Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

Travesia

ISSN: 1356-9325 (Print) 1469-9575 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

Making the Sunflower Sing: Medicinal Plants

in Women’s Songs, Tonadas, and Poems: Chile-
Wallmapu XX-XXI

Rubi Carreño Bolívar

To cite this article: Rubi Carreño Bolívar (2019): Making the Sunflower Sing: Medicinal Plants in
Women’s Songs, Tonadas, and Poems: Chile-Wallmapu XX-XXI, Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2019.1619541

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2019.1619541

Published online: 26 Jun 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjla20
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2019.1619541

~ o Bolıvar
Rubi Carren

MAKING THE SUNFLOWER SING: MEDICINAL

PLANTS IN WOMEN’S SONGS, TONADAS,
AND POEMS: CHILE-WALLMAPU XX-XXI

This article seeks to reveal the knowledges about medicinal plants contained in a broad
corpus of songs, tonadas, and poems from Chile-Wallmapu in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. These texts establish a new textual and analytical category that
we call the ‘lawen-poem’ (plant and medicine poems). These plants’ presence in the
texts as remedy, sustenance, and culture, forms an ‘ecology of knowledges’ (Santos) that
blurs the divisions between science and magic, the learned and the popular, nature and
culture, voice and writing. The lawen-poem accompanies biopolitical resistance by
women, indigenous, and rural peoples, validating their knowledge about life in a
context of patriarchal, colonial, and neoliberal necropower (Valencia). The poem is a
medicine attesting not only to the splinter of ‘gender’s pain’ [dolor del genero] (Eltit),
but also to the good wood from which we are hewn. The poetic word is transformed in
the lawen-poems, sheaves [hojas] that cure and sing sunflowers [maravillas].1

Keywords: Chilean women’s poetry and music; medicinal plants;

indigenous and rural knowledges; biopolitics; shamanism; resistance

Riddle me this - Which tree is the tree of forgiveness? -The olive tree, which gives
us fruit, oil and shade there where the heat rises. Only one that forgives may grant
themselves and others the gift of generosity. With each leaf the olive tree says:
peace is the daughter of forgiveness. And the flower of universal love? Well,
whichever you plant on your porch and balcony for the pleasure of passersby, like
the texts you write without knowing to whom their aroma shall arrive. Now tell
me, which is the flower of joy? That’s always personal. Some will tell you the
orange blossom, dressed in white on a bride’s brow. But for Gabriela Mistral, the
wild and golden path to joy was blazed by the golden poppy, from its Andean bed
to Doris Dana’s. The flower told her in a message: ‘sing and enchant, come with
me from Chile to California’. But, in the Southern Cone popular tradition, and
this is no secret, the flower that will make almost anyone appear to have ‘jasmines
in their hair and roses on their face’, is the ‘cinnamon flower’ (Granda). And in
fact, it was spices (almost as much as gold), and their gift of making one feel alive
with tastes and smells, that brought Christopher Columbus to these lands full of
trees, birds, sunflowers … even cacao, which grants some the seeds of true happi-
ness. Plants were, without a doubt, ‘America’s new good’ [buena nueva de
# 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

America] proclaimed in paintings, songs, naturalists’ displays and, of course, on

the plates gracing imperial tables (Sanfuentes). The first dark-skinned lady to save
the European kitchen, in times of pestilence, was the potato.2 Bocaccio - and not
Pablo Neruda - should have written her not an ode, but an elemental sonnet:
Papa
y no patata,
no naciste con barba,
no eres castellana;
eres oscura como nuestra piel,
somos americanos,
papa
somos indios.

(Neruda, 2010 109)

[Potato/and not tater,3/you weren’t born with a beard,/you’re no Castilian woman;/you are
dark like our skin,/we are Americans/potato/we are Indians.]

But we already know that what comes from the dirt is at times trodden, used,
and not honoured. The chilote potato, forced migrant, will be only the first in a
series of dark skins that form empire’s indispensable ground.
Trafficking in plants has gone hand in hand with human trafficking. Together
with the first plantations and land trusts arrived, literally in chains, enslaved
Africans and indigenous peoples. Their mobility cut by shackles and amputations,
they were bound to plants, ‘vegetalised’. The pleasure of some has been the servi-
tude of others. This is the slave counterpoint to the tobacco and sugar musicalised
by those who felt ‘elevated’. Century after century, these transplants struggle to
conserve their green hope. Like plants, many are stained with blood or condemned
to the same abuse and extermination as any other form of bare life on the planet.
The sole possession of land and money that this produced facilitated the
‘feminisation’ and ‘naturalisation’ of the others, the non-white, non-male, non-sub-
jects, as well as the self-proclaimed true humanity of the ‘few’: those who possess
the logos, the class, privileges, and culture that matter. According to Horst
Kurninsky (1992), the progressive decoupling of nature, women and the feminine
produces an eroticisation of money in which the relationship ‘nature-feminine’
loses its value as life and gains a negotiable price as goods. The domination-submis-
sion contained in the accumulation of money and land is a ‘libidinal economy’,
wherein lies part of its success. Egalitarian, libertarian ties are replaced by the
enjoyment of being ‘master’, ‘lord’, ‘lady’ and, also, ‘slave’, ‘handmaiden’,
‘house-boy’, ‘keyholder’, ‘tenant’, ‘nana’, ‘little man’. One commands and the
other obeys. This is a relational form that inserts itself to and extends from the
bed and is replicated in all moments, genders, and classes, but such that its violent
excess is denied in women, children, and whatever is perceived as feminine.
A link was forged between nature and the ‘naturalisable’ that permits one to
dispose of foreign bodies, to move them about, use them as ‘guinea pigs’, sell
them, jail them, use them as pack mules, pay nothing - God willing - for their
labour, their lives, and tear them up like undergrowth if they interfere with busi-
ness. One might even affirm that they can neither talk nor act, much as plants do
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 3

(not). The patriarchal and colonialist relation with nature defines the treatment of
the feminine or feminisable. So long as there exists no perspectival and relational
shift regarding what is perceived as ‘nature’, ‘indigenous’, or ‘feminine’ and what
we understand by ‘civilisation’, there will be no peace between those who locate
themselves (or are located) on one or the other side of that border. It may well
be that the more and more massive women’s movements also force a change in
the treatment of ‘mother nature’.
Postcolonial, gender, cultural, and critical feminist studies have contributed to vali-
dating both cultural productions and subjectivities conceived of as ‘other’, and to dis-
articulating anthropocentric and Eurocentric visions of knowledge. Much as Michel
Foucault demonstrated in his extensive oeuvre during the last century, knowledges
and disciplines have been used hegemonically for the normalisation, oppression, and
imprisonment of subjects conceived of as ‘abnormal’, not normalised. In this sense,
in the last fifty years literary criticism has acted as a ‘counter-epistemology’ by
including within the currents of humanity those left off to the side, treated as prod-
ucts, objects, informants: ‘Colonialist ignorance consists in rejecting the other’s
knowledge as equal and in its objectification, which historically assumes one of these
three forms: nature, savage, or Orient’ (Santos 2006, 43).4
For the above reasons, feminist critics have historically struggled to interrupt
our immediate association with nature. If we remain on the side of the natural or
‘naturalisable’, it would imply that we might only be mothers, lovers, bodies, or
service, and that our cultural productions are but ‘intuitions’, ‘artisanry’,
‘hereditary knowledge’ without authority and scarcely compensated, available for
the human family much like bread left on the table. Marıa Luisa Bombal’s “The
Tree” - a foundational short story of Chilean women’s writing - can be read as the
painful cut with nature that ‘modern women’ had to realise to aid their entrance
into the public sphere. In this story, as in ancestral cosmovisions, plants are sisters,
and may even sacrifice themselves and die in place of their sister-double - the pro-
tector tree falls, and the protagonist becomes conscious of her circumstances.
Until very recently, the separation between women and nature was such that
one more easily assumed a ‘cyborg’ identity (Haraway) than declared herself
daughter of the earth. Recently, parting from Gayatri Spivak’s work and her
‘strategic essentialism’, and from the various eco-feminisms, there has been a polit-
ically productive return to the relationship between women and nature, reinforcing
our understanding of the relation between capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and
how they work against all non-masculine, non-hegemonic lives.
Even the Marian cult, traditionally bound up with plants, has maintained a separ-
ation between the Virgin and healing herbs. The invocations of the Virgin Mary
extend ties with the vegetal world: the Virgen de Loreto alludes to the laurel; the
Virgen del Carmen to Mount Carmel, an orchard; the Virgen del Tamarugal to a tam-
arugo forest. Gardens in houses, schools, and convents are often dedicated to her;
arches of bright hydrangeas crown the passage of the Virgen de la Candelaria and
her faithful in processions on the isle of Mancera, in Valdivia, every 2 February.
Roses, traditionally associated with Europe, announce the dark-skinned vision of
the Virgen de Guadalupe on Juan Diego’s tilma, also vegetal, and as such announce,
between his ixtle tunic and the rose prints, the mestiza mother of Latin America. In
4 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

