cecilia vicuña_Juliet Lynd

Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia VicuñaAuthor(s): Juliet LyndReviewed work(s):Source: PMLA, Vol. 120, No. 5 (Oct., 2005), pp. 1588-1607Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486270 .

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[ PMLA

Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia Vicuna

JULIET LYND

JULIET LYND is visiting assistant profes

sor of Spanish at Saint Olaf College. She

has published articles on Latin American

film and cultural studies and is at work

on a book about aesthetics, politics, and

performance in postdictatorship Chile.

Quipu que no recuerda nada.

Quipu that remembers nothing. ?Cecilia Vicuna

THE POET AND ARTIST CECILIA VICUNA WAS A PIONEER IN EXPER imental art in Chile a decade before happenings and other

genre-bending artistic displays emerged in the mid-seventies as a deliberately cryptic form of resistance to the violent military

regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973-90). By the mid-sixties Vicuna was altering landscapes, disrupting cityscapes, and mining the pre cariousness of language to produce new forms of socially engaged art. The abstract designs she traced on the beach at Con-con in 1966

(where the Aconcagua River meets the Pacific Ocean [fig. 1]), for

instance, were earthworks avant la lettre, but their evocation of an

indigenous aesthetic combined with the impermanence of the piece (the marks were washed away by the tide, and only photographs re

main) made palpable the loss of a disappeared civilization.1 The im

perative of incorporating indigenous notions of art, nature, and the

sacred into a nonmimetic, neovanguard artistic practice became a

core tenet of the Tribu No 'No Tribe,' which Vicuna would later found

with her friends. This group of poets and artists pledged deference

toward the indigenous (hence the creation of a "tribe") and opposi tion to anything perceived as dominant (i.e., capitalist, bourgeois, criollo) culture.2 Full of youthful idealism but not immune to ideo

logical contradictions, the No Tribe's challenge to everything vaguely

The images on pages 1589, 1595, 1597, and 1599-1603 are reproduced by permission of Ceci

lia Vicuna.

I588 ? 2005 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA



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1590 Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia Vicuna PMLA

dominant might seem incompatible with their

unquestioning support of Salvador Allende's

Unidad Popular project. At the very least, it is

simply in line with the "tradition of rupture" Octavio Paz associates with a long-standing questioning of modernity that can be traced

through European poets such as Friedrich

Holderlin, Arthur Rimbaud, and Andre

Breton (Bianchi, Memoria 247). But Vicuna's earliest art interventions also posit a compati

bility between leftist politics and postmodern ist, deconstructionist art. And although the

Tribu fell apart after the coup?Vicuna found

herself caught in London and unable to return

to Chile?she has continued to experiment in

and between various genres and to find new

ways to incorporate references to indigenous aesthetics into her social critiques. In her

poetry, performance, sculpture, film, instal

lation art, theater, painting, essays, and hap

penings, she draws sharp parallels between

the constructed nature of formal categories of

creative production and those that determine

social hierarchies. References to Chile never

entirely disappear from her work in exile, and

the Chilean situation will become a metaphor for the global dynamics of power that subor

dinate the south to the north and the indig enous to the criollo in the Americas. Her art

and poetry invite a rethinking of those con

nections in terms of an interrogation of the

ways in which global cultural memory is con

structed and a politics of hope is forged.3

quipOem, published in 1997 as a ret

rospective of the artist-poet's work for an

English-speaking audience,4 combines poems,

photographs, and documentation, both visual

and narrative, of her aesthetic responses to a

thirty-year history of struggle with dictator

ship and democracy?in Chile and through out the Americas. Vicuna's work reflects the

idealism of the rise of socialism during the

Allende years in Chile, the violence of Pino

chet's military regime, the pain of exile, and

the reconceptualization of struggles for social

justice after the return to democracy.5 The

book includes examples of her early poetry and performances with the Tribu No, photo

graphs of her installations and street art, and

visual poems whose meaning derives from the

play of the words with their image on the page. Yet the collection as a whole does more than

present the trajectory of the artist's work; the

re-presentation of her precarious texts?sculp

tures, poems, and performances whose transi

tory nature is designed to reflect the fragility of life and its historical circumstances?re

members and rearticulates the Utopian impe tus of her earlier works. quipOem therefore not only revisits the past, it also rethinks the

revolutionary ideals of bygone eras in terms

relevant to the contemporary challenges of a

democratic society still plagued by the persis tence of rigid social hierarchies, and it posits the poem as a vehicle for doing so.

Throughout the collection, Vicuna's art

and poetry refer to the rich visual symbolism of the fiber arts that continue to be an integral part of contemporary indigenous traditions in the Andean world and throughout much of

the Americas. Far from a mere celebration of

the beauty of indigenous aesthetics, her refer ences to weaving evoke the subordinated yet

persistent cultural practices of Amerindian communities. The writing of poetry finds

parallels in the semiotics of weaving, a textile

textual practice that alludes to the unspo ken, unwritten stories of women and of the

indigenous. Feminist scholars have likened

weaving, a devalued form of textuality, to

language, interpreting it as a blank page that

contains the untold story of women.6 Weav

ing thus effectively references the strength of material cultural practices resistant to the

forces of modernization, even while connot

ing the silencing of Amerindian voices.

If weaving alludes to the persistent pres ence of other forms of cultural production in

the Americas, the poet's creative use of ref

erences to the quipu points to the multiple cultural erasures suffered throughout the

continent. The neologism of the title?qui



i 2 o . 5 1 Juliet LYnd x59i

poem?suggests a fusion of poetry with the

lost art of the quipu, a pre-Hispanic form of

abstract encoding involving elaborate systems of knots on colored strings.7 Although quipus still have a ritual function in some Andean

communities,8 the use of them for recording statistical as well as narrative information has

been lost to the processes of colonization. It is

true that after the conquest quipus continued

to be used for recording some accounting in

formation in the Spanish colonial bureaucracy, and indeed Spaniards were fascinated with

the cord-based system, yet quipu making did

not survive as a means of representation. As

Walter Mignolo explains, quipus, along with

other nonalphabetic forms of "writing," such as Mesoamerican hieroglyphs, were devalued

by sixteenth-century Europeans in favor of

alphabetic text, which quickly established its

authority in the New World. Contemporary scholars have made significant advances to

ward the decoding of the quipu: numbers can

be read on quipus containing statistical infor

mation, and recently Gary Urton provocatively

explored the idea that quipus were produced

using a binary code similar to that of comput ers. Debates flourish as to whether quipus were

mnemonic devices that served only their mak ers or sophisticated systems of representation shared by a community of "readers." What is

certain is that the quipu presents a mystery for

the Western imagination and a cultural loss for the subordinated indigenous world. As

part of the contemporary social imaginary, then, quipus connote an irrecoverably lost way of life, and as a constitutive element of Vicu

na's poetry, they represent at once the desire to know the precolonial past and the aporia of

memory in the postcolonial world.9

It is striking that in a collection directed

toward an English-speaking North American

audience Vicuna refers primarily to Andean

cultural forms and specifically to the Inca

empire, with its mystery-shrouded quipus and ceqe, the sight lines radiating out from the capital, Cuzco (located in contemporary

