Kissed Into: The Shared Today of Mapuche Letters

Abstract

Mapuche Letters [Cartas Mapuche] comes as a gift.¹ It is a gift not so much, or not only, to Western brands of inquiry: anthropology, sociology, social (or not very) psychology, political science, even history and literature as disciplines, but is also a gift in the open sense in which Paul Celan said that poems are “gifts to the attentive.” In his notes to “Meridian” (1961), Celan writes, “Poems are not primarily [or not only] written, they do not begin in the moment when they are put into writing; they are gifts [Geschenke] to the attentive.”² In this way, Mapuche Letters can be read as a poem—though not in the way of the poem as a literary genre or function of art.