminine PowerJune 1988), Violación (Rape - May 1991), ¿Hay una literatura específica y característicamente femenina? (Is there a specific and characteristically feminine literature? - 1989) and Cuatro millones de abortos (Four million abortions - 1987). Extracted from The imposible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
The female characters in her stories also show their concern with in-depth analyzes of the gender condition. Abused, hungry, raped women, mothers, grandmothers, widows, abandoned women, condemned to misery and poverty in groups that almost never have a happy connection, but that do not fall into pessimism, but rather spit this harsh and raw reality in our faces. However, beyond her literary universe, perhaps her most revolutionary feminist act was her decision to become a single mother. She was a widow and had no intention of remarrying, but she was already over 35 years old. So, she decided to get pregnant without getting emotionally involved with the father. In that environment full of prejudices and fears, she conceived her son Ariel Plá, in 1940. Heddy Benítez, who met Josefina Plá, says in a text that the father gave his son his surname and that Josefina responded firmly and bluntly: “I also have a surname!”Extracted from The imposible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Josefina was a prolific author. She has had more than sixty books published, including several unique investigations of their kind; around thirty plays (she started the radio theater in Paraguay), such as the successful comedy Aqui não caso nada (Nothing happened here - Ateneo Paraguaio Prize 1942); twenty collections of poems, including The Prize of Dreams (1934), The Root and the Dawn (1960), and Faces in the Water (1963); hundreds of short stories, including La mano en la tierra (1963), her best-known story; as well as essays on bilingualism, theater, visual arts and crafts, or on blacks and British people in Paraguay. She has received numerous awards and distinctions for her artistic and literary work in defense of human rights and gender equality.
Freedom and journalism
Since her arrival in the country, Plá has worked in the newsroom as a correspondent and columnist for the newspaper El Orden and later for La Nación. She also collaborated on Radio ZPX1 El Orden, a fact that also made her the first woman to work as an announcer. About this beginning in journalism, she says the following:
“Before leaving Villa Aurelia I worked at El Orden and for a while at La Nación. Also, in those months I made my appearance on the radio, I was the first announcer in the history of the then newly launched Paraguayan radio [...] Later I had a lot of creativity in this area, not always paid, as an announcer, although I had due remuneration in this area , as a librettist.”
According to some critics, journalistic activity, in addition to teaching, became Josefina's main source of income in later years. Almost all her books were introduced for the first time in the pages of newspapers, among which many writings will be, still forgotten, in the journalistic archive of the National Library of Asunción.
There is not much information about her activity as a journalist in the country's scarce literary criticism, except for the interview that Ubaldo Centurión Morinigo gave her, published under the title Josefina Plá y el journalism paraguayo (Josefina Plá and Paraguayan journalism - 1996). In the book, the interviewer highlights the writer’s dignity and objectivity:
“When sending literary contributions, she was not interested in knowing whether the publication was right-wing, center-wing or left-wing. The truth is that these works were not created to flatter or defend any questionable behavior. They were born from his love for art and freedom of expression. They were born not to receive benefits, but to convey honest convictions, translate cultural concerns, or sing beauty with deep or refined feeling.”
This does not mean that Josefina was oblivious to social and political issues; If that were the case, she would not be the great Josefina Plá. All her work is unapologetically committed to issues of human urgency, a criterion that is valued in the exercise of criticism when approaching studies on other writers. As an example of her commitment, the anecdote of Luis Casabianca, a communist arrested during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, would suffice:
In the poetic chapter El paraguas y Josefina (The umbrella and Josefina), from his memoirs, he says that, when the police chased him and detained him on República de Colombia Street, his only weapon to try to escape was an umbrella. In the middle of a futile attempt, between blows and fights, someone runs towards the police officers who were dragging him and takes the risk of asking him his name and some information that would help locate him and his family. Only much later did he learn that it was Josefina Plá, whose quick action in contacting Casabianca's family helped ensure that she was not just one of the many who disappeared during those years of long military rule. On another occasion, in the 1970s, Josefina would lose her job at the School of Performing Arts for signing a letter of support for the writer Rubén Bareiro Saguier, arbitrarily detained by the same repressive power. These facts are a small sample of Josefina's commitment, whose pen, without being pamphleteer or partisan, never stopped defending freedom, in the broadest sense of the term. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Artistic career
Her sculpture and ceramics have been described as “an archive of Paraguay’s cultural history.” Her work was widely exhibited throughout South America. One of the two murals and mosaics she created can still be seen in the city gardens of Asunción. Some of her ceramics are on display at the Juan de Salazar Cultural Center in Spain, in the Paraguayan capital.
In the 1950s, she co-founded the Grupo Arte Nuevo along with other artists, including Olga Blinder, Lilí del Mónico and José Laterza Parodi. In 1952 she created an article for the Olga Blinder exhibition catalog that was later considered a manifest of modern art in Paraguay. It was a pioneering step towards the creation of the group. In 1959, in response to the Exhibition of Works at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Plá discussed artistic modernization in two long newspaper articles, contextualizing the exhibition within the local artistic dinner and critically evaluating the selection of artworks.