‘Natural Fields’ [Campos Naturales], one of the best-known devotionals dedicated

to the Virgin of Carmen in Chile, the Virgin Mary, in her role as mediator
between heaven and earth, is conceived of as a ‘natural field’, indicating that
nature is a portal that opens upon the sacred: ‘Fields of nature/Let us by/Because
your devotees/Come in adoration’ (traditional).5 Nevertheless, although there are
flowers on her hands, feet, and in her manifestations, Mary should not be confused
with other women: witches and indias, those women that use herbs to far-see, pro-
tect, and heal, and that, in others’ minds, might have the ability to sicken and kill
with vegetal magic. Possessors of a power as biopolitical as it is numinous, they
are seen neither as ‘daughters of Mary’ nor as ‘sweet neighbours in the green jun-
gle’ but, rather, as malignant flowers to be torn up and tossed away. The inquisi-
tion’s genocide of thousands of women in the Middle Ages produced a deeply
terrorised and submissive population and fixed a patriarchal concept of the relation
between women and nature; that is, as powers shut away and managed, serving
the hegemonic religious and political powers.
But the persecution of knowledge associated with plants and women is not
rooted only in the Inquisition, which burned thousands of women- as most did in
that epoch - healing or treating themselves with plants, coming to suspect the
entire world of heresy. Nor is it limited to the eighteenth-century Chillan
Judgment in Chile, which condemned dozens of Mapuche accused of witchcraft to
burn, based fundamentally on their use of medicinal plants (Casanova Guarda).
Nor to nineteenth-century state hygienics that robbed women of their role as
healers and caretakers for other women, criminalising them and turning them into
eternal patients. Endless wisdom concerning sickness and health, the vital cycles,
was thereby buried and has only reappeared, bit by bit, thanks to feminists’ tireless
work.
No, this persecution continues today, as the Chilean State wreaks havoc on the
machi, the Mapuche religious and political authorities. Given the Mapuche vision of
mother nature-~nuque mapu, in which each stone, hill and living thing has a spirit, a
p€ull€u, with which to dialogue, it is not strange that, on its behalf, machi are jailed
and their rewe (sacred tree) splintered, exposing them to the kutran (sickness) of
dispossession. Nor that their words be a loving breath to those persecuted for
defending not only an expropriated territory, but a sacred cosmovision that pro-
tects nature for both Mapuche and non-Mapuche. Machi Millaray Huillaf, Machi
Francisca Lincoyao, Machi Celestino Cordova rumel kar€uleyey foye ka triwe, their cin-
namon and laurel, stay forever green.
The Mapuche natural cosmovision and the cosmovision present in early Chilean
letters have little or nothing to do with neoliberalism’s ecological project: ‘( … )
much like all forms of capitalism, neoliberalism is necessarily an environmental
project, one that hinges on questions of property and mercantilisation of nature’
(Bustos et al. 2014, 12).6 This means that the water, mountains, forests, and wet-
lands are not ‘equals of Eden’, as in Eusebio Lillo’s poetics, but are instead con-
ceived of as ‘opportunities’, ‘resources’, places to exploit. The nineteenth-century
National Anthem - ‘Pure, Chile, your blue sky/pure breezes cross you, too/and
your fields embroidered with flowers/are the happy equal of Eden’ (Lillo)-7
becomes, in the twentieth century, an ‘ecological joke’ [chiste ecologico] (Nicanor
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 5

Parra) in a Chile devastated by mines, forestry, and salmon farms, a sort of dump-
ing ground for what authors from Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, to Diamela
Eltit in the South, have called ‘the company’, ‘the business’, ‘the supermarket’:
From the hydroelectric dams proposed for Patagonia to the intensification of mineral extraction
in Atacama, contemporary Chilean social and political struggles can be read through the
country’s ecology. The knowledges produced about these ecologies, the institutional
arrangements established to govern them, and the forms of social struggle put into motion, all
have something to teach us about the present-day Chile. (Bustos et al. 2014, 13)
[Desde las represas hidroelectricas propuestas para la Patagonia a la intensificacion de la
extraccion de minerales en la Atacama, las luchas sociales y polıticas de Chile contemporaneo
se pueden leer a traves de la ecologıa del paıs. Los saberes producidos sobre estas ecologıas,
los arreglos institucionales establecidos para gobernarlas, y las formas de lucha social que se
ponen en marcha, todos tienen algo que ense~narnos acerca del Chile de hoy.]

But who put a suit on the lily and then thought they could patent it? From
whence came the damage that left some in opulence and others dispossessed? Is
writing condemned to be but an epitaph, or can it be natural beauty’s talisman?
Can our own critical texts be medicine, lawen?
It is more necessary than ever to ask after ‘the geopolitics of knowledge, that is,
who produces knowledge, in what context it is produced and for whom’ (Santos
2006, 46).8 In this sense, our interest in knowledges about plants has everything
to do with their situated, rooted nature. From a feminist perspective and from an
‘ecology of knowledges’ that dialogues with post-humanism and ecocriticism, our
research seeks to accompany the biopolitical resistance of medicinal plants, the
lawen, the sacred herbs, in a context of environmental predation. At the same
time, it seeks to validate the subjects generating these knowledges, often also con-
sidered weeds to be uprooted. We support their right to remain rooted in their
territory, without being expelled from the natural and cultural fields and, further,
the nomadic right to seek nourishment and sustenance securely. Beyond this art-
icle, our research seeks to interweave once more nature, gender, and literature,
starting by valorising knowledges of plants in the Mapuche and rural Chilean medi-
cinal system, present in a broad corpus of twentieth- and twenty-first-century wom-
en’s poetry from Chile and the Wallmapu (Mapuche Nation). It deals with: the
ritual songs of machi and ‘meicas’; blessing prayers; ‘odd women’ [curiosas],
‘herbalists’ [yerbateras], ‘mid-wives’ [parteras], and ‘care-givers’ [cuidadoras]; rural
tonadas, traditionally sung by women; and ‘modern’ poems disseminated by books
and poetry recitals. They are texts by women of various ages, of various styles and
from various sites within the broader cultural field. Women both dead and alive,
whose works span the ritual to the literary; the popular to the lettered; magic,
rites, and faith to writing. Which is to say, from the house to the street, following
the paths blazed by women in the last one hundred years (Pizarro). Yet, we would
superimpose on this diachronic reading another, dialogic and thus opposed to linear
readings, in which the rite converges with the book, field with city, voice with let-
ter and letter with voice, and which is read and sung as a palimpsest by recognis-
ing the traces of one in the other. Ours is a double path between magic and
literature, paved by faith in both the word and the concrete body that sustains it.
6 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

