Written in racialized bodies. Language, memory and
(Post)colonial genealogies of femicide in Latin America
Karina
Bidaseca
Dra.
en Ciencias Sociales. CONICET/UBA y UNSAM
karinabidaseca@yahoo.com.ar
karinabidaseca@yahoo.com.ar
Abstract
Since
1993, the term femicide has referred to a continuous wave of crimes committed
to women due to gender or race, a structural feature of our societies. This
paper inscribes the question on the limits of the representation of the
unutterable in our local post-colonial genealogies. How could we write a
feminist narrative symbolically able to inscribe the losses within it, and question
the world outside? This shows that all efforts in favor of Politics of Memory
must be founded in the recovery of silenced First People languages, and in the
cross-disciplinary junction of Art and Social Sciences.
Key words: femicide,
colonialism and post-colonialism, racialized bodies, languages, memories.
Submission date:
Acceptance date:
1.
Introduction[1]
Gender violences have inhabited our
world forever, and I confirmed it at an early stage in my life, when I read
“The Bloody Countess” [La condesa sangrienta] (1968), by the Argentinian
writer Alejandra Pizarnik. Later on, as I examined her “Proper Name Poem” [Poema
del nombre propio], bearing the architecture figure of the tower of a
medieval castle ruled by the Countess Erzébeth Báthory, I found that the
abjection of violence within women victims of femicide is at the core of the
falogocentric social order:
Alejandra,
alejandra
Debajo estoy yo
Alejandra.
Literature is to thank, definitely.
With the help of the Aesthetic Theory and Post-colonial Feminist Theory, I will
attempt to parallel and analyze the languages of gender violence as represented
by two dialogic artistic expressions, literature and visual art. Seduced by the
alienating, "quite simply fascist"
(Barthes, 1982: 461) power of language proclaimed by Afro-American
writers such as Toni Morrison and Marlene Nourbese Philip, and the First
People's poet Liliana Ancalao, and aiming at sublimating the real violences, I
will delve into excerpts from their work so as to elucidate the best way to
articulate a cross-disciplinary Memory Politic.
Thus, I became fond of Alma López's
art, a Chicana visual artist who works within the artistic political borders.
Her outstanding work will not be able to overthrow the archaic power, but it can
change the regime of visibility (Rancière, The Emancipated
Spectator).
In her famous essay “Under
Western Eyes: Revisited”, Mohanty (2003) points out that the neoliberal
hegemony, the naturalization of capitalist values and the emergence of new ways
of religious fanaticism with strong masculine and racist rhetoric makes need to
reconfigure the maps of feminist practice more and more urgent. Categories such
as First/Third World, the local/global and North/South become insufficient to
explain the complexity of feminist struggles in the new geopolitical scenery
(500-501).
The map of borderlands, an unstable
map built from coloured women's inscriptions, turns us into mapmakers of our own
path, it immerses us in the inviting abyss faced by femicide. Since 1993, the
term femicide has referred to a continuous wave of extremely cruel crimes
perpetrated against women's bodies, the bodies of students and workers who
produce global goods. No surplus labor gained from this work may ever be
enough: the debt contracted with capital is always unaffordable. Its
interpretation calls us to act in relation with the concept of femicide, which
is being used by the new destruction technologies to inscribe bodies —instead of disciplinary apparatus— within the order of radical economy...
Some people deal with it in overt
manners, others in more subtle terms, nevertheless we all face the ghosts and
demons of our gender, looking for aestheticize death in order to sensitize a
world that is plummeting hastily into a dramatic perception of borders and
spectacle.
Where is the dividing line? What
joins the ephemeral and arbitrary nature of any epistemic border together? When
faced with the unutterable, how could we write a feminist narrative symbolically
able to inscribe the losses within it, while also questioning the world
outside? What are the reasons of Southern feminisms for developing Memory
Politics based on the cross-disciplinary junction of Art and Social Sciences?
Beloved
Sixty Million
And more
“It was not a story to pass on.
They forgot her like a bad dream.
(...) So, in the end, they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise. (…)
It was not a story to pass on.
So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant
dream during a troubling sleep (…).
This is not a story to pass on.
Down by the stream in back of 124
her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child,
an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear
again as though nobody ever walked there.
By and by all trace is gone, and
what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is
down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and
unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just
weather.
Certainly no clamor for a kiss.
Beloved” (324).
In this touching manner, in the last
pages of Beloved, the renowned Afro-American writer Toni Morrison[2]
manages to recover in three heartbeats one single sentence made of fragmented
phrases that interrupt the flow of the text; namely, the fact that Sethe's and
Beloved's story was not (is not) a story to pass on. The negation turns the
affirmation of a Women's Memory Politics for victims of brutal oppression,
violent slavery, simultaneous corporal marks and experience of racism-sexism,
economic exploitation and sexual slavery into an antithetical matter.
This marks a historical moment, the
foundation of a fictional heightened
erotization of the feminine black body on the one side, opposite to the
antiseptic quality of a First People's body, uneroticized in the eyes of the
sexual capitalist market (an avid consumer of feminine bodies).
What has to be quickly forgotten
before being passed on? What must remain hidden, silenced, so as not to
interrupt and painfully trouble the flow of present time? I asked myself these
questions in a book I published three years ago[3].
In her 1987 work, Toni Morrison
narrates Sethe's decision, the decision of a slaved mother who, in an act of
love, resolves to kill her daughter Beloved, a tender 2-year-old girl, to
protect her from Sethe's master appropriation. She was an outcast in United
State's post-slavery society. The wheathered house at Bluestone Road 124 was
cursed, it was “full of a baby's venom” (3).
Sethe is a victim of social death.
