27 posts tagged “argentina”
Mercedes Sosa died. I really liked her, not only her music, but her story. Forced into exile in the 1980s by the military regime of Argentina, she returned to Argentina in the late 80s a huge star. And she continued making music, despite poor health.
Because I work in front of this blasted computer day and night, I have to choose my music carefully. For most of my work, I can't listen to music with words in English. So I listen to classical or jazz (but not vocal jazz); I listen to tango music. But sometimes I listen to singing in other languages. For some reason, I can tune out the words (or not understand the words) and I can work without much problem.
So lately I've been loving Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa. I don't think she records anymore (she's in her 70s by now) but in the 70s and early 80s she did all this great folk-y kind of music (in Spanish) that is so perfect for working.
I love this song here (ignore the cheesy karaoke videoish thing). One thing I love about Argentina: what other country produces "pop" singers (old though she may be) who write and perform songs about poets? This song (as much as I can make out in my awful Spanish) is about the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni. She herself deserves an entire post (a very influential poet in the early 20th century who was the first real female superstar of the literary set in Latin America; she committed suicide her 40s). Sosa's song is melodic and hypnotizing, as is much of her other music.
Zip.ca (Canada's version of Netflix) is great! I get to see so many movies that I wouldn't otherwise. Like 2002's Common Ground, by Argentine director, Adolfo Aristarain. Engaging movie about a literature professor forced to retire in the middle of Argentina's financial crisis in 2001. Scrambing to find a way to survive, he and his wife move to the countryside near Cordoba where they attempt to start a lavender farm for perfume-making.
Sounds dull, but in the process, the director explores what it means to be made obsolete in a fast-moving world, why some choose to "sell out," how ideals can distract one from the real essence of living, how the left has largely become a symbolic, castrated and anachronistic position in today's world (unfortunately), how one lives in exile, and what marriage and partnership really mean in determining one's fate.
A really lovely movie that avoids the hokey by meditating on some very intelligent ideas.
Though I've been really busy the last couple of weeks and don't see any slacking off in the near future, I've been managing to squeeze in a lot of reading.
Saturday I read this excellent little book by Adolfo Bioy Casares:
I love these new editions that NYRB is bringing out. They have really interesting introductions and this one is no exception: the prologue is by Borges, actually, and the novel itself is like a cross between Robert Louis Stevenson and Franz Kafka. It has this naive sort of quality to the writing like Kafka's writing does (though his stories themselves are not what one would call full of innocence). This novel is often considered to be one of the most highly underrated novels of the 20th century and the fact that it was written in Spanish didn't help. The book is set on some mystical island where a mysterious group of travelers is living the same day again and again (pre-figuring so much modernist and post-modernist plot techniques), while the narrator looks on, trying hard to inject himself into the action, though no one sees him. If it sounds kind of "fantastical" it is and Borges (who wrote his own share of the fantastic) admires this quality in the book.
The writer, Bioy Casares, was an Argentine writing leader, married to Sylvina Ocampo (sister of Victoria Ocampo, one of the most important 20th century Argentine writers) and very close friends with Borges. This is his most well-known work, though he wrote many short stories and novellas throughout his long career.
Also got about halfway through Tomás Eloy Martinez's odd novel, Santa Evita, a fictionalized account of the "afterlife" of Eva Duarte Perón (Evita), though the book is almost non-fiction since the details are quite factual and the writer himself refers to himself and the writing of this book (and his earlier works, as well) and how he constructed and researched the story. It's a really interesting book that lapses into journalism and memoir and biography and even sections of a screenplay.
I'm no fan of anything Perón, and certainly not Eva Perón, but the book really plays with and explores the "Cult" qualities that her name and image conjured and still conjure. In the process, the author questions what it means to "tell a story" about reality, about how to portray something as complex and contradictory as a human life on a page when nothing we do in life is centered textually. I'm really loving this book. And some interesting "snippets":
- While Eva Perón lay dying, many of those who idolized her attempted to do things to get noticed by her. This was before Guinness, but many of them were trying to "break" records: walk around the Obelisk more times than had ever been done before, go without food longer than anyone had, walk across the Pampas further than anyone had, all in the hopes of having her "notice" them. They'd repeat her name and some would pray to God through her since she was believed to be practically a god by all the "greasers" (as Eva Perón called the poor of her country).