Peru). On the one hand, her work taps into the

cultural memory of the indigenous through out the Americas, from southern Chile (where the Mapuche were not "pacified" until the late

nineteenth century, well after the establish

ment of independence) to northern Maine?

although it can hardly be stated that quipOem presents for its audience any direct explana tion of the plight of the indigenous or of con

temporary Amerindian political and cultural

movements, in Chile or anywhere else. On

the other hand, Vicuna's poetry, while clearly

identifying with the marginalized, builds on

the illustrious tradition of poets such as Pablo

Neruda or Ernesto Cardenal, whose cantos

write the silenced voices of the indigenous into

the history of the Americas. In her personal and professional lives, Vicuna has lived with

and worked for indigenous communities in

South America, and she is actively involved in

the promotion of Mapuche literature not only in Chile but in the United States as well.10 Yet

her use of weaving and references to the quipu in her poetry are remarkably removed from

the sociopolitical realities of the marginalized communities represented. The appropriation of indigenous aesthetics in her work, however, makes the indigenous voice a palpable ab

sence; the semiotics of the poetic text posits the ambiguous presence of Amerindian imag ery as traces of a subordinated reality and as

evidence of the possibility of imagining social

relations in an entirely different way. Further

more, the concept of precariousness, in which her work is grounded, reveals a self-conscious

ness of the fleeting nature of identification with radically other cultures, both past and

contemporary, and establishes the represen tation of otherness as a materialization?in

art, in poetry, and especially in the interpre tive locus of the in-between space posited in

this visually provocative collection?of the desire to tap into a different imagining and

constructing of society. Given quipOetns North American au

dience, it is notable that Vicuna chooses to




reference the Inca empire?and not the Ma

yan or Aztec civilizations?to represent alter native social realities. As Jeffrey Quilter points out in his preface to a collection of articles on

contemporary quipu studies, the Inca culture

has not had the same appeal for North Ameri

can and European scholars as the Mesoameri

can cultures. Whereas the exotic hieroglyphs buried in the Central American jungles have

spurred Western romantic sensibilities, the more tactile, nonpictographic quipus are less

obviously representational (xiv-xv). Quilter also points out that "[s]cholars of the Inka

have too long been caught up in debates as to

whether the Inka Empire was the ideal social

ist state or the worst example of fascism ..."

(xv), yet another way in which the precolonial

past is the recipient of postcolonial projec tions hardly devoid of ideological bias. Vicu

na's work conjures up all these connotations.

Yet her precarious aesthetics avoids imposing any one interpretation on the past (or on con

temporary indigenous cultures as alternative

communities); instead, it utilizes the exoticism

of indigenous aesthetics to trigger the imagi nation and invite the possibility of forging a

Utopian alternative to the social hierarchies

constructed throughout the Americas as a re

sult of colonialism as well as of dictatorship and contemporary neoliberal globalization.11

The precarious aesthetic is for Vicuna the

vehicle for attaining an open-ended mode of

representation that denies fixed meanings and privileges creative connections, position

ing the ephemeral as a gesture of hope against

hegemonic discourses of power. In quipOem, however, the re-presentation of the trajectory of her work through Chile's recent history of

dictatorship and democracy reveals the com

plexity of her interpolation of indigenous aesthetics into her precarious poetics. From

her earliest interventions on the streets of

Santiago, Vicuna has utilized the concept of

precariousness to rethink ways of recording

(re-cording) the memory of violent, traumatic

collective histories through representational

strategies that refuse to promote a facile and

illusory identification with the marginalized other. The reproduction of texts produced in a particular historical moment invites a

double reading: quipOem repositions works

produced in support of the socialist revolu tion or in opposition to military rule to the

context of redemocratization and the hege mony of a neoliberal globalism that divides

north and south, dominant and marginal ized. The book thereby reveals a changing conception of the political potential of art in

the cultural logic of late capitalism.12 Vicuna's use of form to explore the challenges inherent

in any attempt to represent otherness without

speaking for the other suggests an opposi tional politics that relies on a poststructural ist understanding of language and a refusal of

metanarratives (such as Marxism); her poli tics invites contemplation of the articulations

between hierarchizing logics of otherness on

the basis of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. In her texts, the privileging of deconstruction

and the negotiation of meaning work to cre

ate an alternative logic by which poetry and

performance can break down the illusions of

coherence provided by seamless narratives.

The aesthetic thereby becomes an alternative

way of imagining interrelations among hu man beings and across lines of otherness.

Whereas the deployment of difference in

Vicuna's early work constituted a disruptive force to challenge the hegemony of classist,

racist, and sexist discourses and so change the

world, her stake in the revolutionary poten tial of the aesthetic is ultimately replaced by a revised notion of the transformative power of art. The precariously constructed texts in

cluded in her Sabor a mi (1973), written as al

legories of hope during Allende's tenure but

published as one of the earliest cries of protest in the immediate aftermath of the coup, are

rendered allegories of defeat by the changed historical circumstances. Ten years later, Precario/Precarious recontextualizes many

of the earlier works and resuscitates them as




allegories of hope and memories of an alter

native consciousness?largely based in indig enous systems of belief and constructed as a

critique of the dictatorship. However, in the

postdictatorship terrain of a debilitated left?

of a postutopian world of late capitalism in

general?the deconstructive power of repre

senting alterity becomes not a way to imagine a different world but rather a different way to

imagine the world.

