Los cuerpos condenados de Tocopilla: Namazu de Rodrigo Ramos Bañaos

Abstract

The recent narrative of the Norte Grande in Chile has focused on the ways in which the body is affected and stressed by the geographical space of the desert and the problems of the area today, such as extractivism, the marginalisation of subjects, the mining industry, and the sacrifice zones, among others. On this basis, different works have sought to represent how this marginalised space affectively configures the bodies of the subjects who inhabit it, thus elaborating different figures that address the construction of these bodies, pointing to a deepening of the relationship established between subjects and spaces. In this article we will focus on the figures of the body that are proposed in the novel Namazu by Rodrigo Ramos Bañados, where we investigate the link between Tocopilla, the city in which the novel is set, and the characters who visit and inhabit the place, in the context of the imminent disaster that stalks the story from the beginning: the Great Earthquake of the Norte Grande. In this link, the central figure will be that of the condemned body, condemned to death by the earthquake itself and by the marginalisation of the town, and the figures of the strange, monstrous and foreign body.