Rootedness and Uprootedness in "Aguas" by Alicia Genovese: A(n) (Under)water Exploration

Abstract

In Aguas (2013), the Argentinean poet Alicia Genovese explores the relationship between her human (and non-human) characters and water: “some sense of us” (Genovese 33). Drawing on the concepts of “uprootedness” and “rootedness” formulated by Binns (2002) this article explores the tension, omnipresent in Genovese's poems, between problematic dualisms and the quest for a symbiotic unity. The alienation of the human being (uprootedness), observed by Binns in the context of the environmental crisis, and his desire to regain a sense of interconnectedness (rootedness) manifest themselves in Aguas on three different levels: the world, the individual, and art. In Genovese's poetry, the characters' come back to a deep connection with water—and, by extension, with the world in all its plurality—is accompanied by a return to their bodies and sensations—in reaction to excessive rationalism—and to poetry—an ancestral and constantly renewed genre, halfway between the rational and the irrational. A close reading of Genovese's work highlights how these three reconnections are intrinsically linked and how this offers an alternative to the “modern water” paradigm described by Linton (14). The paper demonstrates that Genovese's texts seek to overcome the destructive dualism of a world divided between water and thought by creating, through a poetry of swimming, an alternative imaginary that explores the extent to which “water is a complete poetic reality” (Bachelard 23), i.e. both abstract and material.