This corpus transposes knowledges of medicinal plants coming from popular, rural
Chilean medicine (Oresthe Plath) and Mapuche medicine (Citarella 2000; Jerez
2018), into literary language. It then combines them with other knowledges, con-
stituting what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls an ‘ecology of knowledges’. Some
of the poets in the corpus are both machi and doctors of letters, like Adriana
Paredes Pinda; modern poetry experts that cultivate the decima and tonada, like
Ana Marıa Baeza; professors and healers, like Ana Marıa del Rıo y Faumeliza
Manquepillan; academics and poets, like Maribel Mora Curriao and Maribel Lara.
Almost all are true to the confession Gabriela Mistral makes in her diary: ‘I know
almost as much about plants as about literature’ (Quezada 2002, 186).9
Ancestral knowledges about medicinal plants are acquired and developed through
various means: through lineages, kupalme, of family memories that transmit both
love for the plants and their uses, that is, through ‘the inheritance of a know-
ledge’; via community transmission of ‘natural secrets’ or ‘home remedies’, either
personally, in oral form, or, as we have seen recently, through Facebook groups
and book-length collections, with or without academe’s prestige. These popular
knowledges pass from mouth to mouth and hand to hand, leaving in their wake
the slight scent of herbs. They are borne of the need to heal or be healed, when
all else fails or seems lost: ‘take this bit of water with endless faith’,10 they will
say as they gift you a plant, when there is only that branch to cling to; the plant
bound up in all the love of she who passes it on.
In the lettered tradition, these knowledges lay in the chronicles of conquest, nat-
uralist treatises, codices, travel books, natural histories and, in the last two centu-
ries, in scientific texts spanning from chemistry to botany. They are also acquired
by studying such things as herbalist shops and naturalist displays, or following a
single plant in its travels, as historian Olaya Sanfuentes once suggested to me.
Finally, we can also learn of these plants from the shamanic natural experience and
cosmovision. In this episteme, the uses of plants are learned in dreams (pewmas in
the Mapuche world); in conversation with nature’s guardians (ngen) or the p€ull€u
(plant spirit); or beginning with what the plants themselves say of their diligent
and wise life.
The shamanic cosmovision is grounded in the belief that all beings are one.
Given this, we can mutually affect each other through magic or having, for
example, an animal or vegetal double, to thereby metamorphose into other beings
at will. It is also based in the conviction that we have a spirit that can inhabit other
bodies or travel between worlds. The spirit, like literature, travels through time
and space, joining the sacred and the profane. Finally, it is supported by the belief
that a divinity exists with which one may interact, if faith is had and the adequate
rituals known. All human beings could have a shamanic, even miraculous, aspect,
if we invest body and faith in a healing word.
Shamans, the shamanic cosmovision and its ‘logic’, that is, magic, have been
punished with torture and death, in antiquity, and with ridicule, exoticisation, or
mercantilisation of their knowledges in modernity. Their word has been rescued
from the blaze or the asylum only when it has literary value, as with Saint Teresa
of A vila in Spain, Marıa Sabina in Mexico, or Adriana Paredes Pinda in Chile.
Shamanic knowledges - for example, placing a protective plant in the doorway -
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 7

have been indefatigably associated with either long-gone premodern periods or

mere superstition. Nevertheless, it is possible that some reader, with perhaps a
doctorate and some books in them, has, at this very moment, a little protective
plant in their entranceway, a little red ribbon on their left wrist or, if they are
truly loved, blows out all the candles on every birthday, effecting the magical
union of breath and desire.
The anthropologist Jimena Jerez, in Plantas magicas de la costa valdiviana (2018),
dedicates an entire chapter to anthropological literature’s prejudices toward
Mapuche medicine and its magical, intentional, and visionary use of plants. She
affirms that this negation of the magical and spiritual dimension of Mapuche cul-
ture reduces not only the appreciation of the culture that one pretends to under-
stand but, also, its complete worldview. A world inhabited by spiritual forces
becomes a world of mere objects.
Since the ‘new age’ cultural movement, shamanism has been framed as a path of
self-actualisation and self-knowledge. A certain invented narrative has even been
expressed cinematically, narrating the encounter between the shaman and the
anthropologist that reveals the sorcerer’s knowledges to the real (lettered) world.
It is generally a masculine path, on which the scientist makes himself deserving of
receiving these knowledges through the consumption of plants. The shaman is, in
general, betrayed insofar as a secret is transgressed or, as occurs in the Colombian
film El abrazo del serpiente (Ciro Guerra, 2015), he is reduced to a mere photo-
graph with neither spirit nor community. In this film, anthropological knowledge
betrays humanity by becoming complicit with the military-industrial complex and
the superposition of the national or imperial idea over the earth. The non-ritual
uses of the chacruna and the military use of caucho end in the enslavement of the
Amazonian indigenous people.
Carlos Casta~neda, precursor of this narrative, has been required reading for count-
less adolescents striving to find themselves between the tonal and the magical,
between what is seen and what is divined, consuming datura or, perhaps, just the
magical plant that is literature. Recent years have seen a sort of ‘hallucinogenic tour-
ism’ arise, especially with ayahuasca in the Amazon and in the north of Chile, with
San Pedro (the starry cactus with the keys to heaven). This neoliberal mode has dis-
possessed shamanism of its social functions: alerting communities to danger and catas-
trophe; providing healing through words or ritual; coming to understand spiritual
ailments; mending transgressions; defending sacred spaces and against persecution of
the people. That is, the neoliberal mode has effaced its political dimension. While
they no longer burn machis or commit them to the asylum in twenty-first-century
Chile, they do separate them from their communities, from their territory, by jailing
them. They have become martyrs and objects of hatred, no longer for their alleged
diabolical link but, rather, due to the crude tales of the police, business interests, and
state, linking them to terrorist acts.
Literature, shamanism, and plants have a close relationship. Not only due to the
relationship between the so-called poete maudit and hashish, opium, or the ‘green
fairy’ inhabiting absinthe - not to forget sempiternal wine, or marijuana and
cocaine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If we took up this thread,
every literary movement could be tied to some vegetal extract. Nor is it because
8 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

the laurel, loved by Apollo, was and continues to be the triumphant sign of every
‘poet laureate’. The relationship between literature and shamanism, with or with-
out the use of plants, comes principally from their manner of seeing and conceiv-
ing of reality. Shamanism’s worldview, uniting voice, body, and spirit in order to
achieve one’s goal, is similar to poetry’s practice of knowing the world.
Epiphanies, correspondences, analogies, synesthesia, all demonstrate the unity of
one and all. Magic and literature brush against the space of creation and transform-
ation of reality, to change the world. For Octavio Paz, in Los hijos del limo, modern
poetry is nourished by two literary figures: analogy and irony. Analogy is the trace
of the shamanic or premodern cosmovision in which ‘all are one’ and therefore,
we can find ‘correspondences’ between worlds and beings. Vertical correspond-
ences are the union of heaven and earth allowing you, for example, to see your
fate in the stars or the palm of your hand. Horizontal correspondences dwell in
the realm of synesthesia, a sort of universal empathy and sensorial union between
beings and things. Irony, on the other hand, would be the risible sneer of a death
without transcendence and of the poet’s lost relevance as translator and traveller
between words, that is, a ‘shaman of the word’. For Argentine critic Alicia
Salomone, the pazian relationship between analogy and irony takes on a unique
form in women’s poetry: irony discredits traditional gender roles and analogy
expresses a relationship with nature, even associating it with the possibility of
rebelling against said gender roles.11
Similarly, in the poems of our corpus, modern and premodern visions of the literary
word coexist. The modern ones are used to discuss and discredit the patrilineal literary
tradition that tends to exclude women and their work, and understands nature as the
reproductive, the ancient, everything incapable of recreating itself. So-called premodern
visions establish a shamanic natural cosmovision in which writing is a furrow through
which passes the sacred, a canal for the voices of the living and the dead.
For the avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro, in his manifesto ‘Non serviam’, nature
is a ‘little old lady’ that one ought to dominate or ignore: ‘I don’t have to be your
slave, Mother Nature; I will be your master. You will avail yourself of me; fine. I
neither want nor can avoid it; but I, too, will avail myself of you. I will have my
trees be different than yours, I will have my mountains, rivers and seas, I will have
my sky and my stars’ (40).12 The authors of our corpus will render the shamanic nat-
ural cosmovision literarily productive to then become ‘doubles’ of animals and plants,
fly over the city, prance along roofs like invisible cats and speak with the dead. In ‘I,
Cactus’ [Yo, Cactus] by Alejandra del Rıo, we can observe the rewriting of the gen-
der-nature relationship from a neo-shamanic perspective:
Yo no soy moderna
o tal vez lo soy. Vivo con mi sangre puesta
goteando encima de las cosas
en una absurda imitacion del universo.
(…)
La palabra es una viga
donde posan su alma los muertos
el verbo una cornisa en movimiento
y mi oscura vitalidad
el camino que no cesa.
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 9

