Santiago, Chile, from the Mapocho River: Landscape, Border, and Waste

Abstract

‘Now my body floats over the swells of the Mapocho, my coffin navigates among the murky waters, dodging tires, branches […]. I’m traveling along a brown river. A dirty thread that carries me with ease […]’, declares the narrative voice in the first lines of Mapocho, a novel by Nona Fernández (1971), published in 2002 (Fernández 2006: 13). Specified in the novel’s title, the river here is the Mapocho, a major water landmark in Santiago, Chile. As for the mentioned thread, it denotes both something of excess, leftover or expendable, and also a woven fabric falling apart, becoming frayed and losing its threads. However, if skilfully sewn, the thread can be reincorporated into the fabric. In Mapocho, the river is also the open wound of a city that lived under dictatorship for 17 years since the river is a continuous flow of dead bodies.

This chapter, translated by Thomas Rothe, is part of Fondecyt project no. 1140881, of which I am the head researcher.