Rupture and irreverence in the language of Montserrat Alvarez’s Zona dark (1991)

Abstract

Zona Dark, a collection of poems independently published by Montserrat Alvarez in 1991, has as one of its central axes the representation of Peru as a space deeply traversed by violence and assumes a critical perspective regarding this social world. In this sense, part of the poetic project of the book has to do with the production of a language that transforms the structures that sustain the social configuration that is criticized in it. To this end, Zona Dark points towards a confrontation with the language that organizes society and the creation of new paradigms of poetic production that bring new ways of understanding and experiencing social life. In this article, I aim to study the strategies through which Montserrat Alvarez’s book carries out this process. To achieve this, I will focus on three central aspects of the treatment of language in Zona Dark: the book’s relationship with the Peruvian punk rock scene of the 1980s, the parody of high culture and commercial art, and the dialogue between multiple languages to eliminate any possible hegemony or fixation of a single language as a means to understand and represent the world.