Territory and belonging: the experience of displacement in Mapuche women’s poetry

Abstract

The objective of the present article is to provide an analysis of current poetry written by Mapuche women in Chile from the point of view of the experience of displacement in their works. This subject is problematized by attending to the problematic meaning of “belonging” in the poems in the context of the complex territorial definitions provided by Mapuche culture and the lyrical voices. In particular, we will discuss a corpus of poems comprised of works by Maribel Mora Curriao, Juana Guayaquil Lipicheo and María Isabel Lara Millapán, highlighting the importance of the affects put in place by the authors as well as the role of poetry as a tool Mapuche women employ to propose different ways to inhabit the territory, expressing territoriality as a heterogeneous phenomenon, and allowing its emergence both as an ancestral construct as well as part of the urban space.