Underwritten Voices: Resonant Spaces and Unsound Silences in Dani Zelko, Soraya Maicoño, and Daniela Catrileo.

This article reflects on how twenty-first century Mapuche writers Daniela Catrileo and Soraya Maicoño upend notions of "silence" as corresponding to emptiness or absence through their experiments with poetic form. I begin by examining patterns and forms of silence and silencing in Mapuche poetry, mainly in dialogue with the poet Liliana Ancalao, as well as Mapudungun's polyphonous conception of a "language" or "poetics" of the land that destabilizes colonial modes of listening, voicing, and sense-making. I then analyze the poetics of the line break, as well as the notion of poetic "white space," as contesting narratives that attempt to silence and make invisible Mapuche communities through settler colonial frameworks. I finally evaluate the relationship between form, the caesura or the line break, and silencing or absence in two recent works: Pewma Ull: El sueño del sonido by Soraya Maicoño and Dani Zelko, and Río herido by Daniela Catrileo. Through a notion I term "underwriting," I posit that these poets politicize form and blankness in order to not only make resonant Mapuche voices that have been previously construed as silent and absent by the settler state, but to propose alternative and active conceptualizations of "silence" as poetic modes of theorizing notions of mourning, restitution, and justice under settler colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]