Memory Connection Journal

Abstract

Abstract

This paper analyzes a set of memorial processes linked to the phenomenon
of forensic identification and restitution of the bodies of persons who
disappeared during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, based
on the accounts provided by sons and daughters who recovered their parents’
remains. I argue that one way of giving meaning to these processes is by resorting
to a common topos: nature as a place of reunification. These findings are the
outcome of a more extensive qualitative research project which has gathered a
large corpus of interviews and documents.

Dirt spilled on the floor. I brought the rest to my mouth and ate it, hungry to
see Papá again (…) The earth felt like it had gone from being a thing in my
hand to something alive. Loving earth inside me, I kept on eating (…) Belly
heavy with earth, I shut my eyes.
Dolores Reyes, Eartheater: a novel (New York, Harper Collins
Publishers, 2021), p.15

This paper analyzes a number of memorial processes linked to the
phenomenon of forensic identification and restitution of the bodies of
persons who had disappeared during the last military dictatorship in
Argentina, based on the accounts provided by sons and daughters who
recovered their parents’ remains. Specifically, I am interested in problematizing
those narratives which, following Donna Haraway, resort to nature as a topos
(commonplace) to narrate these experiences.¹

Based on the comparison of cases selected from a larger corpus, I will analyze
the ways in which the presence of the disappeared parents emerges in the lives
of their sons and daughters.² In these processes, the “appeared disappeared” cast
off their ghostly quality, and their existence gains depth and is amplified, giving
substance to the ancestor.

Nature beyond the “natural”: a topos for reunion

To Haraway, nature is neither a physical place nor an essence. Neither is it mother,
matrix or resource for human reproduction. In other words, it is not given, but
configured as topos, i.e., as a commonplace of common themes:

We turn to this topic to order our discourse, to compose our memory (…).
In seventeenth century English, the “topick gods” were the local gods, the
gods specific to places and peoples. We need these spirits, rhetorically we
can’t have them any other way. We need them in order to reinhabit, precisely,
common places-locations that are widely shared, inescapably local, worldly,
enspirited, i.e., topical.³

This conception of nature enables us to address the agency taken on by the
disappeared in the stories developed by their loved ones regarding the processes
of identification and restitution of their remains, which were found after many
years’ searching. In this regard, Vinciane Despret proposes considering the
relationship between the living and the dead based on the way the dead enter
the lives of the living and how they make them act, in order to understand these
relationship spaces that keep them together. She thereby avoids considering
the dead as a mere support of the living in their mourning, to ask the question
“via the milieu” that unites the living and the dead. In other words, she proposes
understanding “what each is making the other do, how they transform each other
together, how they affect each other.”⁴

In this paper I argue that one way to give meaning to the identification of the
remains of disappeared mothers and fathers is through the topos of nature as a
place of reunion. From this standpoint, it is through natural elements (fire, the
sea, the air through birds and butterflies, and earth), and through a sensorial,
quasi-organic rhetoric, that those reunions are narrated, processed, and produced,
during which sons and daughters, as Paula Bombara says, begin to “undisappear”
their parents, i.e., overcome the phantasmagorical figure constituted by the
disappeared condition to restore the “appeared disappeared” to the place of
ancestors.⁵ Thus, in particular, when, based on the finding of human remains, a
disappeared person becomes a dead person, “it is not so much about identifying
them and understanding the reasons for their death (even though they are
important), as about reconstituting them: once again giving them, materially, a
bodiless existence, reconstructing for them, in the flesh, a story of their past”.⁶

The biodiversity of reunions: fire, sea, air and earth

Writer and journalist Marta Dillon, whose mother disappeared, began to write
an autobiography in 2010 when she received a call from the Argentine Forensic
Anthropology Team (EAAF, by its acronym in Spanish) to notify her that her
mother’s body had been found. In her story, she describes imagining building
a “loving fire” with her mother’s bones, to “blacken herself with the ashes”,
transforming them into “pure energy”, thereby achieving the transmutation of a
“ghost into an ancestor”:

“It was that before letting go, I needed to make her burst in among us, among
the solid bodies that we are, able to displace the air as we move (…) She was
solid too, though disjointed, and her fragments spoke not of fragility but of
resistance. Her return interpellated and clamored for a plural – there would
be no goodbye without us waving from the shore.”⁷

By invoking the shared nature of the living and the dead, i.e., the matter of the
solid bodies that we are, whether “jointed” or “disjointed”, Dillon resorts to fire
as a ritual element for transmutation of bones/matter into presence/energy, and
ashes into a visible sign of that mother/daughter fusion into “us”. She imagines
this fusion as a unique moment, essential to a farewell, pictured in another natural
site: the seashore.

