Abstract

PAZ SOLDAN, Alba María. El surgimiento del lenguaje: El jardín de Nora de Blanca Wiethüchter. CELEHIS [online]. 2022, n.44, pp.6-6. ISSN 2313-9463.

In Blanca Wiethüchter's narrativeEl jardín de Nora(1998),a German migrant in Bolivia and his spouse seek and achieve in the alien soil of La Paz to grow a garden that meets their own native national stylistic standards. This European Garden of Eden of their own will be kept and tended by an Aymara gardener of their choice. The children of the migrant family born in Bolivia, and one at a time, and at a very early age, they lost speech. A German governess takes care of them. While the Garden looks greener every new season, Nora is repeatedly baffled by the disquieting opening up of empty holes on the ground. In this essay, we focus on the double binding of children, with their European family and with the German garden on American soil, one the source of their muteness, the other of the emergence of an unfamiliar familiarity in their commerce with nature and the garden. Not without difficulties, they eventually learn how to communicate in an idiom made up of Aymara and Spanish. This is the point the fictional plot of loss and retrieval purported to make: the uncovering of a web of conflicts underpinning every building up of a distinctively personal means of expression, only possible if in touch with earth and deeply rooted local languages.

Keywords : bolivianliteratura; Blanca Wiethüchter; languages; migration; belonging; self-expression.

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