Argentina: Two Writers Griselda Gambaro and Angelica Gorodischer

Author(s): Marguerite Feitlowitz, Griselda Gambaro and Angelica Gorodischer

Source: BOMB , Summer, 1990, No. 32 (Summer, 1990), pp. 52-55
Published by: New Art Publications

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40424212

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 Marguerite Feitlowitz

Arge nt i n a :
Two Write rs
The following interviews with Griselda organized labor. If his plan goes through,
Gámbaro and Angélica Gorodischer took workers will get jobs through the
place in Argentina in 1989. Several weeks government; those who don't will receive
before my arrival - October 9, to be exact - some government relien
President Carlos Menem pardoned all There have been food riots in the poor
military officers facing trial for human rights neighborhoods of Rosario (the home of
abuses during the military dictatorship in Angélica Gorodischer), Buenos Aires and
power from 1976 to 1983. This junta- which Córdoba. Many grocers, rather than be
called itself The Process and came to be looted by their regular customers, opened
known as The Terror - engineered the Dirty their stockrooms. Menem insists these
'fàr, in which some 15,000 civilians were disturbances are due to leftist idealogues,
kidnapped, raped, tortured and disappeared. and has intensified policé and military
Protest against Menem's Pardon, which presence in neighborhoods throughout the
violates the Argentine constitution, has been country.
anguished, bitter and unavailing. For Menem Books are a luxury beyond most people's
has proclaimed: "It is time for the military to reach. One day I found a long-sought copy of
regain its rightful prestige." Gombrowicz's Peregrinaciones en Argentina
In the space of several months, Argentine [Travels in Argentina], a handsome little
currency, the austral has fallen 600%. The book printed in Spain. When the bookseller,
yearly inflation rate is 4000%. The median who'd been chatting me up, said the volume
income in Argentina today is $70 a month, would cost tens of thousands of australes -
much less than the rent on a modest one- about thirty-one dollars - I assumed he was
room apartment. To increase its currency joking. It was a paperback, after all, one
stores against massive capital flight, the hundred and thirty pages. He was not joking.
government raided private CD accounts and As a means of gutting the publishing industry,
has counseled citizens to buy only bare The Process had levied an astronomical
necessities. Just before sitting down to write wide-ranging paper tax, which is still in force.
this, I read that Menem is now proposing Domestic publishers must struggle for raw
disemployment, as a means of crippling materials while the duties in foreign books
amount practically to a blockade.

March 8, 1990

Marguerite Feitlowitz's fiction has appeared in

BOMB. She is currently writing and translating
in Argentina on a Fullbright fellowship.

52 BOMB

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 Griselda
Gambaro

i
I
•s
©

During the Dirty War, Gambaro received
numerous death threats. She was forced into
exile in 1977 when the novel she had just
published, Ganarse la muerte, was banned.
In exile in Barcelona, she wrote and
published Dios no nos quiere contentos, which
she considers her finest long fiction.
Separated from her Argentine audience,
Gambaro was painfully unable to write plays.
Gámbaro returned to Argentina in 1980, the
earliest date it was safe to do so.
One of the most highly-respected writers
currently working in Latin America, her
essential concern is tyranny, and the relations
between domestic and political violence. Her
writing is prismatic, characterized by an
array of distancing devices, including irony,
black humor, and buffoonery. Her plays are
widely performed in South America and
Eastern, as well as Western, Europe. Her
novels have been translated into French,
Italian, Polish and Czech.
This conversation took place in November
1989 in La Boca, a predominantly Italian
working-class district near the port of
Buenos Aires. Gambaro was born nearby in
1932.

