The Feminine Retrieved from the Pre-Hispanic Imagination as a Source of Power and Transformation in El Himalaya o la moral de los pájaros by Miguel Ángel Bustos

Abstract

In El Himalaya o la moral de los pájaros (1970), by Miguel Ángel Bustos, there is a form of indirect political activism. As an intellectual of the 60s and 70s, Bustos had clearly seen a way out of the social and political situation of the country (Redondo 2018) and the planet in the recovery and integration of the knowledge of pre-Columbian American cultures, which, seen from centuries XX and XXI, is completely foreign to capitalism. This area has still been scarcely studied from ecocriticism. El Himalaya... avoids the Western logical articulation and propose an initiation journey, away from the ego and its material achievements, exalted by the system in which we inhabit. In this process, the progressive construction of a multifaceted feminine, mysterious, feared and attractive character stands out, even from the visual point of view in the drawings of the same author, for example, Coatlicue, the lady with the snake skirt. Very succinctly, we put it in relation to the work of the Cordoba poet Romilio Ribero. Throughout the work a kind of strong character is configured, collective and feminine, densely mythical, who opens the route when it closes. We propose considering it a way to recover what was lost, and as a figuration of the Jungian anima.