Toxic Waste and Community Formation in Soybean Pampa: Contextualizing Noxa (2016) María Inés Krimer)

Abstract

Between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, Argentina ceased to be a country of diversified agriculture to become a soybean power. The most immediate consequences of this transition were the massive use of pesticides, among which glyphosate, the contamination of the environment, air and water, the illness and death of the inhabitants and workers of the soybean areas, government corruption, the concealment of truth and the enrichment of some. Literature, both fiction and non-fiction, has been in charge in recent years of investigating and revealing the harmful effects of glyphosate on the human body and the environment. In most of these texts, toxic waste –agrochemical waste that contaminates the environment and endangers the lives of those who handle it– occupies a central role, becoming an irrefutable proof of the danger of intensive agriculture as well as a catalyst of the multiple complaints against these practices. In this essay, after presenting the intimate relationship that has been established over the years between waste and Argentine literature, I specifically examine the functioning of toxic waste in Noxa (2016) by María Inés Krimer, one of the most successful novels in its representation of the effects of transgenic soybeans intensive cultivation. In what I propose in these pages, waste functions not only as a harmful entity, polluting the environment and human health, but also as a catalyst for denunciation, truth, and community creation.