A Poetics of Mud: Andean Ruins in José Eulogio Garrido’s “Visiones de Chan Chan”

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the poetry book Visiones de Chan Chan by Peruvian author José Eulogio Garrido, as a peculiar case of Andean poetry on ruins built from mud adobes. The article begins by unveiling what I understand as a fixation of Andean intellectual history with stone, and explaining the racial and semiotic reductions that this fixation has provoked, to the point of creating paradigms that have been reproduced under different ideas until the twentieth century. In the second part, I argue that Garrido’s poems question the paradigm that associated Indigeneity with the lithic, and allows me to argue that mud as a materiality questions the traditionally accepted relationships between symbol, space and temporality. The ideas that emerge from Visiones de Chan Chan allow me to understand that mud configures in a different way the constitution of the poetic subject, of the place of enunciation, and of the ideological temporalization of the ruin. Moreover, Garrido’s book allows me to postulate the basis of a poetics of mud that incorporates the material and semiotic particularities of this substance, a poetics that in turn becomes a contribution to a larger poetic theory of Andean materiality and placeness.