In one I talk about my body. It ends with me saying that they always looked at me for the way
I look, and that I give no respect to whoever looks at me and doesn't accept me.
In the other I talk about where I'm from. I say I must have come from the triangle, and a few
lines later, that I must have come from Cuyulo.
Northern Triangle is a name given to us from outside. It shows up in reports, in migration
policy, in foreign newscasts.
Nobody who lives here says they come from the Northern Triangle.
We say the name of the village. And the poem puts both origins one after the other using the
same formula, because they're two ways of answering the same question: theirs and mine.
A body classified at a glance and a region classified at a glance. The same operation, on a man
and on a map.
Then I found the word, which had been hiding inside the first poem all along.
Respect comes from the Latin re-specere: to look again.
Aspect comes from ad-specere: how you look when someone looks at you.
Same root. Which means respect isn't a courtesy or a protocol: it is literally the act of
looking a second time. Looking again at something you thought you'd already understood.
That's why the poem ends the way it ends. I give no respect to whoever looks at me and doesn't
accept me: I deny the second look to anyone who settled for the first.
Spanish, English and Portuguese.
⚡ ₿ROCK CASTELLANOS
#poetry #nostr #ElSalvador #etymology #literature #writing #LatinAmerica
