Luis Hernández Camarero (Lima 1941––Santos Lugares, Argentina 1977) was a poet and a doctor who wrote about pain and the importance of healing. His creative work expressed the search for different ways to offer people health or at least remedies to relieve pain. In this project, I will propose that Hernández Camarero’s sensibility to any kind of ache can help us rethink the relationship between healing and reparation. One of the guiding questions of the project is if healing can be considered solely a result of reparation or if it should be thought of as a constituent part of it. I also reflect on the role of art in offering responses to the universal experience of pain, and how Hernández’ poetry invites us to reimagine medical institutions and expand spaces meant for curing.
These ideas aim to show how an artistic experience can help people to be aware of their potential to heal and to demand dignity in the processes of curing, healing, and reparation. For that, I use the concept of “minor acts of reparation”: common and creative actions that accompany and try to improve the daily experience of those who suffer any kind of ache or pain.
DR. DIANA MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ VÉRTIZ
CURRICULUM VITAE
Diana Rodríguez Vértiz studied a PhD in Latin American Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a master’s degree in Hispanic studies at the University of Washington. From 2012 to 2021, she worked as a research assistant with Dr. Margarita León Vega at the Philology Institute at UNAM, where she collaborated on two projects about mystical experiences in Mexican poetry. In the same years, Dr. Rodríguez Vértiz taught the course “Literature and Criticism of Literary Production in Latin America” under the direction of Dr. León Vega in the Latin American Studies Graduate Program at UNAM.
Dr. Rodríguez Vértiz’s research is focused on the poetics of the Peruvian doctor and writer Luis Hernández Camarero. Her most recent piece of scholarship explores the relationship between poetry, science, and ethics in Hernández Camarero’s artistic project. Currently, she is studying Hernández Camarero’s poetics of healing and his conception of poetry and medicine as divine ways to cure.
