Write, Heal, Cohabit: Creer en las fieras by Nastassja Martin

Abstract

This article explores Nastassja Martin’s work, Creer en las fieras (2021), in which the French anthropologist narrates her attack by a bear in the Kamchatka mountains and then her process of physical, as well as ontological, reconstruction. We analyse three thematic dimensions present in the text: first, the writing from and about the body as a way of healing; second, the vanishing lines that project a corpo politics; and third, the cohabitation with the feral from a corporal perspectivism. In this way, the story proposes the bodily device as a metaphor for the feral in pursuit of a community with the cyclical unity of the living. As a research outcome, it’s worth asking if the text would not be part of a global literature that, within posthumanist notions, provide a novel perspective on the links between species as a fluid cohabitation of the living condition through an “emancipation story”.