In the last decade, the Chilean public sphere has been vitalized by the multiple voices of a chorus of Mapuche authors. This historical process is profoundly marked by the oral, collective, and communal character of their culture, a culture in which the poetic, the political and the spiritual coexist. In this essay I query through a historically critical analysis of the poetry of Karla Guaquin, María Huenuñir y Faumelisa Manquepillan, all of them co-authors in the Hilando en la memoria (2006) e Hilando en la memoria. Epu Rupa (2009) anthologies, how the emergence and entry of voices of Mapuche women impacts the Chilean public sphere. Specifically, I focus on how their poetry creates and circulates new knowledge, and functions like “tricks of the weak” enabling communities to weave their own inclusive, diverse, and collective memory, from an aesthetical, ethical, and political standpoint. I claim that their writings not only enunciate a new discursivity, but also, through the performance of their poetic writing, they create a place of resistance and contestation to the hegemonic discourse of the Republic of Chile, whose violence has sought to erase the Mapuche people and their culture. Indeed, their poetry performs the act of subverting the Chilean patriotic discourse that for the last 200 years has sought to erase everything Mapuche, its constitutive internal enemy. We will see how in their poetic language, full of orality and performativity, operates as a trawun (meeting or assembly), a stage that mobilizes the traumatic horror experienced by generations, both Mapuche and Chilean (especially since the civic-military dictatorship), transforming it into a collective ethos around küme felen / mogen (to be well / good living and in equilibrium with nature).
Keywords:
Hilando en la memoria, Mapuche, women’s writing, gender, Chile
Falabella Luco, M. S. (2021). The poetic performance of Guaquin, Huenuñir and Manquepillan’s works: a reading from the standpoint of “The tricks of the weak”. Revista Chilena De Literatura, (104), pp. 17–45. Retrieved from https://revistaidiem.uchile.cl/index.php/RCL/article/view/65771
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