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Exile carries a high
price. For better or
worse, this is my
country. And a
country is not an
abstraction. It's
not the state or the
government, but the
land and the people
who live there.
Griselda Gámbaro: The Pardon is atrocious, particularly since
it's designed to preclude trials.
Marguerite Feitlowitz: Yesterday, at just this time, we were
downtown with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo on their weekly
march in front of the executive government building, the Pink
House. I'd read so much about the Mothers, seen photos and film
clips, yet I was overwhelmed upon actually seeing them. Many are
old women now, in support hose and orthopedic shoes. Thirteen
years they've marched, every Thursday at 3:30, wearing white
kerchiefs embroidered with the names of their disappeared children
and signs that promise, 'We will not forget/ Watching the Mothers, I
couldn't help but wonder if memory, and acts of remembrance -
including writing - could again become a crime.
GG: Menem and his followers certainly would like to impose
collective amnesia. But they can't. We won't let them.
MF: Argentina seems to me a very elusive, contradictory country.
People generally are good-humored and polite, yet one has the
sense that behind all this courtesy there's another, more
repressive, reality. Armed guards in the Cathedral where military
heroes are buried like saints, war medals displayed like holy relics.
Sinister-looking men in expensive suits and dark glasses, crossing
themselves as they walk by the portals.
GG: This is a schizophrenic country, a country that lives two lives.
The courteous and generous have their counterpart in the violent
and the armed who move among the shadows - para-military police
units that weren't dissolved at the end of the Dirty War, secret
services that still operate, all blatantly serving totalitarian interests.
One never really knows what country one is living in, because the
two co-exist. It's what makes our history so painful, what makes
the country so hurtful.
Argentina is seismic as well as schizophrenic. From night to day,
things can change drastically owing to causes below the surface,
behind the screen that's offered up as reality.
MF: It stands to reason that your major theme is violence - its
roots, manifestations, and the ways in which it may be perceived,
masked and denied.
GG: I would add fear, suspicion, and the consequences of
repression. But if I'd been born in another country, a nicer one,
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surely my vision would be different. If I'd been born in Switzerland,
I'd have a different optic, though still critical, something like
Durenmatt's.
MF: If you'd been born in Switzerland, maybe you wouldn't feel like
writing.
GG: I'm not convinced. Okay, Switzerland is not a country that
excites me. But why equate writing (which is to say, living) with
masochism? Do we really need anguish, injustice, collective
breakdown? Do we need poverty, de facto governments, or
pardoned genocides? Perhaps a more balanced reality would better
nurture writers. A human being comes into the world with enough
of a load - incomprehension, affective difficulties, the certainty of
death. Without adding the horrors that Argentina has lived through
over and over.
MF: It's hard to imagine you in some bucolic Alpine setting. The
body of your work has been a response to crisis, to institutionalized
terror.
GG: Yes, but in a sense art has nothing to do with politics, it
occupies a different space, answers to different laws. I don't have
to - in fact I must not - think like a politician or an economist. The
responsibility of the artist or intellectual is to refuse to enter into
that perverse system of thought in which people become
abstractions. My solution to the wheat surplus? Give it all to the
hungry. Any other solution is hypocritical and immoral. Let it wreak
havoc in the world market, so what.
Art's connection to politics lies in its negation of the coarse and
brutal pragmatism that is imposed as 'reality.'
MF: There seems to be uncertainty as to what constitutes reality
in Argentina today. Menem certainly fits in with Peronist models of
