Los pliegues de la extranjería : familia, viaje y archivo en La tierra empezaba a arder (2019) de Cynthia Edul

Abstract

La tierra empezaba arder (2019) by Cynthia Edul (Argentina, 1979) makes use of the motive of the return to the ancestor’s homeland in multiple ways: as a perspective and echo of the writing, even as the form assumed by the narrative itself. The novel connects the ghostly and unstable condition of the returnee with an urgent question of the present: that of migrants, refugees, victims of systematic terror, the dispossessed. Although the family story is what makes possible to connect the intimate drama and the humanitarian, social and political disaster, writing does not rest on this relationship as something given, but as a product of a work of the gaze, a poetic disposition, and, at the same time, as an explanatory impulse that seeks to make visible causes, that traces historical data and establishes networks. The fold between the familiar and the political is achieved in the narrative from a foreigner position that enables the assembly of a “heterogeneous archive” that makes visible the traces and persistence of the past. The book recovers from the idea of ​​folding a logic that allows the concealment to be redefined as a renewed mode of exposure.