Ajy Tojen by Raquel Jodorowsky

Raquel Jodorowsky (Iquique, Chile, 1927 - Lima, Peru, 2011) was the first daughter of a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant couple who settled in Chile during the 1920s, escaping from persecution in their homeland. She was the older sister of artist, filmmaker and author Alejandro Jodorowsky. Her childhood was spent in the province of Tocopilla, and she began her literary career in Santiago by winning a youth poetry contest and the Municipal Prize in 1949. Shortly thereafter she won a scholarship from the Peruvian Ministry of Education to study anthropology at the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, where she settled for the rest of her life. She lived in Peru for more than fifty years and obtained Peruvian nationality in the 1950s. Between 1961 and 1964 she toured the American continent, especially Mexico and Colombia, with the purpose of promoting her work in poetry and painting. She was associated with the Generation of the 50s in Peru, which counted among its ranks writers and poets such as Blanca Varela, Jose Maria Arguedas and Julio Ramon Ribeyro, among others. During the 1960s she was a close collaborator of the Nadasmo movement in Colombia, and along with writers Gonzalo Arango, Jotamario Arbelez and Jaime Jaramillo Escobar, was one of the most celebrated poets of the landmark Festival de Arte de Cali in 1964. She was also a frequent collaborator of the bilingual poetry collective El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, founded by American poet Margaret Randall and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragon in Mexico City in the early 1960s. There she published her conceptual oneiric poetry book Ajy Tojen in October 1964, as number 12 of the journal El Corno Emplumado. El Corno had created an important nexus between the North American Beat generation and Latin American poets during the 1960s, and it is in this way that Raquel meets Allen Ginsberg in Lima, where the Beat poet had arrived and was preparing to follow the route traced together with William Burroughs in The Yage Letters (1963). The friendship between Jodorowsky and Ginsberg is one of the most fascinating chapters in the cultural becoming of the poetry of the Americas in the twentieth century. Part of Jodorowsky's work, characterized by its experimental, oneiric and surrealistic style, has been collected in anthologies published in Spain, Germany, Italy and Argentina. Most of her work, however, was only published in limited editions and has long been out of print. Her last years in Lima were spent between book fairs, poetry recitals, meetings with writers, poetry readings and presentations, and she was the recipient of several tributes, as well as a growing interest in her work shortly before her passing in 2011.