1 post tagged “vietnam war”
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.
