Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Autofictions of Postwar: Fostering Empathy in Lola Arias’ Minefield/Campo minado

2017; Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Kansas; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ltr.2017.0006

2161-0576

Jordana Blejmar,

Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism

Autofictions of Postwar: Fostering Empathy in Lola Arias' Minefield/Campo minado Jordana Blejmar It has often been claimed that the 1982 Malvinas/Falkland War was an event without testimonies or images. In her prologue to Juan Travnik's powerful photographic portraits of Argentine veterans and island landscapes, taken between 1994 and 2008, Graciela Speranza writes that, except for those who were in front of the British troops on the battlefields, "Malvinas es una guerra sin imágenes ni relatos." According to Speranza, the only things the Argentine people remember of the war are a nationalist fervour and a few laconic official reports accompanied by military marches. In the same vein, Julieta Vitullo, author of a book about Argentine literary fictions of the war, writes that "era poco lo que la sociedad sabía —o quería saber—acerca de los acontecimientos mismos" (13). Martín Kohan, however, has noted that already in 1982 the book Los chicos de la guerra by Daniel Kon—which was made into a film by Bebe Kamin in 1984—offered a number of testimonies of Argentine soldiers about their experiences in the South Atlantic archipelago (El país 269). Kohan shows that, unlike the soldiers of World War I who initially returned speechless from the battlefields, Argentine soldiers had a lot to say in the aftermath of the conflict.1 Furthermore, popular magazines such as Gente and Somos published a large number of war images that not only illustrated reports but also furnished the lies that formed part of the discourse of the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. Nevertheless, more than these testimonies and images of the war, what has perhaps most caught the attention of those who later studied the conflict are the fictions that surrounded and continue to surround the event: "the representations more than the realities," the "characters more than the protagonists" (McGuirk 14), the rumours more than the recollections. Due to their [End Page 103] distant location, semi-deserted and inhospitable landscape, and mysterious shape—writer Carlos Gamerro likens them to Rorschach stains—the Malvinas/Falkland Islands continue to function as a site around which Argentines' deepest fears, obsessions, and desires often circulate as well as a blank canvas that can be filled with any imaginary narrative (Vitullo 185). Though some filmmakers, including Tristan Bauer (Iluminados por el fuego, 2005) and Julio Cardoso (Locos de la bandera, 2012), have chosen to deliver historical reconstructions of the conflict, the diverse fictions that surrounded the war have also resulted in an equally sizeable corpus of more playful and profane narratives, notably by writers such as Gamerro (Las islas, 1998), Rodolfo Fogwill (Los pichiciegos, 1983), and Patricio Pron (Una puta mierda, 2007), and filmmakers such as José Luis Marqués (Fuckland, 2000). Following in this playful trend is Minefield—or Campo minado, as it was subsequently called in its Buenos Aires release—, a theatrical performance in which Argentine and British veterans re-enact their experiences on the battlefield.2 Nothing is completely black or white in Lola Arias' 2016 production, and this, I want to suggest, is one of its main achievements. Arias narrates the 1982 war in a performance that challenges the dichotomies often present in previous accounts of the conflict—victims/perpetrators, allies/enemies, heroes/villains, spectators/actors, subjective memory/historical memory—and delivers a play that avoids both Manichean readings of that painful history and also dangerous discourses on forgetting and reconciliation, fostering instead a more productive relationship between past, present, and future.3 I will specifically explore Arias' conception of theatre as a "living creature" and a "social experiment" with a high degree of unpredictability, which is how she described the play in a lecture that she gave on June 6, 2016, at King's College, London. The experimental gathering of performers who fought against each other and who considered themselves foes during the war poses a series of potential problems regarding semi-autobiographical performances of trauma, including the risks of re-victimizing those who went through painful experiences and of feeding the morbid gaze that often characterizes audiences of what Leigh Gilmore has called performances of "limit-cases."4 I will argue, however, that Arias not only successfully overcomes these...