The filiation narrative as an expression of a discord: Mother and writing in El corazón del daño, by María Negroni

Abstract

This paper proposes to link the concept of “filiation narrative”, coined by Dominique Viart, with that of "Literature of Children", used since a decade ago to refer to a considerable textual corpus of the Southern Cone. Subsequently, I propose a critical reading of both terms, prompted by the review of El corazón del daño, by María Negroni, published in Buenos Aires in 2021. An unclassifiable book, like others by its author –such as Elegía Joseph Cornell (2013), Objeto Satie (2018) and others that are reluctant to take residence in poetry, essays, narrative or the visual arts—, that as soon as it is identified themselves as it is barefoot of the concepts previously treated. Negroni, born in Rosario in 1951 (and therefore, distant from the generation of the "children" of the Southern Cone dictatorships), puts the mother at the center of her reflection and in relation to her, her own writing and her inheritance. “La escritura es un réquiem, y esta, mi poética negra” (143), she writes, with an inalienable strangeness, in that the outskirts (outside the family, outside the country, outside the mother tongue and perhaps, also, out of literary classifications) are manifested with unusual awareness of their own work.