Recently added articles from The Virginia Quarterly Review:
In Memoriam: CHARLOTTE KOHLER 1908-2008
Jan 01, 2009; ... Managing Editor, 1942- ...
Ghosts of the Cold War
Jan 01, 2009; ... This new year marks two separate but linked anniversaries: the fiftieth anniversary of Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba touching off the precipitant Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the spread of paramilitarism across Latin America - and the twentieth anniversary of the ...
The Revolution IS
Jan 01, 2009; ... At the fiftieth anniversary of Castro's victory, Americans still know very little about Cuba. Will the dream of the ailing revolutionary-and his manufactured kingdom-die when he does? On November 25, 1956, Fidel Castro and eighty-two revolutionaries crammed aboard a small yacht, slipped ...
Tropical Depression
Jan 01, 2009; ... Cuba has the highest rate of depression and suicide in the New World. So why does Castro's vaunted health care system deny the very existence of mental illness on the island? AUGUST in Havana is a mounting wave of heat - so consuming, the sun so piercing, it can warp your sense of ...
An Individual History
Jan 01, 2009; ... This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine, which the suicide Olaughlin called "handcuffs for the mind." It was before, during, and after the time of atomic ...
Patria y Muerte
Jan 01, 2009; ... Resurrecting My Father's Cuba My father, José Reyes, and his brother, Tom, hadn't returned to Cuba since they were exiled as boys. After an absence of forty-six years, they decided it was finally time. STANDING IN LINE at Miami International at dawn, in a crowd whose sense of ...
Cuba, Where Art Thou?
Jan 01, 2009; ... What if it were not such a tragedy to outlive one's nation, if it were simply an invitation to accept all doors to all hallways, however dark and cold, as gates of the amphitheater at Pergamum rising, ...
Che Sat Here
Jan 01, 2009; ... THE MAKING (AND MARKETING) OF A MARTYR SUSANA OSINAGA ROBLES is the nurse who washed Che's corpse. She's a small woman of seventy-four with wavy hair and swollen legs. Her story begins on October 9, 1967, in VaIIegrande, a town lost in the far reaches of eastern Bolivia. Those were the ...
THE BONES OF MENDIHUACA
Jan 01, 2009; ... El muerto al hoyo y el vivo al baile . . . (The dead to their graves and the living to the dance floor) - Colombian salsa group Fruko y sus Tesos, "A la memoria del muerto" MAIRA ALEJANDRA MARTÍNEZ SUAREZ is sweeping away another layer of dirt when the bullets come flying ...
THE CRIMINAL RECORD
Jan 01, 2009; ... Entre las páginas surge el lamento. (A cry emerges from between the pages.) - Luis Cardoza y Aragón THE POLICE ARCHIVE sits in a cemetery of confiscated cars at the edge of Zone 6 in Guatemala City. Behind the high wall of the police-headquarters complex, the cars are ...
Faces Fleshed in Green
Jan 01, 2009; ... While visiting the Tuoi Sleng Genocide Museum, a former Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia's capital city of Phnom Penh, Binh Danh studied closely the mug shots of former prisoners. Danh, a Vietnamese-born artist whose family fled to a refugee camp in Malaysia in 1979 and eventually emigrated ...
Air and Water
Jan 01, 2009; ... THE DAY CARE is run out of an old boxing gym where corrugated tin ceilings spread like sky and the glossed cement floors are always cold to the touch. Tucked into a northern corner of Long Beach, far past the beach and not so far past the oil refineries, the gym sits at the end of an L-shaped ...
THE Dice Player
Jan 01, 2009; ... A SYMPOSIUM ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF MAHMOUD DARWISH Mahmoud Darwish was the most important Palestinian poet of our time. He was born in 1942 in the Western Galilee in the village of Birweh, before it was razed in the 1948 war that would lead to Israeli independence. As a young man, ...
His Indomitable Self
Jan 01, 2009; ... if you want to get to your indomitable self don't follow the obvious roads! ("The Coastal Road") If poets and their art provide us with tools necessary for living, then Mahmoud Darwish may be the hammer and chisel in ...
The Eternal Traveler
Jan 01, 2009; ... It is Sunday at midnight, and I write in Switzerland, where I am staying for a week before leaving to spend the year in Jordan. I thought of waiting until tomorrow to begin but decided that elegies are better written in the middle of the night- and an elegy for Mahmoud Darwish is best written in ...
His Own Elegy
Jan 01, 2009; ... I read "The Dice Player" in its entirety in an Arabic newspaper right after Darwish read the poem for the first time in Ramallah in June 2008 - what would be his last public appearance in that city. A few weeks earlier, we had talked on the phone about his deteriorating medical condition and his ...
The Dice Player
Jan 01, 2009; ... Who am I to say to you what I say to you? when I'm not a stone burnished by water to become a face or a reed punctured by wind to become a flute . . . I'm a dice player I win some and lose some just like you or a little less . ....
A Braid of Garlic
Jan 01, 2009; ... Aging women mourn while they go to market, buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough today to feed the wolf asleep underneath the table who wakes from what dream? What but loss comes round with the changing season? He is dead whom, daring, I called a ...
Pop-Art Radovan
Jan 01, 2009; ... Radovan Karadzic was once feared as the Butcher of Bosnia. Now you can tour his favorite hiding places. GIGGLES. THE SERBIAN JOURNALIST sitting next to me leans over and whispers into my ear, "This is embarrassing." One of the cameramen-there are four - asks Draga, our tour guide, to ...
9 Sencu Iela
Jan 01, 2009; ... ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 3, 1944-in the hot crickety darkness of Riga, Latvia-my grandparents did two remarkable things. After midnight, while his children were sleeping, my grandfather-Harijs Mindenbergs-sat down at the kitchen table and wrote three letters: One to Benita, his wife. One ...