(‘Yo, Cactus’ del Rıo 1994).

[I’m no modern woman/or perhaps I am. I live with my blood placed/dripping over
things/in an absurd imitation of the universe./( … )/The word is a rafter/where the dead
pose their souls/the verb a cornice in motion/and my obscure vitality/the endless path.]

The lyric subject ‘drips blood’, that is, menstrual blood. She imitates the uni-
verse not only as a potential ‘mother’, but also through artistic creation. For per-
ishing, she is an ‘absurd imitation’. According to her own definition, the speaker
is and is not modern, since in the same gesture signalling life’s finitude, she grants
the poetic word the density of a material, of wood: it is an invisible rafter, upon
which the dead can deposit their soul, like incorporeal birds, so that another might
sing. From this perspective, writing is cradle and crypt for the sacred, a furrow
for life. The political reading that links this poem to post-dictatorial memory is
crossed with the shamanic vision in which the word is a portal between life and
death. The axis that intersects the political and the spiritual is the vegetal metaphor
with which the speaker self-identifies: ‘I, cactus’. That is, a plant that grows in an
almost straight line from dry earth to heaven, so faithfully that one of its species
holds heaven’s keys. The alliance with the plant, her double, grants her an endless
path. The body leaves, the song remains.
‘Orchard’ [Huerta], from Gabriela Mistral’s El poema de Chile, is a shamanic
space permitting the coexistence of living and dead, sheltered by vegetal magic.
The literary text not only makes possible the impossible union of child and ghost,
but also an ecology of knowledges, by uniting literature with a purpose that is sim-
ultaneously pedagogical, environmentalist, and medicinal:
-Ni~no, tu pasas de largo
por la huerta de Lucıa
aunque te paras, a veces,
por cualquiera naderıa.
>Que le miras a esa mata?
Es cualquier pasto. <Camina!
->Que? es la huerta de Lucıa.
Tan chica, mama, y sin arboles.
>Que haces ahı, mira y mira?
Esa vieja planta todo.
Por vieja, tendra manıas.
-Tonito mio. Es la albahaca.
<Que buena! <Dios la bendiga!
-Pero si no es mas que pasto,
mama. >Por que le acaricias?
-Le oı decir a mi madre
que la querıa y plantaba
y la bebıa en tisana,
le oı decir que alivia
el corazon, y eran ciertas
las cosas que ella nos contaba.
(1967, 51)

[-Child, you’re going the long way/through Lucıa’s orchard/although you stop, sometimes,/at
any little thing./Why stare at that shrub?/It’s just some grass. Walk!/What? It’s Lucıa’s
garden. / It’s tiny, mom, and treeless. / What are you poking around there for? / That old
lady plants everything./She’s old, she has her manias./Oh, Tonito, it’s basil!/How wonderful!
10 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

God bless it!/-But mom, if it’s only grass/why caress it so?/-I heard her tell my mother/that
she planted and loved it/and drank it as a tincture,/I heard her say it heals/the heart, and she
always/spoke the truth.]

The great conversations about language, in the classical tradition, almost always
happen beneath a tree, generally an oak. This poem invites us to set aside the
obvious conversation between trees and the wind and attend to the small things.
One must crouch down and make secret, that is, intimate, the space of the
orchard, the garden. Only then will we hear, as in the tales, the secrets of plants
that hold medicine. The child appreciates - it could not be otherwise - the trees’
immensity. He and the plants are at ground-level on the insignificant thing called
‘grass’. Learning that at times lives are judged insignificant, much as, at times,
ours are, has medicinal value in and of itself.
The mother-ghost also teaches him popular medicine: green and odorous basil, stimu-
lant and summoner of life, cures the heart. ‘A sick man that eats don’t die’, my peasant
father often said, and basil calls forth hearty appetites, reestablishing happiness, erotism,
health. One also notices in the poem the disdain for nature and elderly women’s wis-
dom and practices: ‘that old lady plants everything/she’s old, she has her manias’. The
ghost and Mistral herself, following the spirit’s indigenous voice, validate the knowledge
of mothers and grandmothers by affirming: ‘I heard her say it heals/the heart, and she
always/spoke the truth’ (Mistral). For a mistral13 ‘no-oned’ [ninguneada] in her coun-
try, giving and receiving validation is also, doubtless, lawen-medicine.
There is also a medicinal knowledge in this text, tied to mourning. The orchard is
Lucıa’s, the name of the poet’s maternal grandmother. Through this name, Lucıa-
Gabriela is also inscribed, autobiographically, in the poem. The generation of
‘orchardesses’ [huerteras], that is, Mistral and her grandmother, with their mother and
ghost doubles, teach a knowledge rooted, woven, between the vegetal kingdom and a
branch of the family (here, feminine). A knowledge that interweaves living and dead,
much as we know literature does. The vegetal kingdom gives the familial alliance that
protects and tends the garden the gift of a visit from the ancestors. The odour of plants,
the feel of the earth - the putting into practice of knowledge about the garden learned in
childhood embraces, in recollection, the memories of those on both sides of the grass.14
The text is a dream-ground that lets us remember the alliance between maternal
plants that we touch, smell and that even feed us, and the mother that is spirit, ghost,
memory - almost never nothing. Maybe the ghostly Mistral would tell us today,
through this poem, her orchard, how to educate children with loving knowledge come
from the most immediate nature - plants as food, medicine, and nexus with our ances-
tors - and not from the terror of ecocide, something entirely too familiar to them.
Similarly, the poem ‘Healing’ [Sanacion] by machi poet Adriana Paredes Pinda offers a
kim€un (knowledge) by choosing the fuchotun as poetic inspiration, that is, through a
smoke cleansing done with plants. The speaker-machi offers knowledges about her role
as shaman. She says that a spirit inhabits and guides her, telling her which plants to toss
on the fire - laurel (triwe) and cinnamon (foye) - to open the way. It also explains why
the girl is ‘depressed’, that is, why her head is covered in white lice: a visible material-
isation of sad thoughts due to separation from her territory.
In Mapuche and rural Chilean medicine, much as in European romanticism, pain
sickens the lungs - in other words, the sufferer’s vital breath. Therefore, the speaker-
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 11

machi gives her tusılago, used to cleanse respiratory passages. Afterwards, the machi goes
deeper and determines the cause of the pain and kutran (illness), in this case spiritual.
The story emerging from the smoke is of a pregnant young woman (hence matico for
the nipples and birthing wounds) and a young man who stayed in the South, the
Wallmapu. The separation, the split from affect, family, identity and territory, is
expressed as the fold on the body where the medicine is applied. The illness-kutran is
being apart from her land. Therefore, the plant aromas - nothing is as natal and territor-
ial as a plant’s odour - and the feyentun (ritual practice) heal her, by returning her to
being Mapuche, people of the earth. The palqui cleanses her head such that she will
accept the trarilonco (a type of headband) when she ‘comes to’ and life continues:
Fuchotun
es lo que falta. Laurel limpie estos aires,
aclare los caminos.
La que me guıa
vuelca foye en la penumbra, erupciona
una luna mordiendo los espıritus. Ella dira cuando.
(…)

