CHILEAN ECOCRITICISM

ANDREA CASALS

Ecocritical theory has very recently begun to receive some attention in

Chilean academia. This does not mean, however, that there has not
been a literary production that represents the relationship between society and the physical world, nor does this mean that there have not
been any academics exploring these connections. In fact, there is a long
tradition of what Jorge Tellier called
poesa de la tierra (poetry of the land) or poesa larcia (poetry of the
hearth) in 1965poetry that celebrates nature and tends to recover
sense of placeas well as a conscious production of ecopesa (ecopoetry), by antipoet Nicanor Parraironic poetry that is aligned with
the apocalyptic discourse to mention only two examples from the
second half of the twentieth century. Just as well, there have been many
poets who would not have regraded themselves as ecopoets, though
they have foregrounded the environment in their compositions.
Nonetheless, when examining the trajectory of the representation of
the natural environment in local literary productions, from a current
ecocritical perspective, categories such as novela de la tierra (novel of
the land) are not convincing given that the Latin American imaginary
of the land was framed by a European standard of progress which was
imposed over the native relationship.
Before Chile was mapped out by the Europeans, before the arrival
of the Spaniards, different ethnic groups lived upon this territory.
Among them, the Mapuche, who name themselves the people of the
land (mapu meaning land, che meaning people). The Mapuche
are the largest and most recognized native group in Chile at present,
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23.1 (Winter 2016), pp. 105110
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though they are still a minority in a country that disregards its mestizo
(mixed blood) heritage. Nonetheless, official history has ignored their
presence. By mid-twentieth century, history books in the school system
argued that there was a time when Chile was not Chile1 (Blanco 11).
This hegemonic blindness served the purposes of that major globalization impulse that harpooned the American continent as if it were a
loose-fish (Melville 476).
In 1938, however, Gabriela Mistral soundly stated that the name
Chile may be traced to the Quechua (the language of the Incas2): the
Spanish conqueror left us Chiles indigenous name . . .. According to
some, the word Chile means snow and for the Quechua it was the
name of the snowy land in the South; according to others it was an onomatopoeic word, the cry of a native bird (3536). Mistrals words reveal an awareness that escapes her contemporaries in the humanities
in the late 1930s; awareness of the native presence, but also awareness
of the layers of hybridization; the Incas before the Spaniards and the
Mapuche prior to the Incas.
Though the conqueror may have left us the name Chile, contemporary Mapuche poet Adriana Paredes Pinda asserts that by renaming
everything that already had a name, the official discourse ignored the
lineage of those who were expelled from a thousand kingdoms by
force of words (Pinda 810). This linguistic imposition has an evident
counter discourse in how the land was given away as encomiendas
(colonial grant of land) to the Spanish conquerors, totally disregarding
the prior indigenous relation with the land, organization, and culture.
After Chiles Independence from the kingdom of Spain in 1810, in the
central area of the country, this organization remained in what is
known today as latifundos (large estates). Later, the land in Southern
Chile was allotted to German settlers who would commit to make it
productive; up north, the territory was given out to mining companies
(almost exclusively British)all of these overlapping private productive activities upon native habitats. This economic perspective was
attuned with Andres Bellos 1826 Silvas Americanas, a poetic allegory
of the new illustrated Latin American nations, urging them to cultivate
the land. And so they did. From then on, as Jose Donoso proposes in
his essay Algo sobre jardines (1998), the imaginary of the native
Chilean landscapenot Mapu anymoreis associated with vineyards
and alamos (populous alba), which were introduced by the Europeans,
exalting an exotic ideal that became seamlessly naturalized upon the
native land (Casals and Chiuminatto).
According to the Chilean historian Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, from the
first written epic poem on, La Araucana (published between 1574 and
1589 by the Spanish soldier and poet Alonso de Ercilla), the landscape