double-talk and contradictory alliances. The military is still a strong
presence. The economy's a disaster. If things get bad again, will
you leave?
GG: No. Exile carries a high price. For better or worse, this is my
country. And a country is not an abstraction. It's not the state or the
government, but the land and the people who live there. In no
foreign country - no matter how hospitable - would I have the
dialogue I have with my compatriots. Our common history means
that much can remain tacit; there's no need for exposition or
explanation, no need to 'de-code' images and signs.
I recognize that I am a representative here for certain people, not
only because of my books and plays, but because of what I would
call social and ethical commitments. As the poet Hans
Enzensberger said of Diderot and Bakunin, attitudes are more
trustworthy than programs, including writings. The behavior of a
writer can be more illuminating than his books.
MF: Yes, but some real bastards have written great books.
GG: Of course. But for me, particularly regarding my
contemporaries, attitude counts, behavior counts. It's been hard for
me to feel close to Borges, for example. Such an intelligent man,
such a wonderful writer. But he showed off in public too much, and
had some astoundingly puerile notions. His antiperonism was not
born of an analysis of its contradictions; it was an upper-class
reaction, a fear of those who are unrefined, illiterate, without
artistic tendencies. Borges also supported [Chile's] Pinochet as
well as military dictatorships here. Only at the end of his life did he
begin to wise up politically. But then he died, leaving only his books.
For many of us, our reading of Borges is colored by the fact that we
were his contemporaries, living through horrific times. I could
never trust the high value he placed on a writer's 'innocence.' And
his interviews, disquisitions and political pronouncements weren't
directed at us at all, but to North America and Europe.
MF: For a long time in North America Borges was the Argentine
writer par excellence.
GG: Borges embodied a particular type of Argentine. Like Victoria
Ocampo, he was educated in Europe, preferred French or English
to his mother tongue and generally was more sympathetic toward
Europe than Argentina. He couldn't personally connect with hunger
or thirst, with poverty and the miseries of a stunted life. During the
years of the Dirty War, to read Borges meant to walk his road, and
given what was happening all around us, I simply couldn't. This was
a time when writers buried manuscripts in their yards, burned
books in their barbecues. You could be killed if they found a copy of
Freud, let alone Marx, in your house. Or the 'wrong' newspaper,
the 'wrong' name in your address book.
MF: Haroldo Conti, Paco Urondo and Rodolfo Walsh, all well-
known writers, were disappeared.
GG: Yes. We (and not just writers) needed a great, illuminating
representative voice, and Borges held back. I can't help but think of
Sciascia, Boll, or again Enzensberger. In times of crisis, the writer
himself is part of the package.
MF: In submitting my translations of your work over the last
several years, I've found that it doesn't conform to the expectations
many in the U.S. bring to writing from Latin America. Though your
work derives from its Argentine setting and seems to embody the
country's psychic gestalt . . .
GG:Yes...
 Griselda Gámbaro
MF: Your theatre and novels are not imbued with magic realism nor
do they partake of any costumbrista tradition. Not infrequently, your
plays are mistakenly referred to as 'absurdist.' Translated by Marguerite FeNowttz
GG: Argentine writing is something of an anomaly in the context of
Latin America. For one thing, our indigenous populations were
largely decimated. For another, we are a nation of immigrants.
Something like three out of four Argentines have Italian blood;
there are many of Eastern European origin, not to mention strong
Spanish, French, English and German strains. There were also
important immigration waves from Turkey, Syria and Lebanon.
Argentine Spanish is different from that spoken in Spain and
elsewhere in Latin America. My parents came here from Genoa.
From
Italian and French are my other languages and those literatures are