Cantara la ni~na su canto antiguo si conoce

la madre de su raız, si llena su boca
con yerbas sanadoras. Tusılago
para la pena que le derrama
en tos asmatica por el pecho, palke
para la cabeza afiebrada sin trarilonco,
matico cicatrizara herida de parturientas
cuando venga su luz.
Ahora los ojos se les quedan en cementos,
no hay lunas maternales en los edificios,
no entra sol ni aire ni fuego.
La muchacha tendra que hacer machitun.
Los brotes de las maderas
pujan en su lengua,
un pewen de aroma en parto.
Se le habıa ido el espıritu, dicen.
Le hicimos fuegos con luna llena a su ruka,
sus brazos no querıan mapuche por eso la pena,
pero se rindio con foye
mientras cantabamos. Trutruka,
pvfvllka, trompe antiguo con raulı
para enamorarla.
Un muchacho pedıa por su regreso,
porque la libraramos de los perros negros.
Ya no querıa ser secuestrada la muchacha
en otro mundo, pero su corazon estaba partido
en dos
Por eso la pena y piojos blancos.
Pedimos a la mamita le sobara la partidura
allı donde morıa. Vinieron entonces buenos olores,
tierra de Treng-Treng lleno sus manos,
volvıa espıritu de chiquilla enferma
porque la madre fue por el.
‘Tuve que ir a buscarlo por donde se perdio’ (Paredes, 2005)
[Fuchotun/is what’s needed. Laurel, cleanse these airs,/clear the paths./My guide/overturn foye
in the gloom, erupt/a moon biting spirits. She’ll say when./( … )/The girl will sing her
12 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

ancient song if she meets/her root’s mother, if she fills her mouth/with healing herbs.
Tusılago/for pain that spills from her breast/as an asthmatic cough, palke/for feverish brow
without trarilonco,/matico will close birthing wounds/when she comes to./Now her eyes rest
on cement,/there’re no maternal moons on buildings,/neither sun, air, nor fire enter./The
girl will have to make machitun./Buds of wood/moan in tongues,/a pewen of aroma in birth./
Her spirit had left her, they say./We made fires with the full moon for her ruka,/her arms
didn’t want mapuche hence the pain,/but she gave in to foye/while we sang. Trutruka,/pvfvllka,
ancient trompe with raulı/to enamour her./A young man begged her return,/because we could
free her from the black dogs./She no longer wished to be shut in/another world, but her
heart was split/in two/Hence the pain and white lice./We asked the little mom to handle
guiding her in leaving/there were she was dying. Then good odours came,/Treng-Treng’s
earth filled her hands,/the sick, young girl’s spirit returned/because the mother went for it. ‘I
had to seek it where it was lost’]

The speaker-poet, already more than machi,15 memorialises in ‘Healing’ the

odours and tastes of the plants of Southern Chile, of the Wallmapu, so that readers
in the warria (city) can also heal themselves, without having foye and triwe at hand.
A poem as odorous as the smoke cleanse, in which leaves are transposed to pages,
granting health - this is a model of the medicine-poems or lawen that I am propos-
ing in this text.
Another model, from the rural world and without sacred connotations, is the
tonada ‘The Planter’ [La Jardinera] by Violeta Parra.16 This tonada alludes to the
sublimation of amorous mourning through artwork metaphorised by garden work -
‘to forget you/I will tend the earth’.17 At the same time, it grants knowledges of
medicinal plants - ‘for my sadness, blue violet’.18 That is, recognizing that she is
sad, ‘blue’ as a depressed Violeta, but also, getting over the pain with a plant that
heals respiratory passages, the lungs, the pain’s heart. Or when she places poppy,
mother of opium, beneath her pillow to sleep. The song is a poem, yet also sig-
nals, using literary and medicinal wisdom, how to cure pain, or at least what will
calm the heart. This tonada’s cogollo exhibits a knowledge of plants that encom-
passes Mapuche, rural, and European medicines, recommending: ‘Sprout of lemon
balm,/When my pains grow,/Flowers from my garden,/My nurses must be’
(Parra).19 Lemon balm, piwque lawen (medicine-plant of the heart) or melissa is
used in all three traditions to calm a broken heart and bring sleep and subtle hap-
piness. But when the illness does not pass with what is at hand and one must turn
to medics, another important aspect of Violeta Parra’s poetics arises: the social.
Whomsoever ails, being poor, may suffer an ill fate, as she conveys in her com-
piled tonada ‘Black Folks’ Wedding’ [Casamiento de negros]:
Algo le duele a la negra
vino el medico del pueblo
receto emplasto de barro
pero del barro mas negro
que le dieron a la negra
zumo de maqui de cerro
(Parra, ‘Casamiento de negros,’ 1953)

[Something hurts the black woman/came the town medic/who prescribed a clay poultice/but
of clay so black/that they gave her/juice of hill maqui.]
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 13

In the song, ‘the town medic’ behaves like a ‘meica’ and ‘prescribes’ ‘clay
poultice’ and ‘maqui juice’. If we think about the text’s ‘ecology of knowledges’,
we see that aesthetically, the maqui coheres to the poem’s dominant literary
thread, the colour black. From Western medicine we know that maqui is an anti-
oxidant that also lowers blood sugar. From a mapuche medicinal perspective, the
maqui and its quitral is machi-lawen. In this traditional health system, the lack or
rejection of emotional sweetness damages the physical health and, thus, expels
sugar from the body in urine or retains it harmfully in the blood. The maqui’s
sweet drops invite one to enjoy, teaching body and soul that sweetness exists even
for those that have long lived in salty water. Poetry formed around analogies, con-
densations and substitutions, functions in a similar manner: was the bride in this
wedding song so deprived of sweetness that it almost cost her life? ‘Foot to the
ground’ [pie a tierra] (a poultice) before getting up to go and maqui juice to
sweeten up inside seem the best medicines for the sad bride. But ‘Casamiento de
negros’ does more than impart a knowledge-kimun about health and plants. It also
holds a literary memory. We know from Danneman and Barros that ‘Casamiento
de negros’ rewrites a medieval romance and a poem by Quevedo - ‘Boda de neg-
ros’- that takes on new life in Chilean guitars and voices, becoming a song again,
as in its first life as a romance. This tonada holds centuries of literary knowledge.
The voices root it in Chilean territory through the maqui, sweetener and medi-
cine, medicinal plants being profoundly territorial. It seems to us that knowledges
of the maqui as an ancestral medicine lend new light to the song’s interpretation.
Further, the vertiginous rhythm announces its status as an ironic literary game
revolving around mourning and death. The minor tone denounces the wound at
the heart of the jocular - marriage is a luxury, not something for the poor or
black. Therefore, the land (clay) and the hill’s gift of free food, the maqui,
become necessary. Health and remedies are, as in other songs, in nature, if the
subject simply extends their hands to receive them. There is nothing more egalitar-
ian and democratic than medicinal plants and their wisdom.
The neoliberal extractivist model, referring to the limitless extraction of natural
resources, has already set its sights on the maqui and begun to privatise it. It will
soon no longer be Chilean, nor from the Wallmapu, and it will not be available for
the poor, nor for black brides. Ancestral medicinal knowledges will not retain
their lawen if we cannot learn a way of acquiring natural elements other than that
of accumulation or avarice, the bitterness of a world with neither doctors nor
meica- ‘ay what a black wake’. Married to a lamien, enamoured of the sweet maqui
that invites enjoyment, the ex-priest and now pro-Mapuche activist Luis Garcıa
Huidobro, discusses the privatisation of the maqui:
How absurd, they want to patent and privatise the maqui, the maqui. It’s like patenting
resistance. Who could be like the maqui! Despite 40 years of invasion, harvest after harvest of
eucalyptus and pines, the maqui resists, after burns, here comes the maqui, before everything
else, raising its head, to recover terrain no only so that birds and humans might eat, but also
so that to its shade the native coihue might return, the hualle, the arrayan. After the desert of a
terrain shorn by forestry, the humble and resistant maqui returns, to be the food of all
that walks.
14 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