On the first page of quip0em, one finds

(the reproduction of) a thin handwritten

line that starts out moving straight across

the page, just below the center. The line is in

terrupted after a couple of inches by a typed

phrase, "the quipu that remembers nothing, an empty cord," and then the pen's etching continues, making a few small squiggles?as if it were a string. As it marks its way across

the otherwise blank white page, the deviations

from the line spell out "is the core." The last

letter hits the edge of the page, and the next

page picks the line up. It barely progresses a

centimeter before it is again interrupted by

typescript writing: "the heart of memory." The line starts up again and dead-ends at the

fold in the center of the book, where begins a photograph of abstract designs traced on a

beach. Below the photograph are the words "the earth, listening to us" and the caption "Con-con, Chile, 1966" (fig. I).13 This four

page visual poem represents the same fusion

of weaving and writing, Incan and European systems of representation, that can be dis cerned in the title quipOem.

"Quipu que no recuerda nada" 'Quipu that remembers nothing' was one of Vicuna's

earliest poems, written to accompany one

of her first precarious sculptures. Taking a

string and tying knots in it, the artist created a replica of a quipu. Her quipu might have looked like an Incan quipu, but as her poem reminds its reader, it can be no more than an

aesthetic object, torn from its no longer exis tent functional context. The irony of the piece is that for the viewer with no knowledge of

this forgotten system of representation, Vicu

na's quipu is indiscernible from any other: the

objects remain, but the system of which they once formed an integral part has disappeared. The reinvented quipu does not so much sug

gest a desire to recuperate that lost code as

it signals the emptiness of the traces of the

forgotten and unknowable. Vicuna's quipu is an exact repetition of form that is conceptu

ally entirely different; it can be read but never

like the original. Unlike Gilles Deleuze's af

firmation of the liberating potential of such

recognition, there is a strain of nostalgia in

Vicuna's early poem. The later reworking of

the verse as a visual poem, however, seems to

shed this backward-looking gaze at history and embrace a different conceptualization of

the quipu: it is a relic that cannot remember

the past but that in the present indicates a dif

ferent way of representing memory.

Reproduced in 1997 as a visual poem, however, the verse is inscribed in an ink rep resentation of a cord; the artist-poet is no

longer content to juxtapose the poem with

the piece. Even the inscription on the page evokes the etymological relation between

language and string, text and textile, specifi

cally between written representation and the

threads of memory. The piece affirms that

writing now has the authority that the quipu once had in the structuring of memory, but the alphabetic text lacks the visual, tactile, and spatial dimensions of older forms of en

coding memory, of representing the past. The

poem plays on the paradoxical simultaneity of

presence and absence: by signaling the lack of

memory, it enacts memory, but the memory is the trace of an absence, the consciousness

of something irrecoverably disappeared. The 1997 visual version works to fuse the written text with images in a reinvention?not a re

cuperation?of the lost Andean way of think

ing, imagining, and representing the world.

Mignolo provides a thorough historical examination of the consequences for the New

World of the privileging of the alphabetic text




during the Renaissance. Other systems of ma

terial, visual representation?from quipus to

hieroglyphics to indigenous forms of cartog

raphy?were devalued, subsumed under the

ultimate authority of the written word. Angel Rama traces the consequences of this power inscribed in the written text, explaining how

literacy has determined access to power, how written documents (from laws to property deeds to maps) have imposed one order on

another: European over indigenous and the

masculine over the feminine.14 Literary insti

tutions are not exempt from this relation, as

accusations of elitism can always be leveled

by critics unconvinced that literature can

work against an entrenched system of power. Such accusations may be particularly appro

priate when a literary text indulges in opaque

manipulations of language that are difficult to interpret and constitute a cultural prac tice not frequently engaged in popular sec

tors, but, more basically, literature excludes

the illiterate. Nevertheless, in "the quipu that remembers nothing," Vicuna?follow

ing, of course, a long and weighty tradition

of asserting the transformative potential of

the literary text, despite and because of its

opacity?maintains that alphabetic writing can indeed reconstruct cultural memory in

ways that function as an antidote to official

memory, both in content and in form. In

quipOem, the poet experiments with visual

poetry in conjunction with photographs, of

Chile and of her art, to infuse writing with

the dynamism of visuality. This first poem of the collection not only

reworks an earlier poem, it also literally col

lides with the memory of another piece, the

1966 earthwork at Con-con.15 The quipu

penned line or string ends in the book's

crease, precisely where the photograph from

Con-con begins. Vicuna used the photograph before to recall her disappeared precarios: Sa

bor a mi and Precario/Precarious position the

images as memory traces of an art practice

whose revolutionary intentions were shat

tered after the 1973 coup. Indeed, the docu mentation of the "precarious" texts (see fig. 2

for an example of one of the early precarios

[q.41]) would seem on some level to contra

dict the spirit of the works themselves, for if

the novelty of the precarious is derived from

the foregrounding of its impermanence, then the photograph counteracts that by making it a permanent object of aesthetic contempla tion. Certainly works like Sabor a mi appear to cling to the memory of art once executed in a different time and place, as if to recap ture the moment and mourn the loss not so

much of the work of art as of its conditions of

possibility. At the moment of the photograph, the precarious work represents an offering of

revolutionary hope, but whereas the photo

graphs in Sabor a mi protest against erasure, in Precario they document those works that

exist(ed) outside the text and invite con

templation of their temporality. As Roland

Barthes has stated, "The Photograph does

not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a

photograph). The effect it produces upon me

is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see

has indeed existed" (82). The photograph is

never an exact repetition of the original refer

ent; rather, the photograph elicits the strange

experience of the "anterior future" (96), the

sensation that what is shown in the picture exists in the present along with the knowl

edge of or the wondering about what will have

happened and the certainty that the referent no longer exists, that in the present of the pic ture it is going to die. So the photograph, if

considered in the light of Barthes's analysis of

the incommensurable experience of seeing it

instead of its referent, is in a sense as precari ous as the doomed object.