Biochemist and children’s author Paula Bombara is the daughter of a
disappeared father. His remains were identified in 2011, in an unnamed tomb
in a cemetery in the Merlo district.⁸ Ten years after the identification, Paula
cooperated with an EAAF campaign to make its work known by recording an
audiovisual describing her memories of the restitution of her father’s body.⁹
In it, she speaks of the sea as an “inner landscape” enclosing the memory of
the absence. In her longer testimony, the evocation of that “inner landscape”
can be understood as a metaphor of the importance of the sea during her
childhood in helping her cope with her father’s absence, which she lived as
a solitary experience, in silence, “enclosed” within herself. That image of
enclosure contrasts with the movements she felt in her body when her
father’s remains appeared:

“I felt a warm, profound joy flowing through my body, a luminous emotion.
A weight dissolving and turning into an embrace. That was ten years ago.
The search for my father’s remains ended at that time. The feeling of an
embrace continues.”

As from that experience of an inner maritime landscape, she seems to overflow the
contours of her own body, giving rise to tides of water/blood that flow, resonate
deeply, warm, dissolve and envelop Paula and her father in a whole/embrace.
Mosaic artist Ana Páez, whose father disappeared, says that her family was
not searching for him. They did not know about the EAAF until one day, they
received a call to notify them that a body had been found which might be her
father’s. They provided a blood sample, and he appeared. This is why they always
say that her father found them. The remains, found in Lomas de Zamora cemetery,
were identified in 2007. Ever since, Ana ‘s children note their grandfather’s
everyday presence in the air, transmuted into the forms of winged creatures such
as hummingbirds and blue butterflies. In her story, Ana adopts
that childlike gaze as her own:

“There are always hummingbirds visiting the house and (…) the first time one
came, I was in the kitchen, and it approached me and hovered in front of me,
then left. (…) I felt kind of impressed. And Guido her son said, ‘It’s your Dad
who came to visit you, Mom, it’s Grandpa’ (…) And at the cemetery we saw a
blue butterfly and said ‘It’s Grandpa’”.¹⁰

In various pre-Hispanic cultures, hummingbirds and butterflies symbolize a broad
range of meanings, the connection between the worlds of the living and the dead,
whether as messengers or as returning souls. These ancestral beliefs are still
present today, and commonplace in the memory of the disappeared in Argentina
and other countries in the region. As an example, the Memorial Space at the
former Pozo de Banfield Clandestine Detention and Extermination Center
(Centro Clandestino de Detención y Exterminio Pozo de Banfield) has built a butterfly
garden in the inner courtyard.¹1

Filmmaker Pedro Sánchez is the son of a disappeared father. He told me that
it was very hard for him to encounter his father’s remains. He didn’t want to
see them because “it meant recognizing a person and recognizing myself in a
person who was not flesh and bones; he was bones, not flesh.”¹² A year and a half
later, the family decided to bury him, and Pedro was able to establish a different
relationship. Adopting the Mexican cultural concept of celebrating the lives of the
dead rather than mourning their passing, Pedro began to spend time in contact
with the earth. He decorated the tomb with confetti and skulls, opened up to
conversation with his father, and even took food and drink to share with him.
His story is reminiscent of a Latin American tradition that can be traced from the
Mexican Day of the Dead to magic realism, involving integration of the dead into
daily life, endowing them with new depth that amplifies their existence.

Conclusions

Thus, nature as topos becomes a common place to meet with ancestors, enabling
them to acquire agency and affect the daily lives of their sons and daughters
through their presence. The different elements in these stories (fire, water, air
through birds and butterflies, and earth) in turn show that different forms/
figures are used to construct that common nature/artifact, giving rise to different
subjective experiences. In all of them, the place of the “appeared disappeared” is
no longer limited to consecrated, solemn memorial places (cemeteries, marches,
homages), but is magically present in small daily rituals.

