A brief glimpse into Elsa Cross's "Malabar Song"

Abstract

María de los Ángeles Silvina Manzano Añorve's essay examines the religious and mystical dimension in 20th-century Mexican poetry, using Elsa Cross's Canto Malabar as a central example. The author highlights how the emergence of female voices enriched contemporary Mexican literature and identifies Cross as one of the most consistent yet least studied figures, despite her extensive academic and poetic career. The text contextualizes the mystical tradition, from Dionysius the Areopagite to Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila, underscoring the three classical paths to union with the divine: purgative, illuminative, and unitive. It emphasizes that mystical poetry is characterized by intuition, inner experience, and the search for the transcendent, beyond intellectual reasoning. In Mexico, this tradition was transformed in the 20th century, becoming linked to consciousness, dreams, and intuition, and drawing on both the Catholic heritage and Eastern influences. Within this framework, Elsa Cross emerges as a poet who blends East and West. A practitioner of meditation since 1976, he conceives of writing as a consequence of spiritual experience. His poem *Canto Malabar*, written between India and Mexico, stands as a song to life and death, where Hindu symbols such as the banyan tree and Yama converge with universal metaphors about sleep and dissolution. The work is composed of seven parts and 102 stanzas in free verse, and constitutes a search for inner unity and transcendence. Manzano Añorve concludes that *Canto Malabar* is a paean to the divine being that dwells within humankind, and a bridge between diverse cultural and spiritual traditions.