In quipOem as well, the picture of the

long-gone, precarious artwork evokes the

threefold sensation of what certainly existed, what no longer exists, and what is seen now

as a replica after the original work of art has

ceased to exist. But in this first text presented




in the book, the photograph is visually integrated into the

poem, physically connected to

verbal images of the simulta neous presence and absence of

memory. The verse "the heart of

memory" is linked by the line/

string to the verbal image of the

quipu that remembers nothing and the photographic docu

mentation of designs traced on

a beach thirty-one years before

the publication of the book. The

last line of the poem, "the earth,

listening to us," comes below

the photograph, thus placing the image in the center of the

poem. The contrast established in the first two verses, between a lack of memory and the heart

of it, suggests that memory is in

fact constructed on what can

not be articulated, on what is

forgotten, on what once existed

but cannot be faithfully re

membered because it no longer exists?except as memory. This

visual poem, then, foregrounds the theoretical underpinnings of the construction of memory and reminds the reader/viewer

that consciousness of the pres ent is a constant renegotiation with the oblivion of the past. The visual remnants of a pre colonial history testify to a vio

lent past that has been erased

but not forgotten. The poem does not look to an essentialized indigenous culture to oppose postcolonial power; rather, it invites the reader to imagine other loci of

enunciation, to reimagine the interconnect

edness between self and other, between hu man beings and the earth "listening to us."

In the documents section at the end of

quipOem, Vicuna includes a written state

1

Weft of incense sticks: maximum fragility

against maximum power.

ment of hers from New York, 1989, which

returns to the issues of writing, history, and

memory by alluding to the nondocumenta

tion of precarious works:

The first precarious works were not docu

mented, they existed only for the memories

of a few citizens.

Fig. 2

London, 1973.

Photograph by

Nicholas Battye.




History, as a fabric of inclusion and exclusion,

did not embrace them.

(The history of the north excludes that of the

south, and the history of the south excludes

itself, embracing only the north's reflec

tions.)

In the void between the two, the precarious and its non-documentation established their

non-place as another reality. (q.135)

The poet thus gives another reading of the

tension between the precariousness of the

work and the permanence (or permanent pre cariousness) of the documentation, locating the importance of the photographs in rela

tion to the very writing of the history, specifi

cally the history of neocolonial relations and

the integration of Chile and the rest of Latin

America into a United States-dominated

global system. The poem suggests that to doc

ument the works is to rethink what history includes and excludes and to expose the pat tern of inclusion and exclusion inherent in the

historical text. The process is bound up in the

dynamic of power between North and South

America, between the so-called global north

and global south.16 The precarious works de

signed to disappear are associated with what

the south excludes from its own history as it

embraces foreign models. The documenta

tion of the works, then, incorporates those

silenced voices, at least metaphorically, into a

reinscribing of the history of the south.

This reflection on memory initiated in the

first pages is predicated on a specific reference

to the artist's earlier conceptual art and thus

introduces the autobiographical element of

the book. quipOem follows the trajectory of

Vicuna's artistic career, focusing primarily on

her conceptual works, the evidence of which

exists only in photographs and personal ac

counts. These images and narrative explana tions are interspersed, as noted above, with

poems. As we follow this re-presentation of

Vicuna's history as an artist, it is striking to

note that the first third of the book is dedi

cated to work created before or during 1973,

including photographs and brief narrative ex

planations of happenings and performances carried out with the Tribu No and a presen tation of the "diary of objects" that appeared in Sabor a mi as one-time gestures of support for the Unidad Popular, rendered allegories of

defeat in the aftermath of the coup. The re

contextualization of these works, nearly three

decades after their initial production, again transforms what was initially a direct inter

vention into historical commentary on the

limitations of the socialist project for think

ing through the challenges of difference.

The texts that once were chaotically pre sented as a "howl of pain"17 in Sabor a mi now

reappear in conjunction with the works of the

Tribu No that were carried out "in support of

the revolution" but whose distance from the

Allende project is now patently clear. Vicuna

recounts, for example, that she "proposed a

day of the seed to Salvador Allende: seedbeds

greening the rooftops and squares into for

ests and gardens, cities and fields into edens.

Allende laughed and said pensively: 'maybe

by the year two thousand'" (q.28). A few

pages later, she reports having passed along to the former socialist president, "through a common friend," her "proposal to create

a Bank of Ideas, to collect and carry out the

best ideas in the country. Allende laughed and said: 'Chile isn't ready.'" Vicuna's ideas

of cultural transformation and radical de

mocracy are here presented not as a critique of Allende, precisely, but as a memory of the

distance between the radical dimension of her

thinking?the possibility of which she readily attributes to the "Chile of that time"?and the

more pragmatic but also more limited vision

of the Unidad Popular project (q.33).

Adjacent to her comments on the bank

of ideas, Vicuna has included two black-and

white photographs of the "Chile of that time": on the top half of the page is an image of a

sprawling shantytown; below is a picture of

thousands flocking to the street, presumably




a rally of support for the Unidad Popular. The

suggestion is clear: the multitudes in the street

in the second picture are the invisible inhab itants of the shacks piled up between the city and the mountains in the first (there are no

discernible human figures in the top photo

graph). The image ratifies the existence of this

history, and it does so, according to Barthes, more than any other form: "No writing can

give me this certainty [of the existence of the referent in a photograph]. It is the misfortune

(but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of

language not to be able to authenticate itself"

(86-87). Vicuna pushes the limits even of this

affirmation of the photograph's relation to

history by presenting pictures with no cap tion, no explanation other than by juxtaposi tion with other texts. The shantytown could

be anywhere (with mountains) at any time in history since massive urbanization; the

throngs in the street could be in any place that

has broad avenues and nineteenth-century architecture (no signs or posters are vis

ible; no landmarks locate the demonstration

temporally or geographically). The viewer is

forced to deduce, from the aesthetic projects

surrounding the photographs, the obstinate

reminder of a Chile of another era; the sug

gestion remains as well that Chile's struggles with poverty and protest are not unique.