[Que absurdo, quieren patentar y privatizar el maqui, el maqui. Es como patentar la

resistencia. Quien fuera como el maqui! A pesar de 40 a~nos de invasion, cosecha tras cosecha
de eucaliptos y pinos, al maqui resiste, tras quema, ahı vuelve el maqui, el primero de todos, a
levantar la cabeza, a recuperar terreno no solo para que coman pajaritos y humanos, sino para
que a su sombra vuelva el coihue nativo, el hualle, el arrayan. Despues del desierto del terreno
pelado por la forestal, el maqui humilde y resistente vuelve, para ser el alimento del
que camina.]

In this post taken from his Facebook page, Garcıa Huidobro utilises some of the
strategies we mentioned in relation to the poems: become a plant to resist, learn
from them, and do not use them as only metaphors for knowledge (e.g. rhizo-
matic, arboreal, I plant … , field, etcetera). Should the maqui become a pill - like
the South’s trees become chips and splinters - all the community’s knowledges
will be lost. The preparation of foods such as juice, chicha, delicious maqui tarts,
as well as medicinal knowledges of the infusions, the baths, the cleansing, the
mixes of maqui and other lawen-medicine (maqui and lemon balm for sweet
dreams, for example) - all forms of knowing and relating to the world that hinge
on the loving maqui and are alternatives to the extractivist model. Everything is
reduced to a single technical, pharmaceutical process to be sold, and the popula-
tion that relied on it is without medicine and food: ‘What do we know about
resisting forestry. The maqui knows. Watching it we learn, one must be humble
and watch the maqui, ask it to teach us to preserve and rise up again and again’
(Facebook wall of Luis Garcıa-Huidobro).20
The plants in the songs and poems that I analyse are represented as expressions
of a full life. Thus, the rural Chilean tonada - traditionally of amorous themes - has
a long and sensual relationship with plants: fruits’ shapes and juices are metaphors
for sexual organs; spices season erotic desire, as in ‘Cinnamon Twig’ [Palito de
canela] (Loyola); birds and their beaks, from diuca finches to hummingbirds, sup-
port the flowers - no fruits without their help. Plants frame erotic happiness in the
rural Chilean tonada: ‘I can’t take coffee, because coffee steals my dreams, I can
only take tea, because I fall asleep taking you, the little tealeaf/is such a miracu-
lous herb/that I could spend the entire day/taking tea, taking tea, taking tea’
(‘Tomando te’, Raul Gardy).21 In the same way, they are budding beauty, adorn-
ments, as we observe in each concluding ‘cogollo’: ‘now join her here, buttoned-
up little heart, it’s worth more to die loving, than not to live hoping’ (trad-
itional).22 Plants guide knowledge around sex: one must ‘know what cinnamon is’
and the poor soul who doesn’t ends up ‘looking for the fig’s pit’ or ‘sweetness in
a salty sea’ (“Las naranjas”, compiled and performed by Violeta Parra).23 Plants
are, moreover, the doubles of women, their sisters, or even metaphors for them,
so that in the tonadas a woman can be ‘the most beautiful flower’, and their sexu-
ality left to ‘a flower’ that blooms, loses its petals or passes from hand to hand
(compiled by Victor Jara). Elsewhere, a woman may become a flower to resist
(Pinda) or have a plant double (Quitreman), and the fate of a woman can be
sealed with that of a plant (Urriola). In poems, plants can also let the sacred in:
they carry the voices of the dead and the ancestors (Pinda, del Rıo, Mistral), and
they signal transitions between life and death (Parra). One also puts faith in medi-
cinal plants when all else fails:
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 15

Despues del precipicio

Algunos logramos asirnos a las plantas medicinales
Y a mıseros arbustos que crecıan
Sin razon sobre el roquerıo
Y desde el mas puro agnosticismo
Rogabamos a los dioses
A las flores
A los pajaros.
Por los cuerpos nuestros
Y por todos aquellos que no alcanzaron a sujetarse
Como nosotros
(Salinas 2010, 260)

[After the fall/Some of us managed to cling to medicinal plants/And miserable bushes that
grew/Senselessly over the rocks/And from the purest agnosticism/We prayed to the gods/To
the flowers/To the birds./For our bodies/And for all of those that didn’t manage to hold on/
Like us]

They are life enjoyed, defended, finished: fragrant portals, sweetly scented
hinges between life and death, and medicine-lawen that joins the worlds on both
sides of the grass.
Poems from the corpus can also be read as simultaneously revisiting and distanc-
ing themselves from the modern poetic tradition, born of a masculine cradle. They
are ‘disqualified pages’ [hojas desclasificadas] (Elvira Hernandez); ‘modern and not’
[modernas y no modernas] (Alejandra del Rıo), ‘Urriola alone’ in front of all the
schools and movements, especially in considering the poet a ‘clairvoyant’ [vidente]
(Urriola). Pages opposed to, shorn, distant from the tree of Chilean poetry and its
genealogy. We read this in the poem ‘Disqualification’ [Desclasificacion] by
Elvira Hernandez:24
Soy una hoja al aire, se~nor
De esas que vienen escritas por los dos lados
Y desprendida de su arbol mayor
- mi propio viento me descuaja -
Por cierto sin genealogıa
Por entera volatil.

Sin traza de caminos planeo sobre nadas

- es un vuelo muy elevado -
Por aquı y por alla sobre el pajar relativo
(los granos extraıdos son mil veces mas vanos)
No creo que lo note, se~nor
Mi hoja se esta cargando de sangre.
(2016 183)

[I’m a page in the wind, sir/One of those filled in on both sides/And shorn from its old tree/
-my own wind uproots me -/Without genealogy, of course/Entirely volatile, of course.//
Without trace of a path I glide over nothings/ - it’s a lofty flight - /Here and there over the
relative haystack/(the grains shaken out are a thousand times vainer)/I don’t think you can
tell, sir/My page is filling with blood.]

