SPEECHES AND TRANSCURSES: LANGUAGE AND TERRITORY IN "CIELO DE SERPIENTES" BY ANTONIO GIL

Abstract

Territory can be conceived as a foreshortening of worlds articulated and located in time, a culture and in a specific language. Hence the strong connection of the territory with identity, personal or collective heritage, and its manifestation in memory, in the imagination and in the temporality of the discourse. This is the case of Cielo de serpientes by Antonio Gil. The text incorporates the speech of a child and the Inca world during his pilgrimage to the sacred hill establishing a kind of bilingualism and interdiscursivity with the chronicles of the conquest and the Spanish spoken by huaqueros, scientists and anthropologists. The discovery of an Incan relic is not reduced to a patrimonial question, of anthropological or archaeological collective memory, but it allows a new access to the diversity of American colonial history, literature and culture. In this sense, this novel discusses the discursive segments and canons against the status of knowledge and power and problematizes the notion of territory while the linguistic actions carry cultural and popular knowledge.