Orphan in My Own Blood: Yolanda Pantin’s Country

In Venezuelan poetry, the question of belonging and origins has made the home a topos of poetic investigation into the construction of bodies and subjectivities through family memory and an affective relationship with intimate and domestic space. From this lineage of poets of the oikos that mark the Venezuelan twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I will focus on the writer Yolanda Pantin (1954) and her books Casa o lobo (1981; House or Wolf) and País (2007; Country), which explore the act of “returning” home with poetry in order to lend an ear to its secrets and ghosts and to seek a language capable of saying the incomprehensible and unacceptable matters embedded in its narrative.