- After she died, three wax copies of her body were made in case possession of her corpse ever became political. After Juan Perón fled the country (a coup, in 1955) he made no arrangements for her real body and it traversed the globe. She was buried in Milan in secrecy and her grave wasn't discovered again until the early 1970s.
- Between May 1952 and July 1954, the Vatican received over 40,000 letters reporting miracles and visions associated with her in an attempt to get her canonized.
- In 1974 when her body was brought back to Buenos Aires, two of the guards in the van with her corpse which was on the way to the airport in Barcelona got into an argument about a gambling debt. In the back of the van, they both took out guns and began shooting at each other, the van eventually crashing into a fireball, killing both guards, though leaving the coffin unscratched.
- In 1976, when the body was being moved from the Argentine Presidential Palace to Recoleta Cemetery, two guards in the back held ceremonial bayonets. As the car crossed Avenida Julio 9, the driver suddenly had a heart attack and slammed into another car, the soldier's bayonets pierced each others' jugular veins and all three died. Again, the coffin with the body inside was unharmed.
I finished this book in the bath tonight that I loved. I was battling with myself the last three days: wanting to read it, but not wanting it to end.
Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton is 20 years old and records a time in Argentina's history that most would rather forget. It recounts the disappearances, the murders, the pain and oppression of the country's "Dirty War." It's a novel, most definitely not a "history," but at its core is a story of an ordinary Argentine who is both blessed and cursed: cursed in that his wife (and later, his daughter) is "disappeared," but blessed in that he has detailed visions about the fates of the thousands of others who have disappeared.
It's a story about imagining (as the title suggests), about the inability we all have to tell our own stories adequately. Carlos can see what happens to strangers: their torture and torturers, the details of their kidnappings, of their deaths or escapes or, rarely, their releases. But he can't see what has happened to his own wife or daughter. It's his story that escapes him. And the novel is layered with "tellings". He tells relatives about their missing son or daughter, though they are plagued by this knowledge and don't know how to incorporate this telling into their lives and the fact that they must live without their loved one. Carlos' story is told by the narrator, Martin, whose own story is shrouded and vague. In Imagining Argentina, the very country has trouble telling its own story.
This notion of "the disappeared" has always been something of a minor obsession of mine. I remember being a teenager and reading a few books about this time in Argentine history, terrified at the notion that someone could just vanish in the middle of the night, taken away by government soldiers, never to be heard from again. And to live with that space in your life: that your uncle or brother or wife or son may be suffering unspeakably in some basement that you may even drive past every day on your way to work. It's something that a country can't overcome easily, no matter how much they struggle. And it's still feels like a painful wound that hasn't healed, or at least I got that sense when we were there: stories in the paper, the mothers who still march at Plaza de Mayo in remembrance, the occasional person who still occasionally is disappeared.
From the mid-1970s until 1983, perhaps as many as 30,000 people disappeared during Argentina's dirty war. Up to 400,000 were imprisoned, many tortured. Of course, many countries suffered during this time: China's Cultural Revolution (which lasted roughly about the same time frame, though a few years earlier) didn't cause people to disappear but it turned families and schools and cities against each other. I heard so many stories of loved ones put into prison or killed or sent away for some imaginary crimes. A grandfather put into prison for drinking decadent western whiskey. A mother murdered for coming from a rich family. An uncle who went crazy when his students turned against him. This time in China's history feels "real" to me because I can put a human face on it and as I sit here, I can think of 4 specific individuals I know whose lives were directly affected by the tumultuous happenings. That's why "telling" is so important, not only for people to understand, but for people to be able to remember.
I was thinking about this afternoon when I heard this documentary about the 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The hearings that were held in 1970 (a few years later) in order to establish what happened, why it happened and who was responsible seem to strike resonant chords which much that has been happening in Iraq. All those stories told about the My Lai massacre, all those soldiers who recounted their stories, all those officials hearing details of massacres and rapes, etc.etc. Yet, somewhere along the line in the last 40 years we stopped telling that story. And we forgot. I wonder how many people today even know what the My Lai massacre was.
Argentina's "Dirty War" was always a bit far removed since I don't have any close friends who are Argentine to ask. But after reading this book, I feel a bit closer to "feeling it." Not the same thing, I realize, but that's why I love reading: it inches you towards something you can never experience and helps you understand it in a specific way. And the fact that this novel, Imagining Argentina, is written by an American only underscores its message: only someone on the periphery, someone once removed from the emotion, can truly "tell" a story. I don't know if that's true here, too, but it's an interesting dimension to this novel about "tellings."
