The Jacobin detectives and the poetics of the children of disappeared

• Main Author: Adriana Paula Badagnani
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata 2014-08-01
• Series: Estudios de Teoría Literaria
• Subjects: memoria; historia argentina reciente; hijos de desaparecidos; poesía.
• Online Access: http://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/etl/article/view/962

The poetry collection Los detectives salvajes, belonging to the publishing house Libros de la talita dorada, in La Plata, appears as an explicit attempt to establish a counterpoint between militant poetry of the '70s and that one made by the children of disappeared activists. The poetry of the disappeared stands as an artefact of the memory of the past, one of the vestiges or scattered fragments which children have to reconstruct their parents' past. In this way children become detectives. It would have been arduous for children of missing parents to make their own voices audible in a scenario marked by the presence of the absent. The development of a poetic voice with a profound collective and generational imprint appears in the form of the problematization of the paternal legacy. In this context we notice that the authors play with the language of militancy as a parodic form of reconstruction of the link. Poetry of the children stands in the intersection of the fields of human rights, politics and literature; the differential logic operations of these spaces generate tensions that poets seem to want to overcome with polemic public gestures as a way of achieving their own place. In this case, the classical figures of literature, parricide and revenge, appear as polemic exaggerations which poets work with on the field of memory as a form of struggle for meaning.