Luis Hernández Camarero (Lima 1941–Santos Lugares, Argentina 1977) was a Peruvian poet and a doctor who wrote about pain and the importance of healing. His creative work expressed the search for different ways to improve people’s health or at least remedies to relieve pain. In this project, I will propose that Hernández’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 whether healing can be considered solely a result of reparation or whether 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’s 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 from any kind of ache or pain.
DR. DIANA MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ VÉRTIZ
CURRICULUM VITAE
Diana Rodríguez Vértiz received a PhD in Latin American studies from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, following a master’s degree in Hispanic studies at the University of Washington. From 2012 to 2021, she worked as a research assistant with Margarita León Vega at the Philology Institute at UNAM, where she collaborated on two projects about mystical experiences in Mexican poetry. At the same time, she taught the course “Literature and Criticism of Literary Production in Latin America” in the Latin American studies graduate program. Her research is focused on the poetics of the Peruvian doctor and writer Luis Hernández Camarero. Her most recent piece explores the relationship between poetry, science, and ethics in his artistic project. Currently, she is studying his poetics of healing and his conception of poetry and medicine as divine ways to cure.
