At LARB: Homero Aridjis as Guiding Light

Writer and novelist Carlos Fonseca considers the life—its travels, encounters, and literature—of 80-year-old Mexican poet and activist Homero Aridjis, "a writer of rare humanism seldom encountered in modern-day literature who has created a poetics of nature and explored our relationship with the planet," for LARB. More:

When asked about his childhood memories, the poet recalls mornings in Contepec looking up toward Cerro Altamirano, where his passion for poetry found its first inspiration.

The mountain’s splendid spectacle began at the end of October, when millions of monarch butterflies arrived to the Plain of the Mules at its summit. The butterflies would swoop down the slopes, turning the town’s streets into aerial rivers. Our yearly elementary school excursion was always a climb to the summit to visit the monarchs in the oyamel fir-pine forests.

The monarch butterfly, with its tigerish orange wings and its ability to fly up to 100 miles a day during its 3,000-mile migration to central Mexico, has become Aridjis’s emblem, featured in numerous poems, in his 2000 novel La montaña de las mariposas [Butterfly Mountain], and in his 2015 children’s book María la monarca [Maria the Monarch], as well as in dozens of articles denouncing the destruction of forests by loggers protected by government officials. In a 2016 letter addressed to US President Barack Obama, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Aridjis urged these leaders to protect monarch butterfly migration from the destruction of forests by loggers protected by government officials and the massive use of glyphosate herbicides on land in the US Corn Belt planted with genetically modified, herbicide-resistant soybean and corn crops.

As powerfully conveyed in his poem “To a Monarch Butterfly,” the creature has been his guiding light through a world that has become increasingly nightmarish…

Find it all at Los Angeles Review of Books.