Literary representations
of
traumatized memory, both personal and collective, remain the object of
study in
M. Edurne Portela’s
Displaced Memories: The Poetics of Trauma in
Argentine Women’s Writing.
The author examines the works of three Argentine
novelists—Alicia Partnoy, Alicia Kozameh and Nora Strejilevich—who
write of their gendered experiences
of imprisonment and torture from the dislocated space of exile. These authors, according to Portela, remain triply marginalized as
politically deviant,
female writers of prison literature. Their
testimonial
narratives, selected for “remembering and telling of a carceral experience lived by women under a
repressive
military regime” (28-29), are shown to illustrate the relationship
between violence, gender oppression and self-representation. She
argues
that the writing of these texts serves to combat terror, resist
oppression and
defy an imposed silence while enabling the reconstitution of
traumatized
subjectivity.
Portela divides Displaced
Memories into two distinct
parts. The book opens with a pair of introductory chapters that provide
historical and theoretical foundations for the in-depth literary
analyses that
follow. The remainder of the text is comprised of individual chapters
dedicated
to detailed critiques of Alicia Partnoy’s La Escuelita,
Alicia Kozameh’s Pasos bajo
el agua
and Nora Strejilevich’s Una sola muerte numerosa. A brief, three-page conclusion considers
these prison testimonies together. Portela
quickly
reiterates that each of these texts reveals writing to be a performance
or an
“acting-out” of trauma that can work to overcome authoritarianism,
fear and silence.
The first chapter of Displaced Memories offers a succinct yet
thorough overview of the legacy of
This historical synopsis
is
complemented with a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of theoretical
approaches to both prison literature and trauma writing. This second
chapter
summarizes theories of the female body, prison space, torture and
involuntary
exile while elaborating a genealogy of trauma theory from Sigmund Freud
to Ruth
Leys. Significantly, Portela (following
Leys,
Dominick LaCapra and Amy Hungerford) does
not
subscribe to Cathy Caruth’s understanding
of
trauma as an “unclaimed experience.” The
author explains that she rejects the
notion of trauma as an overwhelming event that the subject fails to
grasp and
which therefore remains beyond representation; instead, she contends
that
one’s traumatic past can be accessed through memory and that language
provides a form of control. In her view, the writing of literary texts
serves
as an “acting out” or a repetition of past trauma as well as a way
to “work through” and ultimately claim this experience (39).
Specifically, as Portela herself
elucidates,
“instead of providing an interpretation of trauma that considers
writing
a literal embodiment rather than a representation of the traumatic
experience,
I suggest an analysis of the symbolic uses of language that communicate
the
traces and/or symptoms of trauma” (40-41). This theoretical positioning
informs and shapes the literary interpretations undertaken throughout
the rest
of the book. The author believes that the writing process can be a
cathartic
exercise that provides a space for the traumatized subject to confront
and come
to terms with the past.
Portela’s literary
analyses begin with Alicia Partnoy’s
canonical The Little School (La Escuelita),
a text described as a work of grief. In “Re-enacting Memory,
Reconstructing
Resistance,” as suggested by its title, Portela
examines the structure and content of a trauma narrative that recounts
a crisis
of death yet simultaneously reveals a “hidden transcript” (81) of
active resistance. Like many critics before her, Portela
reads The Little School as a
redemptive narrative that highlights the prisoners’ dignity,
disobedience
and survival. That is, writing, which bears
witness to abuses
and recovers lost voices, brings order to a chaotic world and makes
trauma readable.
What Portela adds to the large body of
existing
criticism of Partnoy’s text is a
discussion of
the revisions made in the 2006 Spanish version (including changes to
the
subtitle, the introduction, the appendices, and the placement of
illustrations).
She notes that the more recent Argentine publication emphasizes the
political
aspects of the work, consciously recuperating the discourse of 1970s
leftist
militancy and privileging the collective over the personal.
In contrast, Displaced
Memories delivers a startlingly pessimistic
interpretation of Alicia Kozameh’s Pasos bajo el agua, a
text that despite its autobiographical
attributes is appropriately labeled a fictional testimony. Portela’s
study encompasses both the verbal and the visual elements of the novel
while maintaining
a particular interest in figurative language. Portela
points to the singularity of Kozameh’s
text
whereby the traumatizing event is not incarceration but rather the
moment of
release and freedom, the reality of which remains overwhelming and
incomprehensible
to the protagonist, Sara. As Portela’s
chapter
title “Uncanny Returns” anticipates, encounters with familiar,
everyday objects (such as cats) remain frightening and disorienting
after
imprisonment. Similarly, the circularity of the fragmented text, in Portela’s estimation, represents a traumatic
loop
from which Sara is unwilling and unable to escape. The protagonist is
shown to
be fixated on the past, to suffer survivor guilt and to long for the
bonding
and solidarity fostered by incarceration. Freedom, insists Portela,
is felt to be a betrayal. Furthermore, in this overtly self-reflexive
text the
protagonist fails to find liberation or comfort in the writing act.
Ultimately,
Portela concludes, Pasos suggests that the attempt
to engage and work through trauma via the written word remains not
merely
difficult and problematic, but nearly impossible.
Portela’s study of
the relationship between trauma and writing culminates with an
examination of
Nora Strejilevich’s complex
autobiographical
tale, Una sola
muerte numerosa.
This novel, more temporally distant, reflects society as a whole
in its
representation of the dictatorship and its aftermath. In her analysis, Portela first traces the destruction of the body
and
concomitant devastation of the family; she then focuses upon the
subsequent
reconstruction of individual and familial identity through memory work. In contrast to Pasos, Portela
discovers in Una
sola muerte numerosa
a representation of the writing process as a
refuge whereby literary representation becomes both a political act and
a vital
component of the mourning process. Again, the chapter title, “From
Victim
to Agent,” aptly reflects the author’s interpretation of the text.
In short, with its
comprehensive
summaries of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to
literary
representations of