Following the book's exposition of Vicu

na's 1973 objects of resistance, the reader turns

the page to find a two-page spread of two pho

tographs without commentary, both of which are simply identified as "Chile, 1973" (q.46-47;

fig. 3).18 On the left, people are lined up along a dirt road bordered by small, impoverished houses with tin roofs; in the foreground, two

young boys entertain themselves with a game of cat's cradle. On the right, an armed soldier

crouches down in front of a man behind a

wire fence; the apparently imprisoned man

is reaching under the wire barricade and to

ward the guard, who seems about to hand him

something. Others behind the fence also ap

pear to search for something on the ground. The ambiguity in both photographs is strik

ing. The left-hand image studiously shows

poverty and highlights a desolate landscape, but we do not know what people are waiting in line for, or even if it is before or after the

fateful September 11 of 1973, when a dramatic

coup d'etat brought Pinochet to power. Fur

thermore, the boys playing with the string are the focus of the image: caught up in the

pattern of the string intertwined around their

fingers (which echoes the motif of weaving

throughout the book),19 the boys are oblivious to their surroundings, although the adults in

the background look at them?or is it at the

camera? Either way, a tension is created be tween the self-absorption of the boys and the

endless line of poverty behind them. On the

opposite page, the apparently candid shot of

the guard and the man reaching out from be

hind the fence is compositionally balanced. Fig. 3

Chile, 1973.

. ...... ... ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~




The guard's rifle points directly at the man, but it seems temporarily forgotten. Despite the possible momentary lapse of the dehu

manized connection between guard and pris oner, the disproportionate relation of power is

inevitable, and it dominates the scene.

The photographs, positioned side by side,

suggest one long image (each has the same

top and bottom margins of white space, and

each stretches from the edge of the page to the crease of the book). The photograph on the left is cropped in such a way that the pattern of

the clothing of the person cut off on the right

edge blends with the shades of gray on the left

edge of the other image. A continuity between

the two images is thus suggested, compound

ing the ambiguity of their referents. At first

glance, the people standing in line on the left seem to join the men behind the fence on the

right. Both photographs evoke the harsh re

alities of "Chile, 1973," and any redemptive human ability to overcome miserable circum

stances (through a distracting game, through

momentary cooperation between prisoner and guard) is subsumed by the violence of

the scenes. When placed in the midst of an

exposition of Vicuna's art and poetry, these

photographs demand both an active viewer to

renarrate the memories exposed by the refer

ents and a contextualization of the artist-poet's work around the ambiguity of this historical

grounding. "Chile, 1973" contains the last

pictures in the book that document anything other than Vicuna's work. The conspicuous absence of any reference to a third historical

period (e.g., of transition to democracy) em

phasizes the importance of remembering and

retelling the history of dictatorship. These photographs of Chile are by no

means the dominant images in quipOem. By far, most are of Vicuna's art?some pieces

produced in Chile and many others elsewhere

throughout the Americas. This includes im

ages of her sculptures (figs. 4-5 [q.81, q.76]), her public weavings (fig. 6 [q.114-15]),20 her

museum installations, and her transforma

tions of New York City street scenes, many of

which revolve around an ecological discourse

that calls attention to the easy flow of trash in

the urban environment. So the photographs of Chile are juxtaposed to an art practice that is carried out throughout the Americas and is

relevant in these multiple contexts. That rele vance is underscored by the constant naming of places, from the beaches of southern Chile to those of northern Maine, passing through Santiago, Bogota, and New York and nearly

always referencing the remote cultures of the

Andes. The poet-artist's reminders of the vio

lent events of Chile's recent history must be

understood as much more than a personal reference, an autobiographical basis of her

work. The interconnectedness of the images in the book suggests that the photographs of

Chile ground the work as a whole, standing as metaphors for the historical shifts in power that operate throughout the Americas and

that Vicuna's art has consistently opposed. The unresolved memories of the dictatorship thus not only remind the reader of the exiled

realities of the artist, they also constitute a

political framework in which to read the rest

of the pieces and from which reverberate the

larger dynamics of power in the Americas.

The overarching concern with mining

other cultural systems of representation for

ways to reenvision the subject's relation to

otherness is thoroughly articulated in the

poem "Ceq'e" (q.110). The author succinctly defines the indigenous concept of the ceqe for the reader in the documents section of

the book: "Ceqe: Line (Quechua). The Inca's

astronomical and ritual calendar. The ceqe were a virtual quipu of sight lines radiating out from Cuzco, invisible lines whose 'knots'

were the waka, sacred sites, stones and tem

ples used as markers for astronomical obser

vation" (q.138). Below the title is an epigraph

by the Holocaust survivor and poet of the

Jewish diaspora Paul Celan: "Thread Suns /

'there are still songs to be sung on the other

side / of mankind.'" As Vicuna has done in




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i6oo Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia Vicuna PMLA

Fig. 5 The Mummy's Skirt,

1987. Photograph by

Cesar Paternosto.

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other works, she draws on another author to

resemanticize the images she uses (here, light and thread, but also the desire to imagine

impossible perspectives from which to create

verse). Below the epigraph is the first verse, written conventionally across the page: "The

ceq'e is not a line, it is an instant, a gaze." This line (which ends with a comma) at once

stands alone on the page and introduces the rest of the poem, which is displayed visually as nine lines radiating out from a central void

of white space (fig. 7). The image itself sug

gests ceqe lines or the

form of a quipu or

possibly a sun (in ref erence to the Celan

verse), although the

rays or threads do not

reach around to form a complete circle; they leave a gap at the top.

Ceqe and quipus are the primary ref erents for the image created by the layout of the poem. The title

evokes the Incan sight lines emerging from

Cuzco, and the word

quipu in the first/last

lines of the visual

poem suggests the An

dean representational

strings. (Additionally, the glossary confirms

the conceptual con

nection between the

ceqe and the quipu.) The page is filled with lines and circles, creat

ing a tension between

the linearity imposed

by the alphabetic text

and the multidirec

tionality the visual

image invites. In ac

cordance with the

first verse ("The ceq'e is not a line, it is an

instant, a gaze"), each

line must be thought of as an instant, as the




II' I (.rtdt. %SBtl vfoodol ('hl, 19<i4

momentary instantiation of a gaze. On the op

posite page, an uncaptioned color photograph of a person's hand tangled up with red, orange, and yellow strings (a thread sun?) creates lines

that radiate outward but that also crisscross, as the sunlight casts dark shadow lines that are insubstantial yet as visible as the threads

in the photograph?thereby emphasizing the

role of perspective in any determination of a

given pattern (fig. 8 [q.lll]). The verses arranged like a quipu read as

follows (or would read this way if they were

not placed in a pattern on the page):

A mental quipu to measure and mediate

a thought, radiating an earthly sun

another meridian

seen from above

The last three verses (or the first three, if one

reads the quipu from right to left?and there is no reason not to, since the visual poem sheds

its entrenchment in reading conventions as

much as possible) read, starting at the top:

a quipu that is not times ritual measure

or from below

The verses "seen from above" and "or from

below" flow together grammatically in ei

ther order in which they are read, a signifi cant point because they are set off from each

other by type in opposite directions. Conven

tional reading practices, bent to conform to

the shape of the poem on the page, come up

against their limit here: since there is no one

way to read the poem, multiple poems are

created, all of which are valid.

