Where to Go from Here?Cultural Production When Post-Dictatorship Slouches Towards Dictatorship

A couple sits in the waiting room of the civil registry. Estranged, they barely speak. In fact, neither of them would even be there if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. They have come to put the last nail in the coffin. They have come to sign the divorce papers.

In the corner of the room, there is a television mounted to the wall. The news is on. The reporter is covering the story of the fall from grace of a political activist.  Handcuffed, head low, she walks, accompanied by an entourage of police officers, towards the entrance of the courthouse. Cameras flash. Reporters wave microphones at her. A ghost of her former self, so eloquent, so defiant, she doesn’t turn to face them. She doesn’t utter a word.

The couple immediately recognizes their old friend. The three of them had belonged to the same political organization, had fought for the same cause, back when the couple had just met, student activists, young lovers.

This is the setting of Alvaro Bisama’s novel Estrellas muertas (2010). The story of the activist’s fall from grace serves as a metaphor for the failure of the couple’s marriage. The loss of faith in a political ideal reinforces the theme of the lost love.

Bisama wasn’t alone in his portrait of political activism. His idea didn’t come out of nowhere. There was something in the air when he was writing. Many such stories in many similar novels were written in Latin America in the first decades of the 21^st century.

Two years earlier, in 2008, for example, Félix Bruzzone had ruffled more than a few feathers when he published Los topos. A little bomb, the short novel detonated the tradition of Southern Cone post-dictatorship narrative, which, to be sure, was already an ailing genre at the time of the explosion.

The unnamed narrator, the child of disappeared parents, like the author himself, refuses to have anything to do with the human rights organizations that speak in his name. The characters involved in the social movements for memory, truth, and justice often prove to be shallow and self-serving. The narrator’s friends, lovers, and acquaintances all expect him to play the part assigned to him, to go through the motions, to perform the gestures, to follow the script. Categorically, he is unwilling to comply. Increasingly his life transpires outside of the limits of intelligibility and bourgeois respectability. He takes refuge in the margins on society, falling in love with a trans sex worker and later becoming one himself. In this new life, he discovers a conspiracy to sequester, torture, and ultimately disappear trans people. A detective following clues, the narrator hunts down the perpetrator and has a plan in place to exact revenge. Instead of following through with the plan, however, he ends up falling in love with the enemy, despite the inevitability of his own disappearance.

Bruzzone’s iconoclastic novel upset the expectations of many of his readers, who had come to expect something much different from the children of disappeared parents. He provided no gestures of affiliation, no slogans about continuing his parents’ struggle, no sentimentalization of a lost past, no idealization of those who gave their lives for a better world, no eulogizing, no sacralization, none of the usual solemnity and mournfulness.

Around the same time, Mariana Eva Pérez, another child of disappeared parents, was writing a blog from the point of view of an autofictional narrator called The Princess of the Montoneros. Active from 2009 to 2012, the project was published in book form in 2012 under the title Diario de una princesa montonera.

The story follows the progressive institutionalization of transitional justice measures at a crucial moment when memory discourse was shifting from a subaltern to a hegemonic position. The narrator witnesses how the State often instrumentalized memory politics and displaced the grassroots social movements that, from the days of the dictatorship, had been tasked with conserving the memory of the disappeared and advocating for the victims of State violence. In the text, this specific sociohistorical context is referred to as “a Disneyland of human rights,” with the role of princess reserved for the narrator, on account of her privileged status, which is to say her special usefulness to the Kirchner administration as the daughter of disappeared parents. The relationship of the protagonist to these developments, however, is far from a fairy tale. Deeply ambivalent, she welcomes juridical reform and institutional protections at the same time that she denounces the clumsy and self-interested implementation of human rights policies. Along the way, the novel also gives reader a glimpse into the gossip and in-fighting of activist movements in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Meanwhile, in Central America, Horacio Castellanos Moya was setting off a few explosions of his own.

In 2005, he published Insensatez, a highly transgressive novel that tells the story of the Informe del Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, or Remhi report, as it is known in English, which is also the story of the assassination of Bishop Gerardi, the head of the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala who oversaw the compilation of thousands of testimonies, two days after the report was published in book form as Guatemala Nunca Más.

The narrator of the novel is a Salvadoran journalist who, having trouble finding work in his home country for writing politically incorrect articles, is more than happy to take a job as a corrector of the text of the Remhi report. What seems to be a worthy cause, however, turns out to be far from ideal from an insider’s point of view. The narrator’s new employers exploit his labor, obligating him to work long hours at a rate much lower than he was originally offered. Despite all the outward signs of altruism, his co-workers are categorically motivated by self-interest. Furthermore, many of them have long and complicated histories with the Central American Right and perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

To make matters worse, the critique of the inconsistencies of human rights activism is coupled with the problematization, on a deeper narrative level, of the theoretical underpinnings of memory discourse, such as the epistemological value of testimony and the conceptual distinction between history, memory, and literature.

