The maternal voice in Carmen Conde’s war poetry: Mientras mueren los hombres.

What is it about?

In Mientras los hombres mueren, Carmen Conde speaks against war through a maternal voice that associates the masculine with violence, war, and death and the feminine with nurturance, peace, and life. While adhering to the patriarchal image of woman as a long-suffering mother, these poems deviate from this perennial archetype in their forceful and authoritative tone. The poetic voice in them is that a mother who not only laments the death of her own son, but also demonstrates compassion for all victims of war. While she weeps, sobs, and wails, she also expresses anger, urges action, and dictates commands. In doing so, she transforms herself from empathetic humanitarian into a self-assured spokesperson and finally into a transcendent being of grand telluric power.

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Why is it important?

The Spanish Civil War has inspired innumerable works of both fiction and non-fiction. Despite the wealth of this output, there remain voices who spoke about the war that have not yet received full attention. One of these is that of Carmen Conde, the only women to write a book of poetry on the war: Mientras mueren los hombres, composed between 1938 and 1939. Despite this distinction, relatively little attention has been paid to this collection

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