Omar Basabe, ed.
Memoriales a pura tripa (Memories Straight from the Gut)
Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 2003. Pp. 192. US $14.45

Reviewed by Roger Moore

In his widely read and accepted study Literature and Exile, Paul Ilie examined the literature of the Spanish Civil War from an unusual point of view. Instead of showing how the exiles had written in their exile or how the people who remained in Spain had written during the dictatorship, he undertook the difficult task of analyzing the effect the "lost" generation of writers had on Spain by their absence.

The situation is rather like that of a person with a missing tooth. When the tooth is extracted, the tongue feels perpetually for the empty socket and dwells on the missing space. When we lose a tooth, we know that the gap, however well we fill it, is really permanent and that the natural tooth can never really be replaced, even though the gap is filled. Imagine how different and difficult, how full of anguish, the situation would be if we knew that our missing tooth was neatly placed in the mouth of another mortal and was there performing the natural function it had once fulfilled for us!

In his first book, Memoriales a pura tripa (Memories Straight from the Gut), Omar Basabe has tried to bridge the gap that has been left by the disappearance not of one tooth, but of 30,000 Argentinians, some of them close friends, some of them acquaintances, missing, presumed dead, from the ranks of those who were seen as opponents to the Argentinian dictatorship. Basabe has tried to bridge that gap in unique fashion: by joining with the younger generation to write about the missing generation. The result is a collection of prose and poetry that has as its central focus the missing generation: los desaparecidos, "the lost ones."

Each writer provides a brief biography: birthplace, what they were doing during the dictadura, their relationship with the regime at the time. Since this is, for the greater part, a younger generation, they were mainly, but not always, outside the field of politics, attending school or being sheltered by their families or friends from the immediate impact of the desaparecidos. There are some very tough and hard-hitting revelations by people who were inside the process of revolt against the system, and some of the stories are truly haunting.

One young lady, after a two year struggle to establish her rights to her dead parents' house, digs in the flowerbed one day and discovers the books and records that lie buried in the garden, alleged evidence of her father's so-called dissident thoughts. One by one she lovingly exhumes them and places them back in her library. Her pride is to read them in the condition in which she found them. Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus: the authors may seem innocent enough to us; but then, we ourselves would have been considered intellectuals, at the cutting edge of dissidence, and would have been marked down for extermination.

Then there is the story of the bell stolen from the local school by two young children, one of whom later joins the ranks of the disappeared while the other walks into exile in Spain. On her return to Argentina, the exiled one discovers that the school from which she and her partner had stolen the bell is being reconstructed after its use as an internment camp. It has advertised for a school bell: so she digs up the one she stole from the place where it has lain buried throughout the disturbances and returns it to its original place and its original function, a potent symbol of all who slept through the dictadura and remained accidentally or deliberately unaware of all that was really happening.

The common link of the stories is the need for remembering, and not forgetting. Also there is the need for breaking the silence and letting the truth be known together with the necessity of destroying the word of the conqueror and allowing the conquered to recover their voices and speak. It is clearly essential for silent witnesses to be reborn and to tell us about their deaths or their escapes from death.

Omar Basabe's great achievement is to have preserved for us texts that bear witness and which might otherwise have been lost. Often these texts come from people who were not writers but who had jotted down their thoughts, their memories, their silent records, and had left them concealed, sometimes in an old cupboard, sometimes with a friend. Omar Basabe has unearthed these texts and added them to the growing body of literary material that forms what he calls the discursive strategies of the reconstruction through literature of Argentina's collective memory.