The narrator pioneers a highly unconventionally mode of engaging with the testimonies that he edits. Instead of engaging with their truth value, he judges these accounts of atrocity by strictly literary criteria. Fascinated by the syntactic anomalies of the testimonies and likening them to avant-garde poetry, he copies passages of testimony of rape, torture, and murder into his notebook based on exclusively aesthetic criteria. To complicate matters further, he then reads these passages aloud to friends and acquaintances whom he expects to impress with his aesthetic sensibilities but only manages to bewilder and offend with his political insensitivities. 

But it is not only the truth value of the testimonies that is called into question. The narrator is unable to determine, with any degree of certainty, what is happening around him. Something is afoot. He is surrounded by shady dealings but doesn’t understand their nature. He suspects that the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop has been infiltrated by the right, but he is unable to confirm his suspicions. The harder he tries to know, the further he gets from knowing. The more he interprets the signs, the more lost he gets in his own interpretations. As a result, the narrator-turned-detective finds himself increasingly tangled in a web of competing interpretations. With not as much as a foothold, he spins off into his own anxious reveries.

Looming behind these novels, of course, is Albertina Carri’s 2003 film Los rubios, a radical break with the aesthetic parameters and political imperatives of testimonial genres. Instead seeing through the transparent medium of testimony to the historical truth that supposedly lies behind it, the extraliterary reference, the thing-in-itself, Carri entraps her viewers in the artifice of testimonial filmmaking, metadiscurively drawing attention to its own mechanics of representation, its own opacities. Irreverently playing with a contentious historical past, she reminds us that the truth is not something that is “out there” but something that we construct discursively, through the medium of language, artistic or prosaic.

So, what are we to make of us of all this?

First of all, we can establish a pattern. We are not dealing with a few misfires, a handful of stray bullets that missed their target, a collection of anomalies. What we have, rather, is an emergent aesthetic, a coherent narrative program, with a shared sensibility and its own arsenal of literary devices.

Literature in line with this general program, which is certainly not limited to handful of examples given above, introduces, for example, an element of humor and playfulness which stands in sharp contrast to the solemnity of post-dictatorial and testimonial genres. The epic and eulogistic character of early post-dictatorship narrative falls to the wayside, making room to explore the possibilities of satire and parody. Play and profanation replace the previous tendency to sanctify victims and romanticize the political militancy of yesteryear. In addition, these novels call into question, in one way or another, the epistemological value of testimony by shifting the focus from historical reference point to the problematics of representation. Instead of idealizing a lost past, they problematize the post-dictatorial present and in particular its capacity to apprehend a historical past.

Source: from "Situations" collection of photographs by Liliana Porter

The most salient feature, however, of this type of literature is its tendency to poke fun at radical politics, in particular human rights movements and memory politics. The cliches and empty slogans of memory discourse are often the butt of the joke. Uncritical adherence to dogma and the self-interested ulterior motives of activists are also frequent targets.

Are we to assume, then, these critiques align with the political right?

No, that would be a grave error. Let there be no mistake on this point. These developments in post-dictatorship cultural production constitute a self-critique of the left from within its own ranks. In fact, it is the credentials of the artists that authorizes them to make these types of critiques in the first place.

In the case of Bruzzone and Pérez, it is their symbolic capital are children of disappeared parents that enables them to speak about their parents in a way that others wouldn’t be able to. In his youth, Castellanos Moya had collaborated as a journalist for revolutionary movements in El Salvador, and, for as caustic as they are, his critiques do not stem from an ideological affinity with the Right or an intent to legitimize the actions of the military but rather from disenchantment with the failure of both the revolutionary Left and human rights movements to live up to their lofty ideals. Though not a former combatant nor a family member of victims of State violence, Bisama’s countercultural credentials are solid enough to allow him to criticize the left without being mistaken for someone on the right.

This type of literary production does not so much constitute a break with the objectives of the left as a change in sensibility following crucial shifts in the social function and cultural meaning of literature.

During the wave of US-backed dictatorships that swept across Latin America in the second half of the 20^th century and in their immediate aftermath, literature acquired a special function that was every bit as social and political as it was aesthetic. In the chaos surrounding extreme State violence, what has been called the “limit situations” of history, it is often difficult to establish what happened, especially in a context in which the State is actively trying to conceal its crimes. In the juridical sense, as a part of the work of truth commissions, then, testimonial genres were crucial in collectively evidence and reconstructing an account of what happened, that is, what went wrong.

