“A Dead Woman Only Departs”. The Dissolution of the Subject and the Restoration of the Country: the Problem of Admissibility in Alejandra del Río's Poetry

Abstract

This paper observes the appearance, specially notorious in material mente diario (2009), the second-to-last book of the chilean poet Alejandra del Río, but also in her two previous publications: Yo Cactus (1994) and Escrito en Brail/e (1999), of an interrogation not only into the quotidian existence and time, the familiar and recognizable places, but also to the foreign and wandering journey that this same places, odd and alien, demarcate, allowing an overwhelming reposition of unknown interior spheres and their bonds with trauma, with the ineffable, what this words attempt to unconsciously express. At the same time that we attend to this painful process of disengagement and estrangement of the territories, times and figures that the speaker declares of her belonging, the itinerary that she articulates with the recurrent motif of journey and exile -that in material mente diario symbolize a return- acquire a tremendous destabilizing role, an alien value, but at the same time a conforming participation in the constitution of the subject as the links of belonging. Is in this double and paradoxical process of estrangement of the own and identification with the alien, and vice versa, that the poetic subject seems to authenticate and disapprove herself in her own ordinance through the (self)spoil, the visionary condition and the prophetic investiture.