IN A NEW TRAVELING EXHIBITION, TWENTY-SEVEN LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS BEGIN THE LABOR OF RECLAIMING THE CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL REMAINS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S CAMPAIGNS OF REPRESSION.
DISCUSSED
Marjorie Agosin, Forces That Be, Zbigniew Herbert, Willed Ignorance, Amnesiac Amnesty, The North Dakota Museum of Art, The Power of Faces, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
When she showed me her photograph,
she said,
this is my daughter,
she still hasn’t come home
She hasn’t come home in ten years.
But this is her photograph.
Isn’t it true that she’s very pretty?
She’s a philosophy student
and here she is when she was
fourteen years old
and she had her first communion
starched and sacred.
This is my daughter
she’s so pretty
I talk to her every day
she no longer comes home late, and this is why I reproach her
much less
but I love her so much
this is my daughter
every night I say goodbye to her
I kiss her
and it’s hard for me not to cry
even though I know that she will not come
home late
because as you know, she has not come
home for years
I love this photo very much
I look at it every day
it seems that only yesterday
she was a little feathered angel in my arms
and here she looks like a young lady,
a philosophy student
but, isn’t it true that she’s so pretty,
that she has an angel’s face
that it almost seems as if she were alive?
*
That, from the Chilean poet Marjorie Agosin, is a poem titled “Buenos Aires.” In 2006, the citizens of Buenos Aires are marking the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of Argentina’s devastating Dirty War, which would presently come to see the disappearance of as many as thirty thousand of the country’s citizens—the term disappearance being both a euphemism and as such an evasion (for these people didn’t just disappear, they were disappeared, they were made to disappear) and also a cannily accurate description of their fate as seen from the point of view of their surviving friends and relatives: suddenly, horrifically, unaccountably (and this last was key), these dear people had just vanished without a trace and were no more. (The thirtieth anniversary of the launch of such campaigns of repression elsewhere in Latin America—Guatemala, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and so forth—is already several years past.)
Argentinean artist Nicolas Guagnini (b. 1966) calls his array of mysteriously black-streaked vertical white vinyl posts 30,000, an obvious allusion to the 30,000 citizens the Argentinean military arranged to be made to disappear following their 1976 coup, a number which included his own father, a journalist kidnapped the following year, never to be seen again, except now, in occasional glimpses, as the spectator circumnavigates the son’s array, and, suddenly, the father’s face snaps into startling focus.
It was a diabolically effective tactic. If, as has sometimes been noted, repression is the effort by the Forces That Be to take people who had started...
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Lawrence Weschler was for over twenty years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award (1998). His McSweeney's-published Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Recent books include a considerably expanded edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, comprising thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin; a companion volume, True to Life: Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney; and Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists. His twentieth book, an intimate biographical memoir of Oliver Sacks, is now available.
