Reseña

Synopsis

Memory the House of Love is a poetic journey from the Arctic to the gates of Antarctica, with stops in Africa and Australia. In each poem, Marcelo Rioja interweaves two voices: a documentary reference to the worldview of an indigenous people —their relationship with the land, water, animals, ancestors, and the spiritual world— and an intimate poem born from it, without claiming to speak in their name, but rather listening to them with respect and letting them resonate in his own experience of love.

Inuit, Guaraní, Maya, Mapuche, Lakota, Yagán, Selk’nam, Aché, Chiquitano, and the San peoples of the Kalahari —such as the Hai||om of northern Namibia, in the Etosha region—, among many others, lend their skies, their rivers, their mountains, their deserts, and their memory to a single question: how do you say I love you in the language of those who know that the land, the other, and oneself are one and the same web of relationships?

The result is a book that is not read straight through: it is traveled. As one travels a territory. As one learns to read the signs of the wind, the traces in the forest, or the brightness of a star. Because, as the title warns, without memory there is no love. And this book is, above all, an exercise of memory: that of the peoples, of those who inhabit dreams, of the people who affirm that the present only has meaning if it is shared.