Fig. 6

The Corral Grid, San

Fernando, Chile,

1994. Photograph by

Cesar Paternosto.




Fig. 7 ? Ceq'e

Thread Suns

"there are

still songs to be sung on the other side

of mankind"

? Paul Ceian

The ceq'e is not a line, it is an instant, a gaze,

to Measure anJ and

me<fiate a quipu that is not

|r *




Fig. 8

Photograph by Cesar

Paternosto.




This simultaneity seems to be the central

idea of the "mental quipu" or the "quipu that is not." The nonexistent quipu is a mental ex

ercise; its purpose is "to measure and mediate

/ a thought" but from multiple perspectives. The poem, thanks to its multidirectionality, at once suggests that "another meridian" is a metaphor for the mental quipu, that either

the meridian or the quipu is "seen from above

/ or from below / time's ritual measure" or

"that a quipu that is not / time's ritual mea

sure / or from below" is also "seen from above

/ another meridian." The thought circulates

around another horizon, perhaps "on the

other side / of mankind." The poem therefore

proposes an endless adjusting of perspective, a reevaluation of the gaze. The metaphor of

the ceqe (or of the quipu) grounds the notion

of imagining other ways of thinking in his

torical reality: the quipu and the ceqe, today devoid of memory, once existed as part of an

entirely other system, not on the other side

of mankind but indeed on the other side of

American history, a side that came before

inscription in the alphabetic texts of official

memory written by the victors?by those who

have had the luxury to forget.21

quipOem, following the course of the

artist-poet from her youth in Chile through her revolutionary art for the socialist cause,

through her art in protest of the dictatorship, and through the broadening of her meta

phors forged in exile, is thus an autobiogra

phy of Vicuna's career (to 1997), but it also

rethinks and recontextualizes her work as

an experiment in rethinking visual modes of

representing memory. The poet's knowledge of Native American cultures is mined for new

metaphors, while references to the indigenous

simultaneously decry the injustice of the cul

tural forgetting of a violent history and call

to memory that destruction. The reinscrip tion of memory?Vicuna's personal history as told through the trajectory of her career

in quipOem as well as the collective history of Chile specifically and of the Americas gen

erally?is proposed as a dynamic and open

process, always at the mercy of renegotiation. This is Vicuna's aesthetic solution for her

nation's troubled and troubling memories of

dictatorship and its unresolved relation to its

brutally produced diaspora. Her work places the aesthetic at the service of reexamining the

Americas' history of repression, destruction, and marginalization, re-membering hierar

chical power relations across the marks of

otherness and difference, and negotiating a

global cultural memory with which to forge a more democratic world.

Notes 1 Soledad Bianchi states, of Vicuna's early sculptures

and inscriptions on the landscape, "It is almost certain

that these were the first samplings of conceptual and land

art in Chile" ("Pasaron" 92; my trans.). 2 My description of the Tribu No is based on com

ments by Vicuna's fellow No artist Claudio Bertoni,

quoted in Bianchi's La memoria (150). A rather lengthy

chapter of this book is devoted to the infrequently dis

cussed Tribu No, but Bianchi explains the formation of

the group more succinctly in her article "Pasaron desde

aquel ayer . ..," (a study that, incidentally, constitutes

the first academic attempt to analyze Vicuna's work in

its entirety). Bianchi notes that the group was formed by three couples, all around twenty years old (Vicuna was

nineteen), and that the members came from different

branches of the university: art, architecture, engineer

ing, English, theater, and philosophy. Their common in

terests, besides a generalized countercultural stance and

a commitment to (neo)vanguard and public art, ranged from jazz and soul music to van Gogh and surrealism,

from Andre Breton's surrealist Nadja to the Mayan sto

ries recorded in the Chilam Balam to the Nueva Narra

tiva and the Nuevo Cine then shaking up Latin American

aesthetics and politics. Although the group was marginal to other, better-known cultural organizations of the time,

such as Trilce or Aruspice, the Tribu No, Bianchi points

out, is no less representative of the tumultuous era and

the idealism of its youth, and she observes that Vicuna's

texts (poetic and otherwise) were among the most inno

vative of the time. 3

I use the term "cultural memory" here in the dy namic sense of a body of knowledge about the past and

the present that is in constant renegotiation. "Global" is

added here to stress the circulation of Vicuna's discourses



i 2 o. 5 Juliet Lynd 1605

throughout Europe and the Americas and the relevance

they take on in those contexts, especially where there

is a shared history of extermination and colonization

of the indigenous. There is also a sense of how cultural

memory engages such issues as the human and environ

mental trade-offs made for the expansion of global capi tal. Nelly Richard describes the imperative of actively

exercising memory in South America: "The exercise of

memory serves to denounce the maneuvers, fabricated

daily by passive forgetfulness and indifference, that erase

traces. Exercising memory serves as well to reanimate

the apparently vanquished remains of a past full of bro

ken symbols, ideological fractures, Utopian remnants of

a historicity that, nevertheless, can still be reimagined

through the desire to shake off the monotony of this

present, which has been routinized by a technocracy of

experts. Some of these exercises of memory take the?

