"Oh Mother Goddess, Wisdom is Foolish". Transcendence and Inmanence in Sur, by Diana Bellessi

Abstract

This paper proposes the existence in Diana Bellessi's work, particularly in her book Sur, a "utopian representation", that evidences an account of all otherness, and establishes a link with landscape, in that the latter is a dense manifestation of culture, revealing that which it displays asan offering for contemplation, at the same time disclosing that which it hides in its language figuration of the unknown; this duplicity demands at the same time, a territorial journey as an indepth search for language and seeing. These two faculties attempt to re-construct an identity which has affected American People's history; starting with the violence of dominion, extermination and "mestizaje" of the pre-hispanic peoples, in a curve that covers the American territory from the extreme South to North America. Expression of an imposed language that in Bellessi's poetry is intervened and transfigured by the testimony of original features of speech and its models of representation that they carry within, in front of which the lyrical subject elaborates an intense exercise of questioning and projections. An exercise related to what we read in Gabriela Mistral's late work Poema de Chile, a predecessor of Bellesi's. Sur then, is presented as a sapiential text, one which comes close to a spiritual truth, and it incarnates an intense dispute of knowledges stemming from immanence and fragmentarism; a fugue in the desire of a divinity incarnated in Nature, this time mostly feminine.
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