ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the imbrication of “slow”- (environmental) and “fast”-acting (political) violence in their transformation of life in the estuarine region of Colombia’s Magdalena River. It does so through a reading of three contemporary works of art and literature which, in their mournful immersion into the region’s once life-giving flows, question presentist and geographically-bounded understandings of violence and ecocide and their racializing effects. Tomás González’s Manglares (2006), it argues, makes of the estuarine “mangrove swamp” an erosive frontier between the solid and the liquid, inviting us to think landscape from an aquatic perspective that erodes sovereign territorial inscription. Supplementing this onto-poetics of water as “flow” and “connectivity” with popular narratives about the desiccation of the region’s “amphibious culture”, Alfredo Molano and María Constanza Ramírez’s La tierra del caimán (2006), invites us to grasp the consequences of regional development as a hardening of racializing exclusions. Finally, it advances, by bringing together these poetic and social registers, Juan Manuel Echavarría’s Bocas de ceniza (2004) recasts the alluvial waters flowing through the river’s estuarine swamps as the signifying media par excellence in which to discern a cumulative history of dispossessions as it is at once muted and intoned.