And it's in telling and retelling stories like Argentina's "Dirty War" that we know not to repeat those mistakes, to know the "warning signs" when a society begins slipping into reactionary chaos.
so our days in argentina are coming to an end. i can't believe these months have gone by so quickly! we fly back to montreal tomorrow, back to winter, back to real life. we may come back. but probably not (though ask me in eight weeks when there is a foot of snow and the wind chill is minus 50). things i'll miss about this city:
- racing around the streets at night in a taxi.
- cheap beef!
- tango music floating out of the most random locations.
- dorrego square on sundays.
- crazy florida street on a weekday afternoon.
- beautiful doorways and arches on every street.
- dulce de leche on just about anything one can eat.
- good cheap wine.
- small cafes and agua con gas with coffee served on little trays.
- fantastic and hip cool restaurants with great music and excellent food.
but: we miss too many things about home, not the least of which is our friends. but it's too loud here. it's too hard to cook with much variety (we won't eat pasta for a month probably once we're back home) and we eat stir fry twice a week just so that our overly-carnivored diet can include some vegetables. otherwise it'd be beef and tomato sauce for every meal!
it's too hard to get books here and the mail service is corrupt and dishonest unreliable. masa's brother spent $150 sending some japanese books from tokyo here and they never made it, just vanished somewhere. others, too, have told us not to have anything mailed (or even fed exed!) here because things have a way of never making it...(what a bunch of postal workers in argentina need with 15 detective novels in japanese is beyond me). and books in the shops are crap for the most part, forget about getting anything specific unless you're prepared to wait 4 months and pay through the nose (a USED paperback marquez novel at walrus books: $25US! same book i can buy at the word in montreal for $4.)
nightlife here is hard to manage: no one goes out until 1 or 2 at the earliest. that's fine now and then, but it's this way every night! i do like the eating dinner at 10 or 11 bit and we often stay up until 3 or 4 normally. but i prefer going out at 9, having dinner a few drinks and being at home by midnight or 1. staying out until 6 or 7 is something i did enough of when i was 25. too old for that shit now (though it's not an age thing here, everyone in this country seems to live like a rock star -- only without the money).
one thing i find amazing about this country (this spanish guy we met the other night was complaining about this, actually, but he was a real ass) is the intellectual tradition that is such a part of daily life. people KNOW their writers here, parks are named after poets (the alfonsina storni children's park in colonia), literature sells, people on the buses read poetry. i love that. in north america if you even mention the word poetry people's eyes glaze over "ooohhhh poetry is, like, so hard and stuff! is that paris hilton on the cover of 'us weekly'?" it's been written about before, but the "dumbing down" of society is truly appalling and i am consistently shocked at how little people (in north america) know of anything outside their little urban worlds. i'll be in a room and people can talk for 45 minutes about their new iPhone or some stupid piece of technology (or, as i intimated before, celebrity gossip) but mention a writer or a political movement and everyone shuts down like you're speaking some archaic form of swahili. (i'm speaking generally, of course.)
but intellectual tradition is alive and well in this country. culture and creativity are in every part of this city, in the local designers' boutiques on cordoba, in the tango dancers on defensa on the weekends, in the young woman reading lorca on subte line B, in the samba singer on estados unidos on saturdays, in the necklace-makers selling their wares from blankets along calle florida...
we sure are gonna miss this place! some last minute pics:
on wednesday, a beautiful clear early summer day. especially lovely since it's now thursday and it's been pouring down rain all day. not many of these walk and shoot days left....(one day i will write a post about buenos aires: the ultimate walking city):
1) parque lezama and a monument to one of those spanish conquistadors. oh, yeah, and some native woman suffering behind him. i don't really get the "focus" of this monument: was the statue added back in the day when people still thought the europeans brought civilization here, then the relief statue added later (80s?) when people realized the spaniards weren't such nice guys...? both add dimension to the other, yet also detract from one another. an odd combination of monument and political statement...
2) statue of mother theresa. at least i assume it's mother theresa, i couldn't find a plaque or anything anywhere. looks like her, i guess...not a very good statue, actually. kind of creepy. in parque lezama...
3) a russian orthodox church. lovely painted blue onion domes. didn't go inside...
4) cool old skyscraper from c1940(?). looks like the building where clark kent and louis lane worked....
