César Moro: Exile and the Poetic Imagination

Abstract

This article examines the work of the twentieth-century Peruvian poet César Moro within the parameters of what Edward Said, Amy Kaminsky, and others have called the literature of exile. Moro (1903–56) may not fit conventional notions of the intellectual or artistic exile in that the time he spent living abroad (in France and later in Mexico) was limited and largely voluntary. However, as many critics have noted, Moro perpetually inhabited a space of multiple marginalities, not least of which was his situation as a homosexual whose “scandalous” life was at odds with the rigid society of Lima in which he came of age. I begin by showing that Moro's “exile” should not be considered an anomaly but rather as part of a pattern that marked the intellectual life of Lima (and many other Latin American capitals) in the period from the early 1920s through the 1940s. I situate Moro within this milieu of discontent and desire, and then examine the peculiarities of his own exilic situation. Through an analysis of certain key passages in Moro's poetry and poetic prose, I show that he responded to the fact of estrangement with a defiant insistence on the powers of the poetic imagination, by means of which his work interrogates not only assumptions about gender, nationality, and cultural authenticity, but also the very notion of selfhood. The only conception of self that Moro is ultimately willing to accept—and even exalt—is that of the poet.