INFORMATION
a part of me.
Buenos Aires developed its own very particular argot, called
lunfardo, strongly influenced by Italian and the culture of the port
with its 'mean streets' and the brothels where tango was born.
Roberto Arlt, one of our most brilliant writers, had an enormous
influence on language here. His highly realistic novels of the city

FOR
were charged not only with the current lunfardo, but with rhythms
and nuances he picked up reading bad translations of Dostoevski.
Non- Argentines are often taken aback by the acidity of our
humor. And what Europeans have mistaken for Argentine 'theatre
of the absurd* has its roots in a strong and deep grotesque tradition.
Eastern Europeans, Tve found, relate very easily to my work.

FOREIGNERS:
MF: A hallmark of your writing, particularly your theatre, is blatant
artifice. Your main artistic strategies are black humor, buffoonery,
irony, and the deep embedding of cultural codes. You also make
'collages/ using the language of other writers together with your
own.

A Chronicle
GG: I have no guilt whatsoever about using other writers'
language - Shakespeare, Sophocles, Ruben Darío, newspaper
clippings, snippets from children's games. It gives more facets to
the surface of the work, multiplies the deeper resonances. The
work isn't limited to a single timé frame or spatial plane.
MF: It also enables you to encode political comment For example,

in 20 Scenes
when in Information for Foreigners, I came upon the line "Violin,
violon/es la mejor razón," I mistakenly thought it was a nonsense
poem. But the lines refer to the dictatorship of Rosas [1829-1852]
when violin music was routinely played during the decapitation of
Rosas' enemies.
GG: Yes, it was yet another way of commenting on the situation in
Argentina in 1971.
MF: Information for Foreigners really was a prophetic work,
The play should be performed in a house or warehouse. The audience
foretelling the whole era of the desaparecidos, of government-
is split into groups, each of which has a Guide who takes us from
sponsored terrorism not only against persons whose activités were
scene to scene. The order in which the scenes are observed by the
deemed subversive but whose thoughts the government believed
undermined 'Western Christian civilization/ groups is aleatory until the final scene, where all the groups converge.

GG: I wrote the play in 1971-72, keeping it hidden in my house.

When finally we had to leave in 1977, 1 smuggled the play out with GUIDE
me.
Ladies and gentlemen: Admission is
MF: It circulated in 'samizdat' among theatre people in Europe, but
you've already paid, you can't repent. The cost is already
when companies offered productions, you refused.
Better to enjoy yourself No one under 18 will be admit
GG: It was impossible, my mother, sister and brothers were still in
under 35 or over 36. Everyone else can attend with no p
Argentina.
obscenity or strong words. The play speaks to our lifes
MF: And Information still hasn't been produced here.
Argentinian, Occidental and Christian. We are in 1971. 1
GG: No, and I don't think it will be. Though it was published during
you stay together and remain silent. Careful on the stai
Alfonsin s term.
MF: Information hinges on juxtaposition: children's games with Scene 1
scenes of torture, a trumped-up arrest with Othello, the poetry of
victims of the Dirty War with the Milgram experiment. You've The Guide leads the group toward one of the rooms. The room is
described this play as 'a guided tour through the places of completely in shadow. The door is closed. A strident sound is
repression and indignity/ heard. Then, many voices, indistinct and juxtaposed, carrying on an
GG: It is. And it's the main reason for what you call 'blatant incomprehensible conversation.
artifice' - otherwise it would be too terrible to watch.
GUIDE
MF: And you avoid the-torturer-as-most-fascinating-character-
One moment ... I don't find my lantern. Remember, opportunity
syndrome through ridicule, buffoonery.
makes the thiet Wktch your pocketbooks! (Light up on a dark and
GG: Torturers don't deserve to be in our midst, and so in the
wrinkled wall.) Only the walls they've left naked.
theatre they don't merit our respectful gaze.
(The light travels. A man is seated on a chair, wearing only faded
MF: Information was unlike any translation I've ever done. An underwear. He raises his head, surprised and frightened. He covers
indispensable source was Nunca Más: The-Report of the Argentine his sex with his hands.) Pardon us, F ve got the wrong room.
Commission on the Disappeared. I needed it not only for the
information, but for its language. For there developed during the Scene 2
Dirty Weit an argot of dissimulation in which familar, domestic
expressions carried sinister, even deadly, implications. The Guide, lighting the way with his lantern, leads the group out of
GG: A way of turning reality inside out. the room. He tries to open the door of another room. Behind the
MF: To cite just one example: submarino came to mean plunging a door a sweet voice sings:
prisoner's head into a basin of water and shit. But originally VOICE
submarino signified a treat for kids: a chocolate bar slowly melting
Carnation, sleep and dream,
in a cup of warm milk. the horse won't drink from the stream.
GG: That's still what it is.
MF: And it's on the menu of any Argentine cafe. GUIDE
GG: Of course.
(With a shrug of his shoulders, returns toward the group)
MF: But it's shocking. I can't imagine ordering one.
It's closed. (He knocks. Nicely.) May I? I've brought a group of
GG: But it's delicious. And it's an Argentine tradition.
spectators. They're anxious.

Summer 1990 85

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