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appears like a cardboard stage, the scenery tending to be represented

merely as an excuse to say something else (Jocelyn-Holt 92), ignoring
that original strata upon which this country was founded (Casals and
Chiuminatto). Though there are some poems in which the land and its
people are timidly foregrounded,3 the trajectory of the Chilean imagination of the land is one that renders an absence rather than the presence of its native peoples and their habitats.
Literary productions labeled as criolllista or regionalista refer to
the narratives developed in early twentieth century in an effort to highlight regional character and differentiate the local production from the
European canon.4 Also known as novela de la tierra which is seemingly nature oriented, academics like Paredes and McLean (in
Marrero) argue that novela de la tierra is too anthropocentric to be considered ecological writing since it systematically presents the classic dichotomy natural-barbaric-hostile to human development versus
human-civilized-pro development, highlighting the strength of the
men who dominate the wilderness and make the land productive. In
this sense, though novela de la tierra does foreground the natural environment, or rather the agrarian landscapewhich in Chile we call
campo, it does not seem sensitive to the natural environment nor is
it aligned with a mestizo (mixed blood) or indigenous perspective in
terms of environmental justice. Jonathan Tittler argues that novela de
la tierra does not even try to speak for nature, the biosphere or the planet5 (199). Nonetheless, Tittler sees in El hombre muerto by
Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga (18781937) and La epopeya de
Mo~
ni by Chilean writer Mariano Latorre (18861955), a broader perspective than that of traditional novela de la tierra because of their consistent intention to forward a comprehensive image of the land (206).
In other words, Tittler invites us to consider Latorre (and Quiroga) as a
proto-environmental author in so far as he foregrounds the natural environment, acknowledging in it an almost unlimited power to domesticate humans as opposed to traditional novela de la tierra where the wild
is domesticated by humans.6
Just like exotic flora has become naturalized in our national landscapes imagination, our official history has also ignored the native
peoples of Chile. In his memoirs, Pablo Neruda (190473) asserts that
in the dominant discourse the Mapuche were declared annihilated
(16). Either totally disregarded and ignored, presented in a fossilized
pre-Hispanic version or reduced to a productive role as campesinos
(peasants, the campo workers). This dual erasure of both the native
and even of any possible mestizo foundation, serves the modernizing
purpose to highlight a unitary national identity that is defined in hegemonic terms. Following Latorre, Chile was artificially unified from

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the capital city, Santiago7 (22), ignoring all other regions and peoples
(Casals and Chiuminatto).
Even so, recent academic explorations in ecological terms are helping to foreground writers who are sensitive to that silenced native environment, and the interconnectedness between the more-than-human
and the human. Noted senior Chilean ecocritics Mauricio Ostria and
Juan Gabriel Araya have explored Chilean poets such as Pablo
Neruda, Vicente Huidobro, and Nicanor Parra, and storytellers such as
Francisco Coloane, respectively.
In this cluster, we include an essay by Professor Ostria in which he
states that local poetry has an ecological vocation because it seamlessly reflects the authors experience of the physical world. After a descriptive presentation of Latin American ecological thought, Ostria
reflects on the poetic production of four iconic poets: Pablo Neruda,
Vicente Huidobro, Nicanor Parra, and Lionel Lienlaf. Neruda and
Lienlaf, he notes, share the ontological experience of belonging to the
southern temperate rain forests, while Nicanor Parra, in his mocking
tone, assumes the role of an ecoprophet, adopting the apocalyptic
trope, recycling any green cliche to denounce that the end of the world
is now. Ostria identifies Pablo Nerudas text Entrada en la Madera as a
threshold to conscious environmental writing in modern ecological
terms. In his essay, Ostria moves on to recognizing Mapuche
oralitudthe writing of an oral traditionwhere evidently, trees precede us and precede language as well.
Along with Ostria, we present four essays by Chilean ecocritics
who participated in a panel in August 2015 at the LASA Southern
Cone conference held in Santiago. Professor Pablo Chiuminatto traces
the pertinenceor impertinenceof applying contemporary ecological criteria on local literary production and ecological considerations in
general. Chiuminattos contribution is a metareflection that allows the
reader to ponder the broader picture of a globalized academia that
nonetheless seems to exchange conceptsNorth to Southin a fruitful, though sometimes imbalanced and thoughtless, exchange.
Postgraduate student Arnaldo Donoso presents a thoroughly in n,
formed overview of the works by Chilean intellectual Luis Oyarzu
who cultivates an ecological awareness that crystallizes in his posthumous work, a long essay called Defensa de la Tierra. Donoso argues that
 ns diaries constitute the large compost heap from which this
Oyarzu
cosmopolitan intellectual (following Ursula Heise), draws material
that merges into his ecological thought and the construction of Defensa
de la Tierra.
Doctoral candidate at University of Minnesota Eva Palma examines
contemporary Mapuche poetry from an ecocritical perspective. In her

