Wingston González [Livingston, Guatemala, 1986], is a poet of Garifuna origin and a transdisciplinary writer. He lives and works in Guatemala City. He received the Luis Cardoza y Aragón Mesoamerican Poetry Prize in 2015, and was included in the list of the The Most Creative in the Region of Forbes Centroamérica magazine (2020). In addition to poetry, he has collaborated in dance, visual arts, music, and artistic action.
One of the most prolific Garifuna writers today, González has built a window into contemporary Black indigeneity in Mesoamerica, but also closed that same window in a sidelong attack on colonialist language and syntax, rewriting Spanish as he goes.
Here, the actual linguistic transformation of Spanish and indigenous threads within the Garífuna community of today and between, González’s overa ll playfulness with history, myth and ode.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
About No Budu Please
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018
Fragmented, broken syntax that plays with language and takes it to the song. Like a kind of prayer, his poems become frenetic, summoning requests. There is no comfort in his poetics. The reader looks at a writing forged in the musicalized word. Where experimentation is the constant: spelling is repeatedly undone, questioning the norm: who is the owner of the word and who should we follow if not our own word that springs from the most intimate part of ourselves?
Timo Berger
Signaturen
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