More generally, on a social level, literature can have a privileged role in processing traumatic historical events. This is the case because of literature’s ability to explore the limits of language, the zones where it gives way to non-language. Literary works often struggle to put into words that which cannot be said, that is, experiences that exceed in some way our capacity to signify them in language. Therein lies the connection with trauma, understood as an experience that cannot be accounted for in language and resists our capacity to signify it and our attempts to assign meaning to it. If trauma is an experience that cannot be accounted for in language and if literature is a tool to express that which cannot be put into language, then literature, so the reasoning goes, can offer the possibility to speak otherwise, that is, to narrate than which cannot otherwise be narrated, to express that which cannot otherwise be expressed. In a context of post-dictatorship, then, especially in the context of State policies of silence, forgetting and amnesty for the perpetrators of atrocities, Latin American literature acquired what Idelbar Avelar has denominated “a memory value.” Tasked with the daunting responsibility for conserving collective memory, advocating for victims of grave injustices, and working through historical trauma, literature was imbued with a mission, a special status, and a unique political function.  

Most of the authors of this type of literature were coming of age at this specific historical moment. They were living what is sometimes referred to as a cultural moment, with its own distinct political and aesthetic sensibilities, in this case marked by a sense of urgency and responsibility. There was a historical task to accomplish. It was time to step up to the plate. Many young people heeded the call, myself included. We went to the assemblies, we stayed up until dawn debating, we wrote pamphlets, we held signs at the marches, we spoke into megaphones until we lost our voices, we formed part of a movement.

Years passed and we repeated ourselves so often that many of us started speaking in cliches, in fossilized tropes, in highly conventionalized and sedimented rhetorical devices. We became predictable, to ourselves and others. Gradually, our words lost their effect, in public and in private. It was time to change, time to recalibrate, time to reinvent ourselves, time to renew our discursive and political strategies. The change, however, did not come from within. History beat us to the punch.

By the early two thousands, the grassroots social movements that struggled for memory, truth, and justice were progressively being displaced by the State and mass media. Transitional justice measures were being incorporated into State institutions. Trials were reopened against the perpetrators of atrocities. Memory museums opened their doors. Monuments to victims of atrocities speckled urban landscapes. Changes in public school curricula ensured that students learned about the recent past. Memory Studies became an academic discipline. Universities inaugurated programs dedicated to trauma, memory, and history. Memory discourse was going mainstream. A hot topic, it also became a hot commodity. An outpouring of novels, films, and television programs flooded a specialized market for cultural products related to the region’s violent past. These developments, of course, were testament to the success of the social movements that were being progressively displaced by the State and the culture industry. They did, however, provoke a crisis within the left, in particular within cultural production on the left.

If the State and mass media had taken over responsibility for the historical tasks previously allocated to literature, then post-dictatorship narrative all of a sudden found itself without its privileged social status and its unique political function. If on one hand this provoked a sense of disorientation and loss of identity, on the other hand it implied that literature was freed from certain previous formal and thematic constraints. No longer obligated to pay homage to victims, it was free to head off in new directions and explore uncharted territory.

This is precisely the moment when the type of narrative that I am discussing in this essay started to emerge. It is no accident. This type of literature emerged at that specific moment because it was the first time that it was able to do so. In this sense, as an aesthetics, it presupposes the success of grassroots social movements, the adoption of human rights policies by the State and media, in short, the shift of memory politics from a subaltern to a hegemonic position. This would explain why, for example, Castellanos Moya’s novel is set in Guatemala, where human rights had achieved bipartisan consensus, and not his own country, El Salvador, where memory politics had not achieved a hegemonic status.

Contextualized in this manner, which is to say historically, it is clear that these authors were not criticizing the content of human rights nor the need for memory, truth, and justice but, rather, its misappropriation by the State and the culture industry. Furthermore, their literature constitutes a self-critique of the left in the strict sense these authors are revising their own experiences as those who in one way or another had heeded the call, stepped up to the plate, assumed responsibility for the historical tasks at hand. 

Once relieved of the enormous responsibility that they had taken on their shoulders, these artists were able to laugh at what they had previously been unable to laugh at, namely themselves, the high humorlessness of the activist community, our doctrinal rigidity, our limitations, our insufferable self-righteousness, our susceptibility to secular religions, our youthful excess of passion, our naivety. For many of us, this came as a much-needed release. It also raised important questions about how to strategize on the left in a new historical context which precluded the empty repetition of gestures from past phases of struggle.

Nowadays, however, we have a new dilemma. If the type of literature that I am discussing here presupposes a specific set of conditions, let’s say those of The Pink Tide in Latin America, what happens when the tide recedes? What happens when the tide of authoritarian, of apologetics of political violence and dictatorship, swells high? What happens when monuments are being torn down and museums are closing their doors, when the recent past is removed from school curricula and university programs are defunded, when negationist discourses are legitimized by the upper echelons of the State. All of a sudden, the inside joke doesn’t seem quite as funny. Certainly, in this new context, we can’t continue to repeat the same gesture.

The question remains then. What comes next?

In the heat of the fight, from down in the trenches, dust far from settling, it is difficult to say. We do know, however, that memory is what comes afterwards, after the fight, and presently the fight is raging. The outcome, it seems, will be decided in the streets. It doesn’t seem that literature will be relegated to the sidelines, confined to the role of bystander, at least not in Latin America, where this has never been the case.