Untertitel (300)
0:00Imagine you're a kid doing the usual
0:01[music] kid things, building forts,
0:04making mud pies, drawing this for some
0:06[music] reason. But even in the bubble
0:08of childhood, you feel it. The secrets,
0:11the silence, [music] the fear, there's a
0:13dark shadow around you. You can't see
0:16its whole shape or tell what's casting
0:18It's only later that you understand
0:21while you were learning your ABCs, your
0:23country was falling apart. That's the
0:25experience for kids growing up during a
0:27war or a dictatorship. [music]
0:28Now, flash forward a few decades and
0:31those children have grown up and are
0:33carrying around an adult's understanding
0:35of what happened with a kid's memory of
0:37it. How do they make sense of the two?
0:40How do they honor the memory of terrible
0:42events that they don't fully remember?
0:45Hi, I'm Kurly Velasquez and this is
0:47Crash Course Latin American Literature.
0:54The 1970s and 80s were turbulent times
0:57in Latin America. And I don't just mean
0:59the fashion, I mean politically.
1:01Governments and rebel groups played
1:03tugofwar for power, often funded in part
1:06by international parties with their own
1:08interests. And these shakeups came with
1:10brutal violence and human rights abuses
1:12from all sides. By 1977, only a handful
1:16of nations in Latin America hadn't
1:19gotten the dictator makeover, which is
1:21hideous, by the way, never in style.
1:24This means that a whole generation of
1:26kids grew up in the shadow of dictators.
1:30And some of those kids went on to be
1:31writers, producing a wave of what's
1:34called postmemorial literature, texts
1:36that reflect on the memory of collective
1:39trauma. In Latin America, this genre has
1:42come to be known as literatura de los,
1:45literature of the children. And often it
1:48blurs the lines between fact and
1:50fiction. Take Alejandro Samra. He wasn't
1:53even born yet when his home country of
1:54Chile fell to a military coup led by
1:57Agusto Pinoet in 1973. By the time
2:00Zambra was a year old, the regime had
2:03arrested and tortured around 130,000
2:06people. Early on, the government
2:08detained and murdered Binochess
2:10political opponents in the national
2:12soccer stadium. [music] Within a few
2:14years, kids were eating ice cream cones
2:16in that same stadium. So, in a way,
2:19state violence was all Zambra knew
2:21growing up, but he didn't really know
2:24it. Not with all the silence and fear
2:27surrounding it. Zambra's 2011 novel,
2:30Formas de Volva Casa, Ways of Going
2:32Home, deals with the struggle of knowing
2:35and [music] not knowing. Half of it's
2:38told from the perspective of a nameless
2:409-year-old in 1985 at the height of
2:43Pino's power. [music] The other half
2:45from the perspective of a nameless
2:47novelist in 2010 who's writing the story
2:50[music] of that 9-year-old. Like Zambra,
2:53the novelist grew up under Pinoett's
2:54regime and has burning questions from
2:56his past. His search is haunted not just
3:00by what he doesn't know, but by what's
3:03been disappeared from collective memory.
3:05It's not a stretch to say that the
3:07novelist character is a standin for
3:08Zambra, a novel about a novelist who
3:11represents the real novelist. Kind of
3:14trippy, right? This framing makes ways
3:16of going home an example of
3:17metaphiction, a self-aware literary
3:20style that emphasizes its own creation.
