Become testimony : women voices about the Brazilian and Argentinean Military Dictatorships

Based on the concept of testimony defined by Giorgio Agamben in Quel che resta di Auschwitz: l’archivio e il testimone (2008), this paper proposes the analysis of three narratives wich seek to reconstruct the memory and the past from a temporal distance that allows to reelaborate and expose the scars of what happened, besides showing and representing various aspects of the politics of trasitional justice, memory and truth (or the absence of all this) in the Brazilian context with references to the Argentinian context as well. This paper proposes to analyze the novel Nem tudo é silêncio (2010), by Sonia Regina Bischain, a São Paulos’s peripheriy writer; Mar azul (2012), by Paloma Vidal, that tells a story about two exiles, father and daughter in different times, escaping from the Argentine and the Brazilian dictatorships. And finally, Volto semana que vem (2015), by Maria Pilla, a survivor from the two dictatorships (Argentine and Brazilian) that elaborates in fiction 20 years later her experience. Based on these narratives, this work aim to approach Agamben’s wish that after the extermination camps, ethics and testimony should make some words forgotten and others understood/read differently. The process of memory elaboration differs in many ways in the two countries. First of all, Argentina has prosecuted its criminals for state terrorism, while Brazil continues to maintain an unrestricted “amnesty” for tortures and murderers. In the Hispanic-American country, public testimonies and proceedings were held and a collective sharing of the crimes of the dictatorial regime was possible. In Brazil, official memory policies in the post-dictatorship period cloistered scars at private levels and at most turned state crimes and horror into a family problem. The discussion has not been and is not yet public and collective. In Literature, these questions are also exposed in different ways. While Argentines consider testimonial literature as an established and prolific literature genre, even tracing different phases with the current production of “Hijos”, for example, bringing irony and humor as new aesthetic elements for the memorial debate. In Brazil, although the current phase also differs from the first stage of denunciation, there is a division in production: narratives that still seek to demonstrate the still open wounds (especially due to the lack of Justice) and on the other hand, an attempt to pacify this past or a melancholy framing of the military dictatorship in an outdated chapter of the country’s history.