5) a dragonfly!
ah, democracy! that blessed institution so many have fought and died for. in considering all that we do in the name of democracy (invade iraq, get snippy with china, waggle our finger at cuba), it's amazing how terribly flawed it is.
in 1956, argentine writer jorge luis borges was faced with a dilemma. perón had fled the country, ousted by a sudden coup that had little popular support. but the intellectuals of argentina (largely part of the ruling oligarchy that had controlled argentina for generations) who all despised perón, worried for the future of the state as perón consolidated more and more power into his own hands, shutting down newspapers that voiced opinions against him, firing anyone not perceived as loyal. democracy itself was being destroyed by perón, a democratically elected leader.
here is where borges ran into a problem: if the intellectuals and aristocracy banned peronism in order to "save" democracy, they would also undermine democracy by the very act of banning a political party, particularly one that had such broad support amongst the working class poor. were argentina to have another election, even with peron's absence, the dictator would win by a landslide.
borges, an influential and powerful writer at the time, signed on to the government action which effectively banned all mention of perón, any displaying of his picture (and that of his dead demi-goddess wife, evita), as if he could just be wiped clean from the political landscape. this was done "for the good of the people" who, as we know all too well today, often don't know what's best for them.
undermining democracy in order to ensure its survival.
(incidentally, it didn't really work and argentina slipped into a long decline politically which lasted well into the 1980s)
this is all on my mind the last few weeks as argentines head to the polls next week: the candidate expected to win by a landslide is christina kirchner, the wife of the current president. no one is accusing the kirchners of being undemocratic, but there is much speculation of a specific "plan" by this power couple to tighten their grip on the "pink house" (argentina's equivalent of the white house): hubby served his term, she does her two, he does two more, etc.
that in and of itself should be enough to make at least small alarm bells tinkle, but christina kirchner has largely neglected argentina in her "campaigning" (newspaper photos always show her in the US or europe, clutching her expensive handbags and looking coyly at the camera, her gloppy makeup always so over the top). she hasn't really come up with any "plan" in terms of economic development. she has no platform really: she is expected to win largely because her husband served his term without any major upheavels (though plenty of allegations of corruption).
i am not argentine, i do not understand the subtle appeals (or the unsubtle appeals, for that matter) that the candidates use to communicate to their constituents. there are several far more qualified and articulate than ms kirchner. something seems amiss to me in all this.
true, ms kirchner is experienced politically (more so than her husband, or so she often says); but this is a country in transition and a strong economic platform is needed: the life of the urban poor is bone grinding and appalling. for all her flaws, at least eva perón understood that it was through the poor that popular support was cultivated. the kirchners seem (and i could be missing it, for sure) to say little about the poor...
why do we care so much what "polls" say (X% of americans think ABC) when so often, "the people" don't know what the hell they're doing?
rupe left today. sad, and we all got a bit teary as we put him in a taxi to the airport. it sucks that he lives so far away from us and it'll be a year until we can see him again; this, after spending nearly every day and evening with him for a month!
great to have such a good friend in my life. and he and masa get along so well...
wow, i've known rupert going on 20 years! damn, that is a long time...
next year we're thinking about france or possibly australia, but we'll see....
today: la boca. not much there: very touristy and a cop stopped us once we wandered away from the tourist area and said "no no go this way. is veeeeerrrry dangeroos!" so we turned around and walked the other day. mmmm. this kind of irks me.
i suppose he knows what he's talking about and, no doubt, it's not the best part of town. still. seemed a bit...i don't know...paranoid. but glad he was there to warn us, i guess.
anyway, we made it home in one piece...just in time to see rupert off.
wow, it's going to be quiet for the next two weeks!
ah. so rupe goes back home tomorrow. hard to believe that a month has passed so quickly and we've fallen into a rhythm so that it feels like we've all lived here forever.
but part of the charm of a place is the knowledge that life here is temporary.
so today we spent the last full day in a relatively normal way (though i didn't WORK today which was not normal lately):
sipping, shopping, napping, eating, walking, gawking, touristing, taxi-ing.
now it's 12.11am and i've got my usual monday late night shift. quiet here now. masa upstairs sleeping; rupe at his place probably still eating....hahahaha
damn, it's going to be strange the next two weeks without him living just two blocks away!
buenos aires so far: havanna (dulce de leche alfajores), tandoor (tikka masala mmmm), photographing everything and sundry, bolivar y brasil, el hipopatamo, pride cafe, flux, viamonte, green bamboo, lugar b&b, dorrego square, and so much more....
m & i have two more weeks here...don't wanna leave.
pics from today....
