A Journey into Mapuche Memory: Self-Translation and Postmemory as a Strategy of World Literature in Liliana Ancalao's Rokiñ (2020)

Abstract

"In her ... poetry collection, Rokiñ: Provisiones para el viaje (2020), Liliana Ancalao deepens the scope of her aesthetic proposal by revisiting the history of her family as well as the larger history of the Mapuche nation, in search of a lost language and a lost memory. In her own journey of re-education and reacquisition of the interdicted language and memory of her people, Ancalao elaborates a discourse and a writing practice where self-translation and the development of postmemory go hand in hand. The post-interdiction bilingualism Ancalao has developed is the result of her personal quest for the cultural recovery and linguistic revitalization of Mapudungun in a postmonolingual context. In such a scenario, self-translation becomes a central strategy both for linguistic revitalization and for postmemorial elaboration, which structures discourse as much as the content and the sociohistorical contexts thematized in the poems. The thematic references to familial and communal memories of loss and trauma define a poetics of historical and linguistic recovery based on factual material mediated by pewma and nütram, two ancestral Mapuche practices of knowledge transmission and collective remembrance."