Gladys Mendia

The singing of the mangroves Gladys Mendia

In the mangroves, the "internet spiders" weave outside the established order: inventors of a language that disorganises the senses, they don't intend to cause chaos but rather to find a relationship with the other and, in case it doesn't exist, create it. This is "the company's labyrinth" referred to by Gladys Mendía in The Singing of the Mangroves, a deeper, underwater reality that survives in the mangrove -that liminal space between the estuary and the sea which acts as a protective natural barrier for the habitats of multiple species. This book should be read as a single song in which the lyrical self rescues the figure of the Rimbaudian rebellious poet, as well as the fugitive slave of imposed language, who is marooned in that labyrinth "in the name of beauty." A fabric that goes from bottom to top, from underwater life to the internet cloud, where memory circulates without a fixed history, a cluster of ignored voices, and the individual becomes communal. In these poems we are spoken to from the body, so the reader is invited to penetrate them, even become a parasite upon them, to make them their own. This is the new epic of the internet poet: the "sea grapes of the new babel". JÈSSICA PUJOL