The Crux of Violence: Unheimlich Encounters and PTSD in Santiago Roncagliolo’s Red April

• Main Author: Stefano Bellin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Fondazione Nuto Revelli 2020-12-01
• Series: Close Encounters in War Journal
• Subjects: peruvian civil war; sendero luminoso; ptsd; the uncanny; santiago roncagliolo; abril rojo; fictional representations of war
• Online Access: https://closeencountersinwarhome.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/bellin-the-crux-of-violence.pdf

This article explores the connection between close encounters, PTSD, and Freud’s concept of the ‚uncanny‛ by analysing the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980-2000) and offering a novel reading of Santiago Roncagliolo’s Red April (Abril rojo, 2006). Focusing on how the novel establishes cross-referential relationships between traumatic encounters and repressed parts of our selves, my reading shows how Red April calls into question the identity position from which we tend to look at war. By eliciting what I call a ‚positional identification‛ with the narrative of war and an ‚ironic identification‛ with its main character, I argue that Red April foregrounds our implication with the structural forms of oppression that feed conflicts like that which struck Peru in the 1980s. In doing so, it reveals our compromised positions and unheimlich proximity to the violence of war.