A Chant or a War Cry? The Internal Dialogue of the Lyrical Voice in Canciones desde el fin del mundo, by Yuliana Ortiz Ruano

Abstract

This article aims to reveal the use of the dialogue between the different voices performed by the lyrical subject in Canciones desde el fin del mundo (2021), by the Ecuadorian poet Yuliana Ortiz Ruano (Esmeraldas, 1992). We intend to identify how Ortiz, habituated to write about topics such as Black Womanhood, Marginality and Poetry viewed as a shelter, disposes of these literary devices in order to build her own sound and symbolic universe. In addition, we seek to analyze how the lyrical voice, through different literary mechanisms, can turn each poem into a remainder of the racial, ideological, and cultural conflicts that the author experiences in real life. This poetry book is an example of how social identity conflicts within the Hispanic American Poets’ work breaks through the poetic construction, which is never completely detached from the topics of genre and race. The theoretical framework for this paper is based on El monólogo interior (1996), by Eduardo Aznar, and Hans-Georg Gadamer´s Poema y Diálogo (1993). In addition, El sujeto boscoso: tipologías subjetivas de la poesía española contemporánea entre el espejo y la notredad (1978-2015), by Vicente Luis Mora, has been a crucial work regarding the study of the lyrical speaker. Our findings led to the conclusion that the chants within Yuliana Ortiz’s book are transformed into war cries in order to expose the abuse towards black female bodies. To this end, we link the lyrical voice’s approach to semantic poetry, which uses ambiguity to amplify the symbolic content of the signifiers, whereas they are related to human, animal or sound elements.