Silence as asylum: the exile of the word in I never promised you eternity, by Tununa Mercado

Abstract

The present analysis focuses its attention on the narrative I never promised you eternity written by Tununa Mercado and published in 2005, worthy of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (2007). This work is intertwined with In State of Memory (1990), a book in which Tununa brings together a series of stories that condense her exile experience in Mexico. As Adriana Bocchino[1] indicates, exile writing points to a text that “does not respond to «being written outside» but rather to an «exile experience», an «experience of being outside», becoming a condition of that writing".

I Never Promised You Eternity is woven through testimonies, letters and diaries that respond to multiple paths crossed by the protagonists. An always displaced, disseminated chronotope is presented; hatching and explosion of spaces and times that come and go at the uninterrupted pace of writing. The numerous narrative voices evoke and shelter each other as they become lost in the wooded memorial process; their melodies are interrupted by their misplacements in a "border time"[2], a time that (dis)articulates the story and traces lines that, like ribs, reveal in the backlight the silences that “promise” to reach a destination.

Mercado's story is presented as a discursive exile where no one, nothing, not even the words themselves return to what they were as they persistently exclude each other.

[1] Ibid.

[2] Tununa Mercado, ob. cit.