{"id":463,"date":"2012-06-14T19:27:25","date_gmt":"2012-06-14T17:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=463"},"modified":"2012-06-14T19:27:25","modified_gmt":"2012-06-14T17:27:25","slug":"in-memoriam-felix-ernesto-chavez-at-a-loss-for-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/06\/14\/in-memoriam-felix-ernesto-chavez-at-a-loss-for-words\/","title":{"rendered":"<strong>IN MEMORIAM F\u00c9LIX ERNESTO CH\u00c1VEZ: AT A LOSS FOR WORDS <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today we have learned that our dear colleague F\u00e9lix Ernesto Ch\u00e1vez, a member of our research group \u2018Body and Textuality,\u2019 was brutally murdered last Monday in the course of a burglary in M\u00e9xico DC. F\u00e9lix had arrived just two weeks ago to teach a course at UNAM and was staying with relatives. A man who had been doing repairs to their house assaulted it, together with two accomplices. F\u00e9lix resisted their vicious attack and died defending his uncle, aunt and cousin, who were also murdered.<\/p>\n<p>Born in Cuba in 1977, F\u00e9lix was both an outstanding researcher and a brilliant poet (as F\u00e9lix Hangelini). He earned his doctoral degree in \u2018Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature\u2019 here at UAB in 2010, under Meri Torras co-supervision, and was currently a post-doc researcher at the Universidad Aut\u00f3noma de Madrid. He had been the President of the Asociaci\u00f3n de J\u00f3venes Investigadores de la Literatura Hisp\u00e1nica, ALEPH (2009-2011), and had taught in places as varied as the Universidad de La Habana, the Universit\u00e9 de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, and the University of Miami. He was one of the still too few men who write about women, particularly women poets in Spanish; at the time of his death he was working on the Romantic women poets of both Spain and Cuba, as he felt they had been unfairly neglected. As a writer, he had published the essay on Walt Whitman  <em>La construcci\u00f3n de las olas<\/em> (2003), and the poetry collections <em>La Devastaci\u00f3n (La imaginaci\u00f3n de la Bestia)<\/em> (2006), and <em>Restauraci\u00f3n de la luz<\/em> (2007).<\/p>\n<p>When first reading the message notifying F\u00e9lix\u2019s death, I just thought it could not be true. Horrifying violence of this kind happens to others, not to our friends. As the hours pass, the monstrosity of his untimely death slowly sinks in and it feels like sheer nightmare. I won\u2019t enter here into a discussion of the uncontrolled violence that M\u00e9xico DC suffers from, for we might as well read F\u00e9lix\u2019s murder as one of those appalling jokes destiny seems fond of cracking (yes, I am thinking all the time of our dear Mia Victori, who also died far from home). Whatever the case, I wouldn\u2019t like F\u00e9lix to be remembered for his grisly end but for his gentleness, sweet good temper and intelligence.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s simply impossible to understand why things like this must happen. Some human beings are indeed vermin beyond redemption and I rebel at the idea that others like our gentle F\u00e9lix must pay for their greed, stupidity and violence. I\u2019ll leave you with the final lines of F\u00e9lix\u2019s last entry in his blog, <em>El bosque escrito<\/em>, and I\u2019ll ask you to always bear in mind how utterly absurd, ironic, cold-hearted destiny can be: <\/p>\n<p>\u201cEstoy en la Ciudad de M\u00e9xico y tengo gastritis mientras veo caer grandes chaparrones del cielo, y se mojan las sillas de madera de la terraza, la mesa llena de queso tra\u00eddo de Zacatecas, los enormes cristales impolutos. El cielo m\u00e1s cercano que nunca, antojadizo, vol\u00e1til. Nada, sin embargo, me resulta familiar. Y me pregunto qu\u00e9 habr\u00eda sido de mi vida hace m\u00e1s de diez a\u00f1os si hubiera empezado por aqu\u00ed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rest in peace, F\u00e9lix Ernesto Ch\u00e1vez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today we have learned that our dear colleague F\u00e9lix Ernesto Ch\u00e1vez, a member of our research group \u2018Body and Textuality,\u2019 was brutally murdered last Monday in the course of a burglary in M\u00e9xico DC. F\u00e9lix had arrived just two weeks ago to teach a course at UNAM and was staying with relatives. A man who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}