The quipu that remembers nothing Towards a poetics of divergent contact In Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabra e hilo

Abstract

Critics of Cecilia Vicuña’s reinvention of the Andean quipu in her poetics of weaving oscillate between two paradigms: one that aestheticizes its formal processes and another that views it as an index of a lost past. This article reframes this opposition by examining the critical role of metaphor in Palabra e hilo (1996) as a strategy for decolonial memory. I argue that the metapoetic interplay between language and weaving reflects on the survival of an obliterated past, disrupting the temporality of moderncolonial history and challenging dominant metaphors of cultural contact. Opposing the homogenizing logic of difference, Vicuña’s poetics of memory activates an experience of divergent contact between irreducible worlds and temporalities, thus liberating the memory of the quipu from colonial grammars that seek to neutralize its critical force.