combative?form of public denunciation by the relatives

of the disappeared who persist in their obstinate and

unconditional search for justice. Others take up the his

torical disaster to contrast the expressive fragility of its

traces with the instability of the technological landscape made of hard, immaterial screens. At the same time, crit

ical thought reelaborates new conceptual images on the

basis of the accidental materials of a history whose vul

nerability seems nothing like the optimistic flow of the

unlimited circulation of merchandise that global capital ism puts on parade" (11; my trans.). Richard's comments

refer specifically to the importance of remembering mili

tary violence and challenging the silencing forgetfulness of the transition. Vicuna posits that violence as tragically and traumatically symptomatic of the founding violence

of a global social order. 4 quipOem is only half the book. Flipping it vertically,

one finds The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia

Vicuna (de Zegher), a collection of academic essays and

an interview with Vicuna. The articles and the interview

all situate the artist-poet between vanguard movements

of Europe and the Americas and Andean traditions. 5 Colonial history unites much of the continent in

a shared collective experience, but it should also be

noted that the coupling of authoritarian regimes with

integration into the global economy through neoliberal

economic policy?which has been perpetuated by demo

cratically elected governments as well?marks the history of much of the Americas. See Idelbar Avelar's discussion

of the problem of memory in the wake of the shift from

the authority of the state to that of the market imposed

throughout South America by dictatorial violence. His

work builds on that of sociologists and other cultural

critics studying redemocratization to suggest not only that this transition to neoliberalism has been more con

sequential than the so-called transition to democracy but

also that much postdictatorship cultural production on

the left can be read as an expression of mourning of the

defeat of leftist politics. Although his study does not in

elude Vicuna, clearly the themes of memory and mourn

ing are prevalent in her work. 6

See particularly Susan Gubar's "The Blank Page." The practice of weaving?by silenced women such as

Penelope?in Greek mythology also has conjured up Western feminist uses of the trope (see Klindienst); yet as

Maria Damon points out, these literary appropriations of

weaving are still distant from the material labor of poor women engaged in the needle arts, from Appalachia to

Third World sweatshops. Vicuna appeals to the etymo

logical origins of textuality in the textile arts practiced

by women throughout the globe and since a time before

the origins of writing. Nevertheless, her work does evoke

the contemporary plight of weavers who are silenced by the cultural legacies of colonialism.

' Quipu is the Hispanic (as well as English) spelling of

the Quechua word for "knot" or "to knot." In the scholar

ship written in English, khipu is frequently used. Quipo is

another common spelling of the word. Vicuna uses quipu

throughout her text. 8 See Frank Salomon's and Carol Mackey's contribu

tions to the collection of contemporary quipu studies ed

ited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton. 9 Another unique use of the quipu in literature can be

found in Francoise de Graffigny's Letters from a Peruvian

Woman (1747). In this epistolary novel, the protagonist, a

fictional Inca princess captured by Spaniards and given over to the French, takes solace in recording her experi ences for her would-be Inca groom. The reader is given her letters, which are supposed to be quipus; the author,

drawing especially on the works of the Inca Garcilaso de

la Vega, presupposes a direct equivalency between quipus and writing. Whether or not it is realistic to imagine qui

pus serving as personal love letters, note how the author

uses the Peruvian woman's perspective to present a critical

view of French society, duly reported in the letters/quipus. Academic knowledge of the Inca worldview is thus em

ployed to criticize the West and to suggest that other cul

tures?specifically, the Inca?have been able to construct

a more just society. This contrast between the Western and

the non-Western is nowhere to be found in Vicuna's work, which thrives on the ambiguity produced by presenting the reader with the possibility inherent in different ways of imagining the world. In Vicuna's work, the Inca empire is not held up as a model; rather, it is evidence that West ern structures of power are not inevitable.

10 See her introduction to the bilingual edition of Ma

puche poetry she edited, Ul: Four Mapuche Poets.

In Chile, indigenous groups were victimized by Pinochet's regime, whose neoliberal economic policies favored the claims of big business over indigenous lands, and Amerindian political organizations united with other

prodemocracy forces. The post-Pinochet governments, however, have done little to advance indigenous rights.

12 The phrase "cultural logic of late capitalism" is

intended to invoke the work of Fredric Jameson on




postmodernism (see esp. his Postmodernism, "Cognitive

Mapping," and Cultural Turn). A careful analysis of how

Vicuna's formal experiments engage questions of social

marginalization and oppositional politics reveals a dif

ferent take on the function of the aesthetic in relation to

the apparently cognitively unmappable relations of power

brought about by the expansion of transnational corpo rations, the exponential proliferation of finance capital, and an increasing cultural investment in the logic of the

market to regulate the distribution of wealth in society. 13

Pages q.8-11. The pages of quipOem are marked

with a lowercase q; the articles collected in The Precarious, the opposite side of the book, are paginated normally.

14 Rama leaves the privileging of the masculine over

the feminine unexplored, but the questions he raises

about who had access to the writing invites reflection on

how women's voices too were silenced by these processes. 15

Catherine de Zegher points out the fundamental

difference between Vicuna's work at Con-con and the

officially designated earth art that emerged in a differ

ent time and place: "Read in comparison with the land

art of Nancy Holt or Richard Long, Cecilia Vicuna's

earth works differ not only in their relationship to the

environment and the body, but also in their diffusion of

knowledge. In contradistinction to Vicuna's perception, these artists have staged a landscape for the viewer to

colonize in order to aggrandize the self and to summon

awe for the sublime Other, as a reason for obliterating it.... Again, in the case of Vicuna, the earth work is not

about appearance, but about disappearance" ("Ouvrage"

21). De Zegher goes on to mention Vicuna's revisiting of Con-con on her 1981 return to Chile after eight years of exile and relates the connotation of disappearance to

that of the disappeared bodies of the dictatorship. Cesar

Paternosto points out a similarity (of aesthetic, not size) between the lines of Nazca and Vicuna's 1966 spirals in

the sand at Con-con, and he notes as well that she was

then unaware of the existence of the Nazca hieroglyphs

("Cecilia Vicuna" 17). Paternosto's point is to signal an

innate, intuitive connection with indigenous cultures in

her work, but regardless of this mystical continuity, her

inscription of human presence on the land through ab

stract forms recalls pre-Hispanic cultural production. 16

It is also possible to understand the metonymous north and south in reference to the criollo "pacification" of the Araucanian Indians of southern Chile in the nine

teenth century, decades after the struggle for indepen dence was won. Yet the book's production and circulation

in English in the United States suggest that the reference

is primarily toward the larger dynamic of globalization and neocolonialism.

