“Flores” as a provocative sign in the mistralian landscape of the Poem of Chile

Abstract

This article deals with the representations of flora in Gabriela Mistral’s Poema de Chile. For this purpose, the argumentation will use the theoretical category of landscape. In this regard, the analysis will focus mainly on the critical reading of the poem “Flowers” and other texts of the same book. First, the naturalistic discourse is studied mainly in the review of the interconnection between vegetal and rocky beings. Second, the pedagogical discourse is added to the naturalistic one through the part of the poem dedicated to the lullaby. Third, the articulation of the naturalistic and pedagogical is expressed at the end of the poem with the reflection on the social. The reading hypothesis argues that the representation of flowers functions as a provocative sign that allows access to a transformative vision of the negativities that afflict the invisibilized subjects: the voice of the mama-ghost configures an agency that seeks to overcome exclusions and relies on the natural landscape to do so.