Emilia Pequeno, Chilean poet: “It is not possible to fully understand love”

A workshop given by Chilean poet, writer and professor Soledad Fariña in 2019 marked a turning point in the life of Emilia Petit Roessler . “I was never a reader of love poems, I wasn’t interested in reading them, I felt like they were a bit stupid. Perhaps because I am very much a girl of my context: while I was studying literature at the University of Chile, the Feminist May (2018) occurred, where the criticism of romantic love was very latent.

Now that the years have passed, I also see it from another angle and I think that my prejudices do not necessarily come from the feminist movement, because they are culturally constructed and have a whole history. And I also understood that there was a question of maturity, because obviously romantic love needs to be rethought, but I think my reaction was a little more combative or adolescent to the subject,” Emilia reflects.

With all this “weight”, he took the workshop, which reoriented his writing. “I began to understand other things, other ways of thinking about love poems; break the prejudices I had in my head,” he says. Thus were born the first five poems which will give way to ‘Notes for an imaginary cartography of the fjords his second collection of poems, presented this weekend in Chile as part of the Ñuñoa International Book and Reading Festival (FILL2024) and which was published by Vaso Roto (Spain and Mexico) after winning the Vaso Roto Prize for Young Poetry 2023 at the Monterrey International Book Fair.

In this collection of poems, Emilia explores, through her body and her touch, an imagined landscape, but which she does not know: the fjords. From the question of this geographical accident, in analogy with the body of a loved one, he constructs an imaginary cartography and a reflection on what the exercise of cartography itself means in terms of affects, memory, language, symbols and representation.

…talk

on the arm of the water

it will come get us

and will bring us together again…

Cartography is the branch of graphic design that deals with the methods and instruments used to exhibit and express ideas, shapes and relationships in two or three-dimensional space. What does this have to do with a couple’s love?

I think about bodies and how we enter other bodies, how we know them and map them. We map the body of our loved one, we begin to know it: here is a mole, here is such a thing. But it is at the same time an exercise in strangeness, because we will always be a stranger in the body of another.

What I wanted to work on was love as an experience, but also as a means of knowing. And in this sense, cartography or this idea of ​​the fjord served as a resource for me to talk about other things; of the difficulty of understanding at a single glance or of the impenetrability of things, because just as the phenomenal world is not completely comprehensible, it happens with love that there is always something which keeps closing.

Don’t you think it is possible to understand both the experience of love and the loved one?

There is an inscrutability, an inability to fully understand and I find that interesting. This is an unanswered question. It’s about not understanding, but getting into things.

Romantic love tells us the opposite…

In romantic love, there is the myth of the better half, this idea that there is someone else who is your complement and who therefore knows you and you know them more than anyone else, and for the same reason, he doesn’t need to talk to her. know what they need or want from the other. All very neurotic ideas that make me sick to my stomach.

This is why I also used nature or the landscape to talk about love. The metaphor or allegory on which the book is based has precisely to do with the obsession with landscape and the fact that I will never have it or be able to fully grasp it. And there is a comparison with love, I can go in and explore everything, immerse myself in it, but in the end there will always be a part that I don’t know and that is not mine.

…I thought about salt water

that rushes through the crack of your plexus

an impassable bone where they weave

the arteries that go to the sea…

Why did you choose a fjord?

The word fjord lived in my head just because, somewhat gratuitously, and I thought it was an interesting word. It’s a glacier that left a crack in a rock and then the glacier melted and filled with water. Like some sort of wound or crack created by a glacier.

The fjord helps me talk about this mark that love leaves, this crack. There is something there, about the rock that breaks but continues to exist and the mark it leaves on people.

Is this what you mean when you talk about emotional memory?

The very concept of trace has to do with the memory of something that was there and in my opinion every experience has effects, maybe they are not always romantic, but there are effects involved, because it affects us.

So in this mapping process you will always have an affective memory.

Affectionate but not romantic…

It is impossible to abstract oneself from the romantic experience due to the configuration of our society, because sexual affection is culturally configured that way. I no longer have the combative look I once had, but I have a critical look.

So for me it is interesting to think of love as a mobilizing force, a drive that goes a little further, because we can have many partners throughout our lives, but there is still a sort of continuum of desire, and on the other hand each experience is unique at the same time.

Basically, what I wanted to do with this collection of poems and what I learned in Soledad Fariña’s workshop, is to question myself again about love and the ways of loving, which is ultimately a constant and necessary exercise.

…I face

to find a way to contact you

and still fail in what they call

transmissible

a gesture would barely be enough

if you directed your eyes

towards this latitude…