Maternal Archive of Racialized Trauma in Esta herida llena de peces

Abstract

This article reads Lorena Salazar Masso’s Esta herida llena de peces (2021) as the construction of a maternal archive of racialized trauma in Colombia’s Chocó region. Centering on the river journey along the Atrato undertaken by a white woman and the Black boy she has raised, a journey concluding with the boy’s death and the passing of his biological mother, the essay argues that the novel frames violence not as an exceptional event but a structural condition which differentially distributes precarity, displacement, and loss. The theoretical framework brings together critiques of contemporary warfare as inscription on noncombatant bodies, the unequal production of grievability, the ongoingness of racial harm, and an expanded concept of the archive attentive to embodied memory and testimonial residues. Through close reading, the article shows how the novel binds body and territory within an affective geography of fear, where mobility does not deliver safety but intensifies vulnerability. In this context, motherhood is seen as a way of dealing with trauma through daily acts of care and preparing for survival. It also highlights that true closure is impossible when the situations that cause loss are still affecting us today. Ultimately, the novel unsettles normative imaginaries of motherhood and intervenes in debates on memory, war, and racialization in Colombia by rendering legible an archive that does not heal the wound but insists on its persistence.