Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Desert Speaks in Juan Armando’s Poetry


Tue 05 Feb 2019 | 01:26 AM
maydaa nadar

By Maydaa Abo El-Nadar

CAIRO, Feb. 5 (SEE) – Mexican Poet Juan Armando Rojas Joo arrived in Egypt to present the Arabic version of his book that includes two poems: Sanctuaries Desert Sea and Dawn.

The book was translated from Spanish to Arabic by Professor University Abeer Abdel Hafez, Head of the Spanish Department at Cairo University.

Prof. Abeer Abdel Hafez

Regarding his stay in Egypt, he expressed, “For us who were born abroad, it is our dream to visit Egypt. Since I was a child, I was dreaming of sojourning in this country as I am fascinated by its culture and its desert.”

In his poetry desert is very present, bearing in mind that he was born in the Mexican desert of Chihuahuan. “Desert is not a dead space; on the contrary, it is very alive, full of animals and plants that are different from the ones encountered in other ecosystems,” he added.

At the ongoing 2019’s Cairo International Book Fair, along with Abdel Hafez, he read, on Friday, his two translated poems where the indigenous tribes’ voice and the voice of the European arriving are heard. “My verses sing for the two voices.”

Photo Credit: The Transcript

Traveling through the verses, the audience could feel the complicated moments as well as those of trans-culture. Worth noting is that he enjoys multi-ethnicities: Indigenous, Mexican, Spanish, and Chinese, a fact that he cleverly utilized in his poems.

Some people could be disturbed by having more than one root. This is not the case of creative people, and not what occurred with Joo who enjoys being multiethnic. “Instead of conflicts, I build bridges between cultures, through my poetry.”

Joo currently is the Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at the Ohio Wesleyan University located in the US. His duties include preventing students, professors and workers’ discrimination at the university, cultural transformation, dialoguing to change how the world and its people are perceived, connect various cultures. His semi-academic and semi-practical job-description perfectly match his poems’ themes.