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Citizens of Memory: Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina

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Citizens of Memory: Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Books Arts and Sciences 11-10-2017 Citizens of Memory: Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina Silvia Tandeciarz College of William & Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbook Part of the Modern Languages Commons Recommended Citation Tandeciarz, Silvia. "Citizens of Memory: Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina" (2017). Bucknell University Press. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbook/24 This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Books by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. :CITIZENS i OF MEMORY AFFECT, REPRESENTATION, AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN POSTDICTATORSHIP ARGENTINA THE BUCKNELL STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THEORY Series Editor: An{bal Gonzalez, Yale University Dealing with far-reaching questions of history and modernity, language and selfhood, and power and ethics, Latin American literature sheds light on the many-faceted nature of Latin American life, as well as on the human condi­ tion as a whole. This series of books provides a forum for some of the best criticism on Latin American literature in a wide range of critical approaches, with an emphasis on works that productively combine scholarship with theory. Acknowledging the historical links and cultural affinities between Latin American and Iberian literatures, the series welcomes a consideration of Spanish and Portuguese texts and topics, while also providing a space of convergence for scholars working in Romance studies, comparative litera­ ture, cultural studies, and literary theory. Selected titles in Series Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Ricardo Palma s Tradiciones: Illuminating Gen­ der and Nation David Kelman, Counterfeit Politics: Secret Plots and Conspiracy Narratives in the Americas Andrew R. Reynolds, The Spanish American Cr6nica Modemista, Temporal­ ity, and Material Culture Rebecca E. Biron, Elena Garro and Mexico s Modern Dreams Adriana Mendez Rodenas, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims Brendan Lanctot, Beyond Civilization and Barbarism: Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina Thomas S. Harrington, Public Intellectuals and Nation Building in the Ibe­ rian Peninsula, 1900--1925: The Alchemy of Identity Earl E. Fitz, Machado de Assis and Female Characterization: The Novels Jason Cortes, Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino­ Caribbean Narrative Persephone Braham, From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America Mary Beth Tierney-Tello, Mining Memory: Reimagining Self and Nation Through Narratives of Childhood in Peru Silvia R. Tandeciarz, Citizens ofMemory : Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit http://www.bucknell.edu/universitypress Citizens of Memory Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina Silvia R. Tandeciarz p°' ll.55 y3t,3 Published by Bucknell University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE 11 4AB, United Kingdom Copyright © 2017 by Silvia R. Tandeciarz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available LCCN 2017947780 I ISB 9781611488456 (hardback: alk. paper) I ISBN 978 I 611488463 (electronic) @J" The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American ational Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents List of Figures xi Acknowledgments xv A Note on Translations XXl Introduction xxiii Abbreviations xi vii 1 Making Space for Recollection 2 Mnemonic Hauntings: Photography as Art of the Missing 67 3 Archaeologies ofldentity: The After Generation's Archival Returns 109 4 Purgatorio as Memoryscape: Literature, Exile, and the Project of Transnational Justice 175 5 Affective Transmissions: Toward a Pedagogy of Human Rights 211 Bibliography 269 Index 291 About the Author 297 IX Introduction Hope is memory that desires.-Honore de Balzac, "A Prince of Bohemia"1 This is a book about memory. More specifically, it is a book about efforts at recollection in postdictatorship Argentina and about the hoped-for futures they set in motion at a particular moment in time. It is about sites, images, narratives, and practices that address the collective trauma of state terrorism and its enduring presence; and it is about the ways in which storytelling, by framing remembrance, helps constitute communities of belonging. The me­ morial works studied here ask us to pay attention; in capturing our attention, they seek to seed possibility. The ways in which they move us are not always predictable. Our interactions with them do not follow the most carefully laid out scripts. The affects they elicit are not always positive. But in eliciting af­ fects they are generative. This is a book about the power of memory to move us somewhere else, against indifference. In perhaps one of his most poignant poems, Argentine poet Juan Gelman poses a series of questions as he imagines the fates of his disappeared son and companeros [fellow militants], their missing bodies, their bones, in their final resting places: si dulcemente por tu cabeza pasaban las olas del que se tir6 al mar I lque pasa con los hermanitos que entierraron? I lhojitas les crecen de los dedos? I larbolitos I otof\os que los deshojan como mudos? I en silencio2 xxiii XXIV Introduction [if gently by your head passed the waves of the one thrown into the sea / what happens with the little brothers they in-earthed?/ do small leaves sprout from their fingers? / saplings / autumns that defoliate them like mutes? / in silence]3 His opening lines conjure the death flights through which thousands of citi­ zens, deemed enemies of the state by the military regime, were killed, their bodies tossed into the Rio de la Plata, often tied and weighted down to ensure their vanishing. They are addressed to a singular death, a cadaver at the bot­ tom of the sea gently rocked by waves as another body breaks through the water. One body, then two, lead the poet to wonder what happens with those other "little brothers" disappeared by the machinery of terror, those buried in the ground, infosas comunes [mass graves] and in unmarked graves.4 This thought evokes the image of new growth sprouting from their fingers, their bodies turning into small trees and giving way to the natural cycle of life and death, to Autumn's falling leaves and the silence of a figurative winter. Gelman's artistry is evident here, in his ability to transform through meta­ phor the scene of annihilation into something more, something generative. And it is evident, too, in the way he manipulates language to create pockets of intimacy vital both to the construction of collective memory and to the forward-looking work this memory might engender. These pockets opened through language manifest, for example, in his erroneous conjugation of the verb "enterrar" [to bury] in the poem's first stanza. His subtle transformation of "enterraron" [they buried] is like a snag or a slap after the caress of the opening lines; the word's deformation interrupts the gentle flow of questions in which it is inserted and demands we pay attention, revisit what is written there, to try to understand the very finitude of death, and simultaneously, the always present and also creative nature of mourning. Like a thud, or a prick, like the Barthesian punctum, the word emerges from the poetic unconscious and is not corrected: retaining in the preterit construction of the verb the pres­ ent conjugation of the root [entierran] and therein the word for earth [tierra], it manages to articulate the unbearably lasting, almost inassimilable reality of a loved one's body deep under ground, rendered mute and surrounded by silence, in humid darkness, but also in the very medium from which that voice's life-nurturing energy, its legacy, might be harvested. Referencing thus the physical matter of the tomb, Gelman prepares the metaphor of the tree and the genealogy of resistance it figures. From the silence that closes the opening stanza, the poem goes on to remember those gone, to name them, to reconstruct their militancy and their humanity with tenderness, effectively reconstituting the shared hopes of a shattered collective. And then, having Introduction XXV touched these memories, the poem ends with the muteness of bones disinte­ grating in a summer night. The title poem of a collection Gelman wrote during his exile in Rome, "Si dulcemente" [If gently] speaks to the immediate wound and maps the scene of devastation. It follows the series "Carta Abierta" [Open letter] that was addressed to his disappeared son and opens up Gelman's family album to affiliations born through militancy, exile, and mourning after a crushing defeat. 5 As an ex-Montonero who took up arms in the late 1960s and early 1970s before breaking with the guerrilla organization, and who lost his son, daughter-in-law, unborn granddaughter, and countless friends and fellow militants, Gelman belongs to the generation decimated by state terrorism.6 His poetic voice draws on a reservoir of language ripped from the very vis­ cera of grief, evoking at times an infant's babble, at times a mourner's howl. Well-known for his linguistic experimentation and neologisms, his poetry has received considerable critical attention, most of it linking his literary journey to the militancy that helped to shape it.
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