Children’s Voices in El cementerio más hermoso de Chile, of Christian Formoso

Abstract

El cementerio más hermoso de Chile (Christian Formoso, 2008) is a collection of poems that assembles the conquest of the Magallanes region and the history of Chile in the voices of the characters that inhabit the Cemetery Sara Brown in the city of Punta Arenas. Its lines expose the roughness of history but its poetic density transcends the testimonial and need not verisimilitude in order to build a literary narrative of violence in Latin America. This paper puts forward a philosophical interpretation of this density. It concentrates on one of the areas of the cemetery, which is also one of the numerous levels of the play’s poetics. This is the voices of the children that speak up in the Canciones para los niños muertos and the Canciones para los niños muertos en los basurales. The traits of childhood and its being experience show in the stories of these children in order to express the horror -not of death but of violence among the living.