Without a ‘family tree’ and descending from a slight height - and therefore
without an epic or a parachute, as Vincent Huidobro’s Altazor has - the
‘disqualified’ is a ‘page’ that houses a woman’s biological body and a body of
16 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

literature.25 It is ‘a page filled in on both sides’ that is filling with blood while it
falls, without being noticed by the ‘sir’ to whom the poem is directed. In the
Chilean popular world menstrual blood ‘comes down’ [baja] - the poem does not
refer to just any pain, it is a ‘gendered pain’. Flying, floating, falling, writing, fill-
ing with blood and ink, without being ‘noted’, incorporated to the Chilean literary
system. That is, to be ‘no-oned’ [ninguneada], excluded, is doubtlessly part of the
kutran (illness) with which the patriarchy inoculates women. The disqualified
poem-page is lawen, medicine, because it makes itself known, registering itself so
that other pages, also twice-written, notice that they are not alone in their fall -
that many others are falling, free.
These songs, ritual chants and poems share that they are proffered by a concrete
biological body, in this case those of women in a specific cultural space: the heal-
ing ritual and, in modern poetry, the recital. The latter has determined the diffu-
sion and the political character of women’s poetry, as we see in Luis Carcamo-
Huechante’s text on Carmen Berenguer’s poetry and in El cuerpo de la voz: Poesıa,
etica y cultura by Francine Masiello. Voice, body, text, and faith (although it may
only be in art) together constitute a medicine that attests to not only the pain or
‘splinter’ in the wood of which we are hewn, but also the collective’s power and
the force of understanding the world as somewhere where ‘everything is round’,
that is, collaborative (Mistral).
Each page of the corpus that we propose tells us: weeds don’t exist, no life is left
over. The feminine poetic word sung, prayed and written, becomes the poems-lawen,
‘pages that heal’ the Kutran-illness of patriarchal and colonialist dispossession, mis-
ogyny, and racism. The texts restore health by, for example, identifying, attesting to,
and denouncing what Diamela Eltit has called ‘gender’s pain’. That is, the physical
pain, the sensation of old age or extreme exhaustion, that public-facing women relate
in their most private texts, such as letters and diaries (Eltit). Further, they heal by
counteracting the exclusion and rendering invisible (‘no one-ing’ [ninguneo] in
Elizabeth Horan’s reading of Mistral) that women and their cultural productions
experience. Validation and valorisation are a form of responding to this kutran, this
gendered pain. Women poets, machis, lawentunchefe, €ulkantufe, singers, meicas, cleans-
ers, blessers and odd women (and researchers and critics) sing, pray, read, write,
publish, making a text-body by placing a voice in the text, so that the next to read or
listen discovers that she, too, can bring forth her voice.
‘Making the Sunflower Sing: Medicinal Plants in Women’s Ritual Chants,
Tonadas, and Poems from Chile-Wallmapu XX-XXI’ explores the way that wom-
en’s poetic texts permit the coexistence of multiple knowledges and orient them
toward the valorisation of lives perceived of as having minimal worth. Further, it
establishes the constitution of a literary subgenre, the poem-lawen or medicinal
poem, in which knowledges of plants are added to art’s work of sublimation, to
cure the wounds patriarchy inflicts on women who sing or write when it renders
them invisible, dispossesses or silences them. It explores the links between femin-
ism, women and nature from the perspective of bio-poetic resistance in the neo-
liberal context and announces the possibility of a neo-shamanic reading of poetic
texts wherein converge patrilineal knowledges and knowledges that pursue the
union and relation of all beings. Finally, our text a popular texts and knowledges
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 17

to the literary text. ‘How do I weave the yuyo flower?’ asks Adriana Paredes Pinda
in one of her poems. How do we define the literary beginning from this slapdash,
mestiza writing that celebrates the co-presence of distinct forms of knowing by
and in writing? These are questions that every biopolitical crisis brings to the fore-
front of critical and literary works.
Weeds don’t exist, no life is left over - this is a truth that the pavement
interred. The angel of history watches herbs resist in the ruins that disaster left
and leaves, putting a sunflower seed on our tongues and saying: ‘there is still
beauty in this world - sing!’ I sound the lion’s tooth, the messenger, desiring that
all knowledges bound to plants arrive at the heart of whomsoever can defend
them. Let it be so, felepe mai.

Translated by Conor Harris.

Acknowledgements
This article is part of FONDECYT Project 1171337, for which I am the lead researcher with co-
researcher Claudia Rodrıguez, whose valuable collaboration in the formalisation of the project I appreciate
immensely. I am grateful for her generosity and creativity, capable of generating diverse and productive
communities. I would also like to thank my hosts from the Centre of Latin American Studies at
Cambridge University- Françoise Barbira Freedman, Geoffrey Kantaris, Rory O’Bryen, and Joanna Page-
for their support, ideas, and faith in this garden. Further, I extend my gratitude to my dearest colleagues
present at the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies’s colloquium Configuraciones Culturales de lo
Polıtico, at the Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas- UNAM, Mexico D.F., June 15-16, 2017, where I
read a shortened version of this article. Finally, I am grateful for the comments by this journal’s
anonymous readers, which contributed to bettering the initial work.

NOTES

1. In Castilian, ‘hojas’ can refer both to plant leaves and sheets of papers, and ‘maravillas’
to both sunflowers (as in the title) and marvels. Throughout this text, these dual
meanings should be understood as implied each time these words appear.
(Translator’s note)
2. The term used in the original is ‘morena’, literally translated as ‘brown [skinned/haired]
woman’. (T.N.)
3. Neruda plays with the Latin American Castilian word for potato- ‘papa’- and the Spanish
Castilian word- ‘patata’- which are rendered here as potato and tater, to give weight to
the Latin American over the Spanish, following Neruda. (T.N.)
4. ‘La ignorancia colonialista consiste en rechazar el conocimiento del otro como igual y en
su conversion en objeto asumiendo historicamente alguna de estas tres formas: naturaleza,
salvaje u Oriente.’
5. Campos naturales / Dejanos pasar / Porque tus devotos / Vienen a adorar
6. ‘( … ) al igual que todas las formas del capitalismo, el neoliberalismo es necesariamente
un proyecto ambiental, que gira en torno a las cuestiones de propiedad y
mercantilizacion de la naturaleza.’
7. Puro Chile es tu cielo azulado / puras brisas te cruzan tambien / y tu campo de flores
bordado / es la copia feliz del eden
18 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

8. ‘la geopolıtica del conocimiento, es decir quien produce el conocimiento, en que

contexto lo produce y para quien’
9. Alongside Claudia Rodrıguez, co-researcher on this project, we have constituted a corpus
of songs collected in distinct mediums and re-written by recent Mapuche and Chilean
poets; traditional tonadas compiled by Violeta Parra and Margot Loyola; texts by Gabriela
Mistral and Violeta Parra; and a selection of poems from Marina Arrate, Marıa Ines
Zaldıvar, Malu Urriola, Ana Marıa Baeza, Rosabetty Mu~noz, Alejandra del Rıo, Alicia
Salinas, Marıa Isabel Lara Millapan, Maribel Mora Curriao, Cecilia Astorga, Gladys
Gonzalez, Adriana Paredes Pinda and Faumelisa Manquepillan.
10. Tomese esta ag€uita con harta fe.
11. In Latin American narrative the coexistence of shamanic vision with European rationalism
gave rise to what Alejo Carpentier called the ‘real maravilloso’. The African hero
Mackandal was, from the European perspective, judged and burned at the same time
that, from the African perspective, he was saved by becoming a dragonfly. The novel’s
narrator grants the same truth-value to both views, permitting them to coexist.
Mackandal died in the blaze, Mackandal is saved. This also held later, for magical
realism’s narrators. What I am saying is that the tendency toward fusion of the literary
with the magical has also existed in narrative, even when the text is overtly political.
12. ‘No he de ser tu esclavo, madre Natura; sere tu amo. Te serviras de mı; esta bien. No
quiero y no puedo evitarlo; pero yo tambien me servire de ti. Yo tendre mis arboles que
no seran somo los tuyos, tendre mis monta~nas, tendre mis rıos y mis mares, tendre mi
cielo y mis estrellas.’
13. This word is in lower case in the original- it also refers to a wind, and thus calls back to
the beginning of the author’s discussion of this poem. (T.N.)
14. Peasant tonadas also use tended plants as a link between living and dead, as in this tonada
that Raul Gardy left his daughter Virginia:
Mi sombra te fue siguiendo
Mi sombra se hizo tu sombra
Mi vida se fue fundiendo en tu vida
Mi corazon ya no late por mı
Por ti lo hace ahora
Y cuando el recuerdo tuyo esta aquı
Vivo cantando
Y cuando el recuerdo tuyo se va
Quedo llorando
Hoy revivieron las rosas
Mi linda morena
Que tu me dejaste
(‘Mi linda Morena’, Raul Gardy)

