Sensible/visible: The Children of Forced Disappearance Victims in Hasta que mueras, by Raquel Robles (2019) and Yo la quise (2020) by Josefina Giglio

Abstract

The literature of the children of forced disappeared victims, including that of Raquel Robles and Josefina Giglio, who went through the traumatic experience of the last Argentine civic-military ecclesial business dictatorship in 1976, has been the subject of multiple approaches by vernacular critics (Reati, Domínguez, Basile), or foreign (García Díaz, Bolte, Gatti, et al). In this study, I name the group as lowercase in order to displace the institutional character that, although important, can reduce the perspective that I am trying to display. This perspective focuses on questioning what the writing of children of the disappeared contributes in terms of complexity to literary studies within the framework of memory-literature articulation. Thus, I notice an accumulation of writings, whether in the multiple arc of narrative or poetry, where the assumption of the voice that enunciates, in some cases, works the experience in the first person from styles already registered in literature, although the experiences of the authors enhance writings that are difficult to place in literary trends. As if literature were to make visible the very tension that its politicity implies from the narrative voices with one foot in the lived experience and the other in the creative laboratory; It is also necessary to point out that this experience places state politics as the central node since it reconfigured the life not only of the authors but of all society, in this case Argentina. In the selected novels we are faced with what Jacques Rancière (2015, 2011) understands as a principle of action, from which neither literature nor readers can be far from a new ethos. From this it is possible to connect with certain experiences that emerge in this case from both novels and that affect our perception of reality and history. Argentine literature, born in the very bosom of the nation-state, is not the same after the sons once they intervened in the street in the second half of the 90s of the last century to demand justice, they speak in the new millennium and write experiences that affect us all, and that reshape the ways of thinking politics, literature and history.