3:23And by using this style, Zambra shows us
3:25that writing fiction is a way of
3:27reconstructing the past. But there's a
3:30catch. While the boy in the story
3:31eventually learns some big important
3:33truths, the novelist never gets [music]
3:36answers. And that uncertainty is kind of
3:38the point. Zombra's English translator
3:40Megan McDow observes that Zambra has a
3:43bone to pick with the traditional novel
3:45and what she calls its sure declarative
3:47voice. That novel belongs to our
3:50parents, the novelist character says. As
3:52for his generation, experimental work
3:54that exposes its own fictionality
3:57ironically feels more truthful, which
3:59makes sense, right? When a false version
4:01of the truth has been imposed on you,
4:04you might find black and white certainty
4:06to be less honest than the messiness of
4:09not knowing, not knowing if you can
4:11trust your own memories, not knowing if
4:13you can trust the official record, and
4:15not knowing what really happened to
4:17people you knew. And when something like
4:19this has happened to you, can you write
4:22about anything else? Let's get the curly
4:24notes on an author who asks that very
4:283 months before Felix Bone was born in
4:32Argentina's military police detained his
4:34dad. Not long after, they took his mom
4:37too. His parents were among tens of
4:40thousands of people who were kidnapped
4:42[music] and disappeared by the military
4:44dictatorship of Jorge Videla, who's been
4:47nicknamed the Hitler of the Pampas. All
4:49told, Videla's regime murdered or
4:51disappeared tens of thousands of
4:53Argentinians [music] in an attempt to
4:55crush opposition and spread terror. Not
4:59only that, but many of the regime's
5:01victims included [music] pregnant women
5:03who were forced to give birth in secret
5:05detention centers. Their babies taken
5:07away and illegally adopted, sometimes by
5:10the same people who had detained or
5:12killed their parents. [music] In his
5:14fiction, Rousona creates characters who
5:16are the children of the disappeared.
5:18Like in the short story and mama, other
5:21photos of mom, the protagonist is trying
5:24to understand his dead mother by talking
5:26to her ex-boyfriend. And in his novel
5:28Lostopos, the moles, the narrator is the
5:31son of disappeared parents. But in this
5:34story, he doesn't take the typical
5:36journey to uncover the past. Instead, he
5:39goes on a surreal quest that actually
5:41has nothing or everything to do with his
5:44parents. As the scholar Hordana Blehar
5:46puts it, Brous challenges the idea that
5:49all children of disappeared parents are
5:52destined to go to the same places and
5:55ask the same questions. Even when a
5:57terrible thing has happened to lots of
5:59people, the way it's remembered and
6:02experienced is still individual to each
6:05person. And literature can give us a way
6:07of understanding that by feeling what
6:09it's like to live a life that isn't
6:11ours. That's especially important for
6:13elevating women's perspectives whose
6:16stories tend to be undertold in
6:18narratives of war. Let's take a look at
6:20Claudia Ernnandez's 2017 novel Rosa
6:23Tumbakma, translated as Slash and Burn.
6:26It was inspired by the Salvadorian civil
6:28war, something that personally affected
6:31Nandez and my family, too. It was a
6:3412-year conflict between El Salvador's
6:36authoritarian government and rebel
6:38groups that banded together in
6:40resistance. They called themselves El
6:43Farabundo Marti Para Liber National, the
6:47Farabundo Marti National Liberation
6:49Front. And within the movement, women
6:52took on roles as both organizers and
6:55fighters. Meanwhile, international
6:57powers treated the whole thing like a
6:59game of 3D chess. Cuba and the Soviet
7:02Union bankrolled the FMLN while the US
7:04sent billions of dollars to government
7:06militias. By the time a peace deal was
7:11tens of thousands of Salvadorans had
7:14been killed and hundreds of thousands
7:16had fled the country, including my own
7:18family. Now, in Slash and Burn, El
7:20Salvador isn't actually named. In fact,
7:23no one is. There's a very hush- hush
7:26vibe surrounding everyone's identity,
7:28but the novel focuses on an unnamed
7:31heroine who's going through it. First,
7:33she's a young girl dodging the rebels.