Theater and teaching
From Federico García Lorca, Josefina rescued not only poetry. Her passion for theater made her work hard to create and promote a national dramaturgy. The School of Performing Arts (Escuela de Artes Escénicas) was opened by her and Roque Centurión Miranda in 1948; but, according to her, since 1928 they already had activities involving theater. Within that school, her work as a teacher intensified, another task that remained with her until the end of her life. She was responsible for some workshops at CCJS. In 1963, she was invited to take part in an important artistic project: creating the mural at the Municipal Theater of Assunção with José Laterza Parodi. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
In addition to her criticisms, the result of her didactic intention and vocation, which generated publications such as Cuatro siglos de teatro en Paraguay (Four centuries of theater in Paraguay - 1990/1). She was also a ceramics teacher at the Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano CCPA (Paraguayan American Cultural Center), where she was taught by José Laterza Parodi, with whom she would work on several works. For several years, at the Escuela de Arte Escénico, she taught classes in Theater History, Theatrical Analysis, Scenic Accessories, Character Analysis, Theatrical Theory, Work Analysis, Drama Theory and Phonetics. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Josefina had an intense dramatic production, in which she gave freedom to Paraguayan popular culture, making her characters express themselves in Guarani and Jopará (a mixture of the two languages). Her main theatrical works are Aquí no pasó nada (Nothing Happened Here - 1945), Hermano Francisco (Brother Francisco - 1976), Fiesta en Río (Party in Rio - 1977), a volume of Teatro escogido (Selected Theater) that was published in 1996 by El Lector. Regarding Josefina’s dedication to theater, María Ángeles Pérez López highlights:
"We owe her detailed knowledge of the history of Paraguayan theater, one of the least frequented in the Spanish-American field, as she is the author of a monumental work, the Historia del Teatro Paraguayo." Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Literary career
Josefina was considered a poet of the avant-garde school, alongside Hérib Campos Cervera, her husband's nephew. His literary creation covers various fields of writing and presents themes linked to typical subjects of cultural history and dimensions of human experience.
The representation of female figures is a striking feature in her narratives. Her poetry gives voice to the historically silenced feminine sphere and denounces the social prisons imposed on women. She also explores contradictory individual experiences such as love and hate. The concept of cultural displacement is constant, through characters with diasporic, border and hybrid identities and narratives in many languages, which mix traditions and cultural imaginaries. Her literary production encompasses more than forty titles, including poetry, narrative, theater, social and cultural history of Paraguay, ceramics, painting, and criticism. She frequently collaborated with Roque Centurión Miranda on many of her pieces, particularly from 1942 onwards.
Poet already in childhood
Poetry appeared in spurts in her childhood, and she had to hide it under the mattress, between books, behind loose tiles, in the least imagined places, until one day she secretly sent some writings under a pseudonym to a magazine and was able to contemplate, too. secretly, the father's pleasure in reading them, not knowing that they were his daughter's. Despite this, she has fond memories of her father, who, although he forbade her to write, did not prevent her from studying. She says:
“My father was determined that my name would appear on some list of important women.”
He made her study, in addition to high school, the commercial knowledge course, equivalent to a public accountant, and the normal teaching profession, which Josefina refused. According to her, her father wanted her to be a lawyer, because at that time, there were only two doctors in law in all of Spain. Josefina had to be the third, she had to go down in history as the first lawyer in Spain.
But it was not like that: despite the nights when Dom Leopoldo entered his daughter's room to rummage through her belongings and throw away every trace of poetry he had produced, Josefina never stopped writing. Just like Sóror Juana Inés de la Cruz, poet of the Baroque school, playwright, philosopher, and New Spanish nun who dressed as a man to have access to books and hid them under her skirts, Josefina managed to follow, protected by some tricks, her vocation: literary destiny has established its mark. At the age of fourteen, after publishing under a pseudonym as a gesture of rebellion against her father's prohibition, she published, under her own name, Donostia, a magazine from San Sebastián. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
Interpreting Brazil
It is difficult to imagine that Josefina's contact with Brazilian art did not influence that Week organized in Asunción, especially because it revives the name of the main Brazilian avant-garde event: Semana de Arte Moderno de São Paulo (São Paulo Modern Art Week), held in 1922. In 1952, she had written a series of articles on literature, architecture, dances, and other popular movements in the neighboring country. In these texts she gives special importance to the week of 1922 and to the process of Brazilian modernity in general, positively highlighting the expressions committed to human issues, and not to the aesthetics of drastic separation. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - .
The series was called Interpretando Brasil (Interprating Brazil) and at the end of each week it was present in the cultural section of the newspaper La Tribuna, between 1952 and 1953. At that same time, some articles about her were also published in Rio de Janeiro newspapers, written by Romanian Estefan Baciu, who lived in exile in that city. The locally failed Semana Del Grupo Arte Nuevo (Art Group Week) made many of its artists successful in other areas, as they were invited to the III and IV São Paulo Art Biennial. In the second year of participation, Josefina and Laterza received the prize of thirty-five thousand cruises, with the work Ritmo Guaraní, and Josefina became part of the local jury for the 1959, 1961 and 1963 biennials. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
The important thing about her relationship with Brazil is that in the 1950s Josefina began extensive work seeking to understand the process of formation of the Paraguayan identity. Her essays about Gilberto Freyre in the La Tribuna series establish her conceptual and ideological framework on the topic. In more than one article she brings together the sociologist's work, due to his assessment of the mixture between Indigenous, black, and European people in Brazilian identity. However, it goes far beyond the Brazilian author, because instead of idealizing the mestizo with the idea of racial democracy, it manages to capture, problematize, and denounce the difficulties and tensions in the formation of mestizaje, which proposed to focus on, many years later , in “hybridization processes”.
Many of Josefina's stories will be examples of the problematization of these processes. The one most cited by critics is the Manos en la tierra (Hands on the ground), written in 1952, although published only in 1963, in a volume that takes that play as its title. Josefina was consolidating her modern language, following the intellectuals of her time, with the same concerns as her Latin American contemporaries, but achieving, perhaps, a little more. She chooses the story that problematizes the situation of contact between Spanish culture and Paraguayan Indigenous and mestizo culture, as the starting point of her narrative production, using the title of her first book of stories. Extracted from The impossible absent: Biography of Josefina Plá - Daiane Pereira Rodrigues.
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