17 The quotation is from Felipe Ehrenberg's introduc

tion to Sabor a mi. The pages are not numbered. 18 Neither these photographs nor the aforementioned

images of the shantytown and the throngs of people in

the street are listed in the photography credits; their an

onymity contributes to the Barthesian reading of their

uncanniness. 19

De Zegher suggests that the work of the anthro

pologist Franz Boas on string figures as an old form of

entertainment worldwide provides an added layer of

complexity to the meanings evoked by Vicuna's meta

phoric use of threads ("Ouvrage" 18). 20

Particularly striking are two of her more recent

(1994) outdoor works, Hilo en el cerro (in which she criss

crossed Santiago's Cerro Santa Lucia public park with red

yarn spun by a Mapuche woman) and 12 hilos en un corral

(in which she transformed the space of a corral on a farm

in the mountains near San Fernando). See de Zegher's

analysis of these two pieces, which "reframe Vicuna's

concern with crossing the boundaries that separate the

individual and the collective, the private and the public, the local and the global, the 'smooth' and the 'striated,' the 'nomad space' and the 'sedentary space'" ("Ouvrage"

29-30). Relating the corral piece to the devastating ef

fects on local farmers of the transnational expansion of

agribusiness, de Zegher suggests that Vicuna's "weaving

'protects' the entering viewer/reader and the land against the multinational grip of North American corporate

agro-industry?which eliminates the 'inferior' native

corn to replace it with its own 'rich' corn treated so as not

to run to seed, so that the Chilean farmers become com

pletely dependent on those corporations for production." She goes on to state, "Moreover, taking up the grid's am

bivalent relation to matter and to spirit, Vicuna extends

it in her work to imply the overlaying of modernity onto

Andean culture, and vice versa" (31). 21

See Paternosto's The Stone and the Thread for a re

thinking of the history of abstract art that writes out the

bias against indigenous aesthetics as primitive. Analyzing the various genres of abstract art developed in the pre

Hispanic Andean world, Paternosto shifts the paradigms that have dominated explanations of modernist primitiv ism to expose the fallacy of the modernists' "discovery" of premodern forms. Parting from the premise that pre Colombian art was both abstract and inherently not dec

orative?i.e., that it constituted a visual code integrated into a worldview?he analyzes an array of indigenous cultural forms, from Incan stone monuments to Ay

mara weaving, to disrupt and rearticulate the metanar

rative of the progressive development of aesthetic forms

established by modern art history. Vicuna shares with

Paternosto's revisiting of indigenous aesthetic traditions

and their relation to modern art a revalorization of na

tive cultures that counters modernity but does so without

exoticizing the other or relegating its forms to the realm

of the premodern. Whether or not Vicuna's personal rela

tionship with Paternosto is relevant (they have been part ners for years), she has stated that her work has evolved

in tandem with his since 1980 (Wik'una 109). Likewise,

he cites her poetic etymologies in his work (Stone 165). See the twin essays in which Vicuna writes on his work



i 2 o. 5 Juliet Lynd 1607

and he on hers for further contemplation of the parallels in their representation of indigenous aesthetics (Vicuna, "Cesar Paternosto"; Paternosto, "Cecilia Vicuna").

Works Cited Avelar, Idelbar. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial

Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photog

raphy. 1980. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill,

1981.

Bianchi, Soledad. "Pasaron desde aquel ayer ya tantos

anos, o acerca de Cecilia Vicuna y la Tribu No." Hispa merica 17.51 (1988): 87-94.

-. La memoria: Modelo para armar: Grupos literarios

del decada de los sesenta en Chile: Entrevistas. San

tiago: Direccion de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos,

1995.

Damon, Maria. "'Independent Embroidery': Theorizing,

Improvising Text/ile Collaborations." Chain 4 (1997): 37-41.

Deleuze, Gilles. Repetition and Difference. 1968. Trans.

Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

de Zegher, M. Catherine. "Ouvrage: Knot a Not, Notes as

Knots." de Zegher, Precarious 17-45.

-, ed. The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia

Vicuna. Hanover: UP of New England, 1997.

Ehrenberg, Felipe. Introduction. Vicuna, Sabor. n. pag.

Graffigny, Franchise de. Letters from a Peruvian Woman.

Trans. David Kornacker. New York: MLA, 1993.

Trans, of Lettres d'une Peruvienne. 1747.

Gubar, Susan. "The Blank Page." Writing and Sexual Dif

ference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Sussex: Harvester, 1980.

73-93.

Jameson, Fredric. "Cognitive Mapping." The Jameson Reader. Ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Maiden:

Blackwell, 2000. 277-87.

-. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Post

modern, 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998.

-. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Cap italism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Keefe-Ugalde, Sharon. "Hilos y palabras: Disenos de una

ginotradicion (Rosario Castellanos, Pat Mora y Ceci

lia Vicuna)." Inti 51 (2000): 53-67.

Klindienst, Patricia. "The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours."

Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984): 25-53.

Lippard, Lucy. "Spinning the Common Thread." de Ze

gher, Precarious 7-15.

Mackey, Carol. "The Continuing Khipu Traditions: Prin

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Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance:

Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor:

U of Michigan P, 1995.

Paternosto, Cesar. "Cecilia Vicuna." Trans. Lori M. Carl

son. Review 39 (1988): 16-17.

-. rIhe Stone and the Ihread: Andean Roots of Abstract

Art. Trans. Esther Allen. Austin: Texas UP, 1996.

Quilter, Jeffrey. Preface. Quilter and Urton xiii-xix.

Quilter, Jeffrey, and Gary Urton, eds. Narrative Threads:

Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin:

U of Texas P, 2002.

Rama, Angel. La ciudad letrada. Hanover: Nortes, 1984.

Richard, Nelly. "Presentacion." Politicas y esteticas y de

la memoria. Ed. Richard. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000.9-12.

Salomon, Frank. "Patrimonial Khipu in a Modern Peru

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Tupicocha, Huarochiri." Quilter and Urton 293-319.

Urton, Gary. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in

the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: U of

Texas P, 2003.

Vicuna, Cecilia. "Cesar Paternosto." Trans. Lori M. Carl

son. Review 39 (1988): 14-15.

-. Precario/Precarious. Trans. Anne Twitty. New

York: Tanam, 1983.

-. quipoem. Trans. Esther Allen. Hanover: UP of

New England, 1997.

-. Sabor a mi. Bilingual ed. Introd. and trans. Felipe

Ehrenberg. London: Beau Geste, 1973.

-, ed. VI, Four Mapuche Poets: A Bilingual Anthol

ogy. Introd. Vicuna. Trans. John Bierhorst. Poetry in

Indigenous Languages. Pittsburgh: Latin Amer. Lit.

Review, 1998.

-. La wik'una. Santiago: Zegers, 1990.



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