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Connotas. Revista de crítica y teoría literarias

On-line version ISSN 2448-6019Print version ISSN 1870-6630

Abstract

CABRERA GARCIA, Fabiola Itzel. The metaphor of corn in contemporary poetry in the Nahuatl language: a review of the verses of Juan Hernández Ramírez and Natalio Hernández. Connotas. Rev. crit. teór. lit. [online]. 2023, n.26, pp.49-78.  Epub June 26, 2023. ISSN 2448-6019.  https://doi.org/10.36798/critlit.v0i26.446.

In this essay, I analyze the metaphor of corn in the poetry written by Juan Hernández Ramírez and Natalio Hernández, Nahua poets native of the Huasteca Veracruzana. I do this through the analytical proposal by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The use of such a proposal has to do with the author’s premise that the metaphors go through thought and action, as well as to the intention of not using analytical tools whose dialogue is limited to occidental poetics. The study nourishes from reading the poetry books by Ramírez and Hernández, and by the semi structured interviews I did to each one. The results where three categories: a) the concept of náhuatl as a cob, in which a relationship between corn and the word is observed as important element for a biophysical dimension and for the cultural identity of the Nahua people b) the human body as a corn cob and c) death related to the biological process of the grains sprouting. The analysis demonstrated that the ontological vegetable metaphor constitutes a topic in modern náhuatl poetry. With this essay, I am interested in exposing that the indigenous poets can propose other forms of thinking the world, its links, and confrontations, in spite of the structural racism against it. I emphasize in the ontological input that they provide after being read; the array of possibilities that they provide for the occidentalized readers regarding the construction of a new way to understand nature, far from the exploitation and dominance of the occidental world, all this, through the metaphors that they weave around corn.

Keywords : mexican literature; Nahuatl poetry; indigenous poetry; linguistic diversity.

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