7:35Then she's pregnant and fighting
7:37alongside them. Then her baby is sold to
7:40fund the rebellion. Disappearance here
7:42becomes intimate. Even the bond between
7:45mother and child isn't safe. And the
7:48threat of sexual violence follows the
7:50woman throughout her life. Not just her,
7:53but everyone named sister, daughter, or
7:56mother. We're left with the sense that
7:59all women live with this threat. The
8:01novel continues into the war's aftermath
8:03where our narrator is the mother of four
8:05daughters. Her memories overlap with
8:07their childhoods in unexpected moments
8:10like when she realizes her daughter's
8:12bright pink backpack would have made her
8:14an easy target as a rebel. These echoes
8:17show us that in some ways the past lives
8:19on in the present. Another novel that
8:21unpacks women's experiences of war is
8:24Lasandre de Laora, Blood of the Dawn by
8:27Peruvian author Claudia Salasar Gimenez.
8:31This one shares the perspectives of
8:32three very different female characters,
8:35a photojournalist named Melanie, an
8:38indigenous farmer named Modesta, and a
8:40social worker named Marcela. This novel
8:43is set at the height of Elmpo demoed,
8:46the time of fear in 1980s Peru. On one
8:49side of the conflict, there was the
8:50Peruvian military known for torturing
8:52[music] and killing their own citizens.
8:54On the other, there was Sandero
8:56Luminoso, Shining Path, a militant group
8:59hellbent on revolution and willing
9:01[music] to murder civilians to get
9:03there. Caught between the two were
9:04everyday people just trying to [music]
9:06survive. The novel is composed in
9:08fragments that weave through the three
9:10women's lives. Modesta's [music]
9:12story is written in the second person,
9:15inviting us to identify with her as
9:17[music] her village is terrorized by the
9:19shining path. Meanwhile, we watch as
9:21Marcella is swayed to the path's cause,
9:24[music] renaming herself Comrade Martha.
9:27And then there's Melanie, who's trying
9:29to shake her government escort and
9:30document the truth of what's happening.
9:33Since she's the one carrying the camera,
9:35we might take her to be the witness and
9:37[music] memory keeper. But she reminds
9:40us that she represents just one lens and
9:43it has limits. These are photos that
9:45push you to look outside the frame
9:48[music] that gesture at all that hasn't
9:50been captured. How much is outside the
9:52frame? What stories will get away? And
9:56that's the struggle of memory, right?
9:58You can't hang on to everything and you
10:01can't always see the full picture.
10:03Everything outside of the frame is
10:06what's been disappeared by censorship,
10:08by fear, and by time. And the camera,
10:11like the novel, becomes a way to point
10:13at what's gone. Ultimately, the three
10:15women's paths meet in the mountains, but
10:17they also meet in violence. Even though
10:20they have different levels of
10:21involvement in the conflict, they all
10:23suffer the same brutal fate. In an
10:26interview, Salasar Himenez said that
10:28though writing about violence is not an
10:30easy process to endure. It has to be
10:32done. We cannot relegate these stories
10:35to silence. And that means a lot to me
10:37as a reader and as a Latin American.
10:40It's heavy to revisit these histories,
10:42but it also feels important because it's
10:45a part of me. In the shadow of
10:47dictatorships, conflict, and war, many
10:51Latin American authors wrestle not just
10:53with the memory of trauma, but with the
10:55challenge of memory itself.
10:58How do you remember when the truth is
10:59obscured by fear or silence or lies?
11:03When some questions don't have answers,
11:05and how do you put those memories into
11:07words? Writing and reading can be
11:09healing, a way of reconstructing
11:11history, naming what's been disappeared,
11:14and finding answers for how to live here
11:16now. Next time, we'll keep addressing
11:18ghosts of the past by talking about
11:20horror and Latin American literature. Go
11:22hug the people you love, live your best
11:25life, and I'll see you next time. Thanks
11:27for watching this episode of Crash
11:28Course Latin American Literature, which
11:30was filmed at the Carlos Hernandez
11:32studio in Indianapolis and was made with
11:34all the help of these kind people. If
11:37you want to help keep Crash Course free
11:38for everyone forever, you can join our
11:41community on Patreon. Oh, and if you're
11:43interested in learning about some of the
11:45topics covered in this episode, we
11:47pulled together a playlist you can dig
