BODY, PAIN, AND PASSION: SUFFERING AND TRANSCENDENCE IN RAÚL ZURITA’S "INRI"

Abstract

My article is dedicated to the collection of poems INRI by the renowned Chilean poet and artist RaúlZurita (*1950). Published in 2004, INRI is a reaction to Ricardo Lagos’ public confession at the Mesa de Diálogo about the Chilean military’s monstrous practices of how the so-called death flights had actually been executed during the dictatorship to make people or what was left of them disappear: bodies thrown into the sea, rivers and mountains. I show how the poet, referring to Christ’s passion and with the repetitive style of prayers and litanies, forces the readers to imagine those last moments of the fall of these human beings, victims of the dictatorship, before disappearing forever. Through his poetry, Zurita leaves a trace of their existence, restores their dignity, and offers images full of beauty and consolation for the survivors who have lost loved ones. It is an elegy to the victims, beyond faith and a Christian transcendence, that imagines the victims’ bodies as grotesque, in Bakhtin’s understanding and, therefore, as part of a continuous organic cycle of death and resurgence.