[My shadow was following you / My shadow became your shadow / My life melted into
your life / My heart no longer beats for me / It beats for you now / And when your
memory is here / I live singing / And when your memory leaves / I remain crying /
Today the roses you left me / My lovely dark-skinned dear / Came back to life]
15. Claudia Rodrıguez, in her necessary and indispensable article ‘Weup€ufes y machis: canon,
genero y escritura en la poesıa mapuche actual’, establishes the correspondence between
machi and lyrical speaker in the poemas of Adriana Paredes Pinda. We are following her
hypothesis in this reading.
 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 19

16. The Chilean version of the tonada is a rural musical genre that incorporates plants
thematically, generally those associated with the amorous, and structurally through the
‘cogollo’, an octosyllabic flourish serving as a greeting.
17. ‘para olvidarme de ti / voy a cultivar la tierra’
18. ‘para mi tristeza, violeta azul’
19. ‘Cogollo de toronjil, / Cuando me aumentan las penas, / Las flores de mi jardın, / Han
de ser mis enfermeras’
20. ‘Que sabemos nosotros de resistirle a la forestal. El maqui sabe. Mirandolo a el
aprendemos, hay que ser humildes y mirar al maqui, pedirle que nos ense~ne a ser
preservantes para levantarnos una y otra vez’
21. ‘No puedo tomar cafe, porque el cafe me quita el sue~no, solo puedo tomar te, porque
tomandote me duermo, es la hojita del te / hierba tan milagrosa / que estarıa todo el
dıa / tomando te, tomando te, tomando te.’ The translation doesn’t convey the
wordplay in this song- ‘tomar’ is both ‘to drink’ and ‘to take,’ such that ‘tomando te’ is
‘drinking/taking tea’ and ‘tomandote’ is ‘taking/making love to you’- they are effectively
homonymous. (T.N.)
22. ‘presente aquı la compa~nıa, cogollito abotonado, mas vale morir queriendo, que no
vivir esperando’
23. ‘saber lo que es canela’, ‘buscandole el cuesco a la breva’, ‘dulzura en la mar salada’
24. I would like to thank Ignacio Sanchez for bringing this poem to my attention during my
course ‘Poemas plantas medicinales’ in the Facultad de Letras at the Pontificia
Universidad Catolica de Chile.
25. Here, as above, the word ‘hoja’ in Spanish should be understood not only as ‘page’ but
also as ‘leaf’ (T.N.)

References

Bombal, M. L. 2012. “El arbol”. Santiago de Chile: Pehuen.

Bustos, B., P. Manuel, and B. Jonathan. 2014. Ecologıa polıtica en Chile. Naturaleza, propiedad, conocimiento
y poder. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria.
Casanova Guarda, H. 1994. Diablos, brujas y espıritus maleficos. Chillan, un proceso judicial del siglo XVIII.
Chile: Ediciones Universidad de la Frontera.
Casta~neda, C. 2014. Las ense~nanzas de Don Juan: una forma yaqui de conocimiento. Buenos Aires: Fondo de
Cultura Economica.
Citarella, Luca, ed. 2000. Medicinas y culturas en la Araucanıa. Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana.
De Ercilla, A. 2011. “Canto 1.” La Araucana. Madrid: Catedra.
Del Rıo, A. 1994. “Yo cactus.” In El yo cactus, 87. Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Chile.
Eltit, D. 2013. “Genero y dolor.” Revista Taller de letras 53:131–138.
Foucault, M. 2008. Historia de la sexualidad. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno.
Gardy, R. 1949. “Tomando te.” RCA Vıctor. [sound recording]
Granda, C. 1950. “La flor de la canela.” Sony Radio. no. 1138. Sony.
Guerra, C. D. 2015. El abrazo de la serpiente [The Embrace of the Serpent]. Madrid: Karma Films.
Haraway, D. 1995. Ciencia, cyborgs y mujeres: la reinvencion de la naturaleza. Madrid: Catedra.
Hernandez, E. 2016. “Desclasificacion.” In Los trabajos y los dıas. Antologıa, 183. Santiago de Chile:
Penguin Random House.
Jerez, J. 2018. Plantas magicas de la costa valdiviana. Valdivia, Chile: Ediciones Kultrun.
Kurnitzky, H. 1992. La estructura libidinal del dinero. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno.
Lillo, E. 1909. Himno Nacional de Chile.
Loyola, M. 2006. La tonada: Testimonios para el futuro. Chile: Ediciones PUCV.
20 ~ B O L IV A R
R . C A R R E NO

Masiello, F. 2013. El cuerpo de la voz: (poesıa, etica y cultura). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo.
Mistral, G. 1967. Poema de Chile. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Pomaire.
Neruda, P. 1977. “Oda a la papa.” In Nuevas odas elementales, 109. Buenos Aires: Losada.
Paredes Pinda, A. 2001. “Williche, poetas y poesıa. Nosotros como el sol no tenemos amanecer.” In
F€utawillimapu, 105–111. Osorno: CONADI, Universidad de Los Lagos.
Parra, N. 1982. Ecopoemas. Barcelona: Ediciones Vegueta.
Parra, V., compiler and performer 1956. “Las naranjas.” In El folclore de Chile., Vol. 1. Odeon, LP and
CD.
Paz, O. 2008. Los hijos del limo: del romanticismo a la vanguardia. Santiago de Chile: Tajamar.
Pizarro, A. 2001. “La casa y la calle: mujer y cultura en America Latina y el Caribe” In Escritoras de
nuestra America., edited by Eliana Ortega, 144–154. Santiago de Chile: Isis Internacional.
Quezada, Jaime. 2002. Bendita mi lengua sea. Diario ıntimo de Gabriela Mistral. Santiago Chile: Editorial
Planeta.
Rodrıguez, C. 2005. “Weup€ufes y machis: canon, genero y escritura en la poesıa mapuche actual.”
Estudios Filologicos 40:151–163.
Salinas, A. 2010. “Sujetos.” In Antologıa poetica de la generacion del ochenta, edited by Andres Morales, 260.
Santiago de Chile: Mago Editores.
Sanfuentes, O. 2009. Develando el nuevo mundo. Imagenes de un proceso. Santiago: Ediciones UC.
Santos, B. d. S. 2006. Conocer desde el Sur. Para una cultura polıtica emancipatoria. Lima: Fondo Editorial de
la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UNMSM Programa de Estudios sobre Democracia y Transformacion
Global.
Spivak, G. 2010. Crıtica de la razon poscolonial: hacia una historia del presente evanescente. Madrid: Akal.
Sutherland, Juan Pablo, ed. 2016. Cuerpos y hablas en la poesıa de Carmen Berenguer. Santiago: Mago.
Urriola, M. 2017. Cadaver exquisito. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio.

Rubı Carren ~ o Bolıvar is Associate Professor at the Facultad de Letras de la Pontificia

Universidad Cato lica de Chile. She has authored Av. Independencia. Literatura, mu  sica e
ideas de Chile disidente (2013), Memorias del nuevo siglo: jovenes, trabajadores y artistas
en la narrativa chilena reciente (2009) and Leche amarga: violencia y erotismo en la
narrativa chilena del siglo XX (2007). She is editor of Diamela Eltit: redes locales, redes
globales (2009) and La rueda magica: ensayos de literatura y mu  sica (2017). She is
currently editor in chief of the journal Taller de Letras. Her research examines Chilean
and Latin American literature and culture from interdisciplinary perspectives that pay
particular attention to the intersections of lettered and oral traditions, as well as high
brow and popular ones. She has been awarded the Beca de Creacio n Literaria from the
Fondo del Libro del Consejo de Cultura de Chile and the Beca de Investigacio n del
CLAS from the University of Cambridge. Email: rcarrenb@uc.cl