The Brooklyn Rail

from Time Ripens on the Counter: A Literary History of the Americas 1971-1994

Curator Rachel Weiss, in discussing Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light writes that “We need a way of rendering visible that doesn’t have a horizon or, anyhow, doesn’t have one yet.” She then goes on to write that in order for story to resist narration, the filmmaker (and by extension, writer) needs to resort to “displacements”. She writes:

The space of generational transition is one way to do that, and another is a different way of making sense, a way of listening not pointed toward hearing (or, not yet), to know about what it was that happened. If trauma is fundamentally untellable but needs nonetheless to be told, then we need—the filmmaker seems to say—to leave the usual world of time with its narrations leading from then to now to then-to-come.

Here Weiss speaks to questions of repair and dissent and toward the unresolved matter of legibility (“listening not pointed toward hearing (or, not yet)”) that can begin to bring the words back, even in the fragmented syntax of time out of joint.

For poet Carlos Soto Román, the task is not to ask about the after with respect to memory but to think it as a field of counter-documentation—one that does not, unlike many oft-criticized sociological studies and Truth Commissions, instantiate an arbitrary finality and closure—that continues to enclose/foreclose on itself, only to contradictorily acknowledge these same historical fissures and cuts. Soto Román’s writing grapples in similar ways to what Weiss writes are Guzmán’s “returns [that] have moved along a path set out by the task of grieving, and the language of his returns has staked out more and more space for what those tellings might give rise to in those to whom they are told.” But in Soto Román’s writing that deals with the Pinochet years, also perhaps due to the significant differences in age and experience, his focus is often on the not-yet that belongs to redaction, with the erasure of memory through obfuscation, and with the strategy of running memory down beyond mediation into obscurity and projected inconsequence. In his work, and particularly in the excellent translation of his 11 by Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Patrick Greaney, Robin Myers, Jèssica Pujol Duran, and Thomas Rothe, what is at stake is a poetic historiography that reperforms the aporia of the disappearances, of officialese, and of secrecy.

11 is a difficult book to sum up, and while I agree with translator Thomas Rothe in his informative and quite thorough afterword that there are multiple voices that come through in this text, I would urge readers to go a step further than Rothe’s statement that “Soto Román is and isn’t a witness to these atrocities [of the Pinochet years],” to ask what, precisely, Soto Román is witnessing in his work, originally published in Chile in 2017. Drawing from scholar Astrid Lorange’s recent writing on Soto Román’s work, I would note that 11, and his work more generally, deals with the question of the material afterlives of the Pinochet years, and the structuration of memory in the individual author, rather than attempting to foreground the place of witness, which 11 seems keen to reframe in terms of the material act of reading. A number of Soto Román’s other works, including Chile Project: [Re-Classified] and Antuco (co-authored with Carlos Cardani Parra) likewise play with the question of readership rather than the issues of witness and truth commissions that was sought after not by writers of Soto Román’s generation, but by that work of an earlier generation, to which Patricio Guzmán belongs. But I am, perhaps, quibbling with a volume that has, in the multiplicity of its translational voicings and the depth of these translators’ knowledge of the material, presented solid ground for a potential new way of working with and discussing the status of the document in contemporary poetry.

Soto Román’s use of a number of poetic strategies, from erasure and appropriation, to elements of concrete and visual poetry, to collaged lists, do not act as gimmickry, where they might easily lapse into these modes in a less capable poet’s hands. What they actually deal with is the status of the object of memory as a kind of information overload, where what seems conceptually tangible (a book that narrates the other September 11, as Scott Weintraub posits). Indeed, 11 is a book about the act of reading temporal traces, themselves. The original Spanish edition makes clear the way the past bleeds into the present when we suddenly encounter this, as readers:

¡Vaya! Google Chrome no ha podido encontrar la página

www.comisionprisionpoliticaytortura.cl.

Quizás quisiste decir: www.comisionprisionpoliticaytortura.gob.cl

A familiar message “Google Chrome could not find” also shifts the onus for politically motivated imprisonment and torture away from the Chilean body politic (.cl) and onto the government “.gob.cl”. There is a disappearance in this linking, as in the book’s numerous pages of captions without their associated images, which acts as a subsequence or supplementary indictment of the missing page, the missing object. The distance between these two sites is in the perhaps: “Quizás quisiste decir”—“Maybe you meant to say.” This phrasing pushes the reader toward assigning responsibility, but only tentatively so. Indeed, the term that may be more accurate, or return better results, on the book’s page would come from a disconnected domain altogether. The suggestion that is offered by Chrome is to search “comisionprisionpoliticaytortura cl”, rendering a disconnect between political imprisonment and torture and Chile, and entirely excises the government’s authority and responsibility (.gob) altogether.

Elsewhere in the book, we find specific physical sites, but which, in their anaphoric repetition and reference “Fue ejutado” (“Was executed”) are accompanied by dates and places, alternately, and by page after page of “N.N.”—unknown name. The naming of the impossible name—that of the executed—in accompanying the exact place (“on their patio” for example) dislocates and disinters, only to come to the same unknowing and irrecoverable. This might conjure Benedict Anderson’s comment on Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where he writes:

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who 'discovered' the Unknown Soldier's name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly nationalimaginings.¹

But, as Jean Franco has pointed out, the “cruel modernity” that produced disappearances is also one that leaves behind traces—photographs, documents, memories, which act as a parallel cenotaph, the underlying question of documentation. This is what Soto Román seems to be demonstrating in looking for documents, videos, and other forms of quasi-archival and archival traces. His project is one that scours the internet for these sources, but leaves little room for a polemic or juridical indictment. Rather, it is suggestion—maybe you wanted to say—that assigns direct responsibility in the inextricable connection and fundamental disconnect between the state and civil society. When, early in 11, Soto Román quotes the song “Chile eres tú” (Chile it is you), “Chile, bandera y juventud” (Chile, flag, and youth), he is presenting not only what remains in the public historical record (numerous uploads of this song, including a triumphalist broadcast from the military government from shortly after the 1973 coup, exist on Youtube with wistful and nostalgic sentiment reserved for the Pinochet government), but the act of textual reproduction, which both unknots the ideological in stripping the song of its televisual imagery, but also points forward in the book to the setlist from Pinochet’s birthday party where “la banda de Guerra” (the military band) plays, in order, “happy birthday,” “the old banners,” “the radetzky march,” “Libre” (a military march), and “lili marleen” (sic). The arrested status of the “juventud,” then, the sclerotic nature of the dictatorship, lives on, named in minute detail, while the rows of N.N. persist.² In the original broadcast video of “Chile eres tú,” posted to Youtube and festooned with row after row of comments wistfully longing for Pinochet’s Chile, we see the “eternal flame,” a near counterpart of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, burning throughout, as though likewise marking off this absence and its looped back-to-the-future of post-coup Chilean society.

1. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. Verso. P. 9
2. The use of the ‘cult of youth’ in the first period of the Pinochet years has been explored at length in Muñoz Tamayo, Víctor. "Chile es bandera y juventud". Efebolatría y gremialismo durante la primera etapa de la dictadura de Pinochet (1973-1979). Historia Crítica, núm. 54, septiembre-diciembre, 2014, pp. 195-219.