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O T E S

1. My translation. This, and all other translations, is mine.

2. From early thirteenth century until the Spanish conquest (c. 1572), the
Inca civilization spread from the highlands of Peru to the west coast; from
what today are Ecuador and a small part of Colombia, down south to central
Chile and northwestern Argentina, including a portion of Bolivia.
3. For example, consider Eusebio Lillos Al Imperila (1864) or Augusto
Winters Fuga de los Cisnes (1927).
mez, Nan. Antologa crtica de la poesa chi4. For further reference, see No
lena. Tomo I (1996). Santiago: Lom, 2000.
sfera o
5. intenta siquiera hablar por la tierra, i.e., por la naturaleza, la bio
el planeta (Tittler 199).
n por la imagen mas amplia de la
6. debido a su constante preocupacio
gicos
tierra, estos dos textos criollistas pueden ser considerados proto-ecolo
(Tittler 206).
 artificialmente a Chile (Latorre 22).
7. Santiago unifico

O R K S

I T E D

Bello, Andres. La Agricultura de la Zona Torrida. Antologa Crtica de la

mez. Nan Santiago: Lom, 2000. 5156.
Poesa Chilena. Tomo I (1996). Ed. No
Print.
Blanco, Guillermo. Contado a Chile. Santiago: Ed. Andres Bello, 1975. Print.
Casals, Andrea and Pablo Chiuminatto. On Poetic Nature: from Land to
campo, and the Notion of mapu(revised manuscript). Transatlantic
Landscapes. Environmental Awareness, Literature and the Arts. Ed. Marrreo.
Jose Manuel Alcala: GIECO-Franklin Institute-UAH, 2016. Print.
Donoso, Jose. Algo Sobre Jardines. Artculos de Incierta Necesidad. Santiago:
Alfaguara, 1998. 129137. Print.

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essay, like Ostria, Palma argues that when connecting poetry and ecocriticism it is possible to reveal and articulate concealed memories or
world visions that integrate the human and the more-than-human
world.
Finally, Doctor in Literature, Andrea Casals argues that a distinctive
characteristic of Latin American ecological writing is the evident commitment to denounce environmental injustice. In her paper, Professor
Casals does not stop to prove Gabriela Mistral, Violeta Parra, or
Adriana Paredes Pindas ecological vocation (Ostria), but focuses in
tracing how they give a voice to the native people who claim for the
devastation of their mapu, and therefore, themselves as the people of
the land.

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Marrero, Jose Manuel. Ecocrtica e Hispanismo.Ecocrticas; Literatura y

Medio Ambiente. Eds. Flys Carmen et al. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert,
2010. 193217. Print.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick (1851). New York: Barnes and Noble Classics,
2003. Print.
Mistral, Gabriela. Caminando se Siembre. Prosa Inedita. Ed. Vargas Luis.
Santiago: Lumen, 2013. Print.
Neruda, Pablo. Confieso que he Vivido (1972). Santiago: Planeta, 1992. Print.
Santiago: Lom, 2005. Print.
Paredes Pinda, Adriana. Ui.
Tittler, Jonathan. Una Relectura Ecocrtica del Canon Criollista: Mariano
Latorre y Horacio Quiroga. Tabula Rasa 7 (2007): 197210. Web.