Endnotes

1. Donna Haraway “The Promises of Monsters. A Regenerative Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others” in Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler,
Cultural Studies, (New York, Routledge, 1992), p. 44.
2. This work was conducted within PICT project “Genetics and Human Rights:
imaginaries, beliefs and management of health, justice and identity in recent
Argentina (1980-2020)”. Following a qualitative research design, I prepared a
corpus of 13 trajectories of sons and daughters of disappeared persons, who went
through the process of identification and restitution of their parents’ remains. These
trajectories were reconstructed based on 5 interviews from the “Memoria Abierta”
oral archive, 3 interviews from the Testimonial Archive at Mariano Moreno National
Library, 3 of my own interviews, and 2 testimonies compiled in testimonial books. I
contrasted these experiences with 5 of my own interviews with forensic experts,
addressing how family members experience the restitutions, 4 interviews from oral
archives with other family members and/or close friends who recovered the remains
of their loved ones, and 11 testimonies of other sons and daughters of disappeared
persons who have not been able to recover the remains their parents. All this
comprises a corpus of 32 cases, in addition to press articles, blogs, technical reports
and other public documents. Selected from among testimonies scattered within the
wider corpus explored, the cases presented herein condense key aspects of the
memories of the restitution process of the bodies of parents. Finally, it is important
to note that I have used real names for public testimonies available for consultation,
and fictitious names for stories collected from interviews conducted with informed
consent under the condition of anonymous use of data.
3. Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others”, p. 122.
4. Vinciane Despret, Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind (Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 28 and 29.
5. Testimony of Paula Bombara, Human Rights Program and Department of
Communication of the National Library, (Biblioteca Nacional), Buenos Aires City, June
16, 2022. https://www.bn.gov.ar/micrositios/multimedia/ddhh/testimonio-de-paulabombara-
16-de-junio-de-2022 (Accessed 7 May 2023).
6. Vinciane Despret, Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind, 74.
7. Marta Dillon, Aparecida (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2015), 191 (author’s
translation).
8. Página 12, “El primer desaparecido de Bahía” [The first person who
disappeared from Bahía], March 25, 2013. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/
elpais/1-216541-2013-03-25.html (Accessed 7 May 2023).
9. Audiovisual “De la sangre profunda vuelvo”, [From Deep blood I return] National
Memorial Archive, Secretariat of Human Rights, Ministry of Justice and Human
Rights. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/derechoshumanos/ANM/de-la-sangreprofunda-
vuelvo (Accessed 7 May 2023).
10. Author’s interview, 20 April 2022.
11. To see images https://www.ambiente.gba.gob.ar/imagenes/Nativas/
Gu%C3%ADa%20Plantemos%20nativas.pdf , https://www.facebook.com/
groups/255112728009873/search/?q=mariposas (Accessed 8 May 2023)
12. Author’s interview, 9 June 2022.

References

Haraway, Donna, “The Promises of Monsters. A Regenerative Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others” in Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler,
Cultural Studies, 1992 New York: Routledge, 295–337.
Despret, Vinciane, Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind [2021]
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sources

Dillon, Marta, Aparecida, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2015.
Testimony of Paula Bombara, Human Rights Program and Department of
Communication of the National Library, (Biblioteca Nacional), Buenos Aires City,
June 16, 2022. https://www.bn.gov.ar/micrositios/multimedia/ddhh/testimonio-depaula-
bombara-16-de-junio-de-2022 (Accessed 7 May 2023).
Página 12, “El primer desaparecido de Bahía” [The first person who
disappeared from Bahía], March 25, 2013. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/
elpais/1-216541-2013-03-25.html (Accessed 7 May 2023).
Audiovisual “De la sangre profunda vuelvo”, [From Deep blood I return] National
Memorial Archive, Secretariat of Human Rights, Ministry of Justice and Human
Rights. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/derechoshumanos/ANM/de-la-sangreprofunda-
vuelvo (Accessed 7 May 2023).
Author’s interview, 20 April 2022, PICT project “Genetics and Human Rights:
imaginaries, beliefs and management of health, justice and identity in recent
Argentina (1980-2020)”.
Author’s interview, 9 June 2022, PICT project “Genetics and Human Rights:
imaginaries, beliefs and management of health, justice and identity in recent
Argentina (1980-2020)”.

Biographical Note

Soledad Catoggio has a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos
Aires and is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical
Research. She is currently the director of the Nucleus of Memory Studies (CISCONICET/
IDES-UNTREF) and co-director of the scientific journal Clepsidra.
Interdisciplinary Journal of Memory Studies. She has spent many years
researching the relationship between religion, dictatorships and memory in
Argentina and Latin America. She is the author of Los Desaparecidos de la Iglesia.
El clero contestatario frente a la Dictadura, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2016. She
is currently researching the socio-historical processes of articulation between
genetics, memory and human rights from the 1980s to the present, with
a particular interest in the relationship between the processes of identification
and identity recovery of the disappeared and the ways in which family, community
and institutional memories are reworked through these processes.
mscatoggio@gmail.com