Counter/Insurgent Guerrilla Ecopoetics

Abstract

Drawing on examples of Latin American guerrilla poetry by Mario Payeras, Javier Heraud and Rita Valdivia translated in Anglophone small-press editions, this article explores fissures between material environments of struggle and the theoretical concerns of a transcultural ecopoetics. The article proposes that the resulting “guerrilla ecopoetics” mirrors both the networks of international solidarity in which these poems were published and the rhetoric of counterinsurgency, through the shared ecological figure of entangled relationality. In Ernesto Cardenal’s poem “Ecology,” political struggle is imbricated with a more-than-human ecology of relations. But this claim, common to other guerrilla lyric, is complicated by the ambivalent translation between language and matter via insurgent metaphors that figure guerrilla strategy in terms of natural cycles and processes, such as swarming and pollination. In turn, these figures are made available for capture by counterinsurgent discourse that naturalizes agrarian struggle, and by environmental theory that uses the language of swarms and assemblages. This argument on the naturalization of social reproduction through figurative language, encompassing the militant practicality of supply, infrastructure and subsistence (and their obverse, sabotage and counter-strike), leads to tensions between New Materialist theory and historical materialism, negotiated through what the Guatemalan militant intellectual Mario Payeras calls the “environmental dialectic.”