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Introduction
How
do events under the Argentine military dictatorship of
1976 to 1983 still shape Argentina's literature and culture?
Should modern writers focus on this "most savage
tragedy" or is it now time to forget? Here, Argentine
authors and journalists, using extracts from their works
and exclusive interviews, explore this issue.
Between 1976 and 1983, a state of fear existed in Argentina.
Under a fog of suffocating language about The Process
of National Reorganisation, and of Social Normalisation,
the armed forces of the state terrorised Argentina into
conformity.
From
the union to the university, the organised and the educated
in the most literate society in South America were all
suspected of “subversion”. The dirty war, as it was called
after de Gaulle’s phrase 'la sale guerre' for his colonial
war in Algeria, was against Argentina’s own citizens.
And it contaminated the language.
"People
have tried through their imagination to deal with this
horror. There have been all sorts of ways. Satirical approaches,
black humour, realistic.
It’s been an obsession and quite understandably, because
it does defy common sense. It defies imagination.
There’s something totally obscene, totally perverse. I
don’t know of a writer who hasn’t tried in some way to
deal with this. It is haunting.
Of course the public feels the opposite. The public wants
to forget it. So you find that talking to average people
on the street, they don’t want to know about this.
This is a further stimulant to the writer, who wants the
public to remember. To force them to remember.
I think these are the problems that have occurred with
the Holocaust."
Professor Jason Wilson, University
College London
 Listen
to the radio programme:
Latin
American Words - Argentina.
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2000 |
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"Nobody
knows how many died in the Dirty War, some say,
maybe 30,000 disappeared. People do not know and
that anxiety, that worry, still haunts Argentina."
Nick Rankin, presenter and producer Latin American
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