1: Where to Begin? (2013)

Everything that allows men to become rooted, through values or sentiments, in one time, in one history, in one language, principle of alienation which constitutes man as privileged in so far as what he [... ] imprisoning him in contentment with his own reality and encouraging him to offer it as an example or impose it as conquering assertion.1I'm saying that domain of poetry includes both oral and written forms, that poetry goes back to pre-literate situation and would survive post-literate situation, that human speech near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.2FROM THE FIRST MOMENTS OF COLONIZATION, indigenous peoples and lands to which they belong become fodder for imaginations of colonizers. A set of new expectations placed over their world like thin cotton sheet. Lumps and gradations protrude through sheet, but everything covered by its white topography. Soon, gritty realities of colonial frontier are wrapped up in smoother narratives about civilization and progress, as if land and its occupants were dormant forms of something not yet realized. Here, in this as if, we find disjuncture so profound that it leads one society to collide blindly with another; peaks and chasms of misprision that result prevent dialogue or consultation. As anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose writes, ?as if is fundamental epistemological error.3 It presumes existence of another world, and lays its imaginary form upon one already present. The colonist, in turn, acts as if he were creator of this world, as if land and its indigenous custodians were nothing other than parts of material field awaiting sanitization and re-sculpting. The colonist's identity determined by his own imagination; new world needs to exist so that colonist can colonize. The colonial project consolidated implicitly by conviction that colonization of new world will improve it; for Caribbean poet and critic Edouard Glissant, this conviction becomes value: an individual's very worth will now be determined by his or her relation to this new colony. So it that those conquered or visited peoples are forced into what Glissant calls a long and painful quesf ' for way of defining their own identities in wake of conquest. For centuries, whole populations have had to assert their identity in opposition to processes of identification or annihilation triggered by these invaders.4Christopher Columbus did not voyage in name of country, Glissant argues, but in name of an idea.5 It was this idea - of New World as Other, of Europe as source of knowledge - that would provide impetus for creation of so many ?epistemological errors'. As Spaniards spread north and south throughout enormous continent of Americas, it was as if virgin territory were being revealed to light for first time. This conviction followed them like shadow all way to site of what now Santiago de Chile, and remained embedded in non-indigenous Chilean consciousness. Before their arrival, writes Pablo Neruda, all was silence of water and wind across vast southern lands.6 As conquistadors continued south into territories of Mapuche, the light came despite daggers.7 However, rather than silence, Spaniards actually encountered fierce resistance: their colonial expansion was halted by Mapuche; majority of colonists retreated to Santiago, where they turned their focus to developing new centre of commerce and European civilization. Thus, by nineteenth century, with firm boundaries established between it and ?wild' lands to south, Chilean society could imagine itself as primarily European. A national imagination absorbed beneath its white skin those indigenous pueblos of central zones, but it expelled idea of indigenous Other to southern frontier, beyond which lay lands of Araucania. …