No-one visits the haunted house at 124. The novel depicts how enunciative
contexts (colonialism and slavery) expose different ways of putting to death.
There is no single way of dying, and death may well be an act of freedom.
Sethe's narration changes our ethical sense the moment we understand that in
North American society of the time, infanticide was a symbol of resistance
against slavery[4], when a mother knew that
little girls, “neither of whom had their adult teeth, were sold and
gone and she had not been able to wave goodbye” (28).
Sethe was raped by her master, and
by other Sweet Home's slaves. This was a misfortunate euphemism for naming the
slavery-ruled plantation. If a woman slave tries to escape, then she bears a
double punishment; leaving behind the workforce's reproductive capacity.
Pro-slavery society, forced to permanently produce new slaves for its
expansion, is thus threatened (Grüner, 2010).
“It was dangerous for ex slave woman
to love something so much, especially if that something was her own children”
says Toni Morrison.
The following has been my sustained
stance on this issue throughout my years of study on Gender Violences: Sethe
commits infanticide, but she is no child killer. Sethe's criminal narration
becomes a narration of freedom. Sethe does not kill, she liberates (Bidaseca,
2010). She is put to death in every sense of the expression, her voice is
relegated, silenced by the white master's voice.
“That
anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not
just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like
yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think
it up (…), The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all
right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing —the part of her
that was clean” (295).
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence
Softly Breaks
150 and more
She Tries
Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks[5]
(1989), by the Canadian, Afro-Caribbean writer Marlene Nourbese Philip, falls
into a new narrative aesthetics on “the lyricism of the Jazz-word (…), the
fusion of Caribbean and English, very close to a creole mood” (George Elliott
Clarke, in Daily News, cited by
http://www.nourbese.com/reviews/she-tries-her-tongue-2/). Her writing exists in
a tension between father tongue (the white, euro-Christian male canon) and the
mother tongue (black, African and feminine). The core of “Discourse on the
Logic of Language” says:
“English
is my mother tongue
A mother tongue is not
not a foreign lan lan lang
language
l/anguish
anguish
- a foreign anguish.” (She Tries 30)
Norubese Philip[CORRECTOR1] (1989) sets on an interesting phonetic word-play, turning the word
“language” into “anguish”. Hers is an unrelieved anguish generated by the
violence within the colonizer's act of imposing a foreign language over the
local language... a foreign language she cannot reconcile with. Throughout her
works, Philip questions the dominance of Western discourse and aims at
re-visiting the past with a focus on collective memory and identity.
In Zong! (2008) she takes the reader
through a walk along a dramatic pathline set in the late XVIII century. Back
then, in November 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered 150 African
slaves to be murdered by drowning them in the ocean, so the ship owner could
collect the insurance money.[6]
Zong! is set in the context of plantation economy, African free men trafficking
and then turned into slaves in America, African mysticism, and the primary
violence of Capitalism. Building these stories in such a disjointed manner
implies reuniting a past out of isolated pieces, palimpsests in which the
individual (the Self) is faced with his/her past and present.
"I WEEP FOR THIS GAUNT RED
WOMAN with the dread hair who, without much formal education, understood the
workings of capital and empires. Who was pissed to hell that the product of her
labours, her beloved cocoa, could only fetch one cent per pound. I weep for
her. And I sing. For her... I feel her anger all these years after her death.
Know her anger. Own it as my own. And hers . . . In knowing her anger I know
that she is kin. In ways more powerful than blood. . . Oh, but I will give an
account of descent from ancestors. I am neither alone. Nor mutant, not a
changeling. The current of resistance runs swift, runs deep, weaving its way
through the genealogy of these people lurking in the half shadows. . ."
(Genealogy of resistance).
Also,
in “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty of the Girl with the Flying
Cheek-bones” (1989: 52-53):
In whose language
In whose language
If not in yours
Am I Am I not AmI I am yours Am I not I am yours AmI I
am [...]
Am I
Beautiful (53)
Again, the author summons a game of
negations that outline the idea of language as a mined field for women
(Bidaseca & Sierra, 2012). Vietnamese feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha
(1989), born in 1952, Hanoi under Indochina's French dominion, raised in South
Vietnam during the war and then having then migrated to the United States in
the 1970s, articulates the issue quite successfully. Woman is at war with two linguistic
conceptions of the Self, a “Mayor I” (the master individual, the deposit of cultural
tradition), and a “minor I” (the personal individual, owner of a specific race
and gender) (6). The writing process represents an act of violence: in order to
write clearly, we need to trim, erase, purify, and give shape to this minor
“I”, we have to fit it into a tradition, locate it (17). Woman needs to distance
herself, as a way of alienating, or adapting the stolen or borrowed voice to
her own self, but most importantly, as a way of internalizing the language of
the master subject (27). On the contrary, Minh-Ha argues in favor of a map of
enunciative relations where language multiplies, subverts, and reflects the
contradictions of the notion of the original “I” most spread by Cultural Gender
Theories (22).
In her introductory essay “The
Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy”, Philip (1989) states that “For the many like me, black and
female, it is imperative that our writing begin to recreate our histories and
myths, as well as integrate that most painful of experiences -- loss of our history
and our word. The reacquisition of power to create in one's own i-mage and to
create one's own i-mage is vital to this process; it reaffirms for us that
which we have always known, even in those most darkest of times which are still
with us, when everything conspired to prove otherwise -- that we belong most certainly
to the race of humans." (http://mnourbesephilip.wordpress.com) The power,
and the danger of the artist, poet or writer, rest in his or hers ability to
create images, i-mages. Philip (1989) divides the word image in i-mage so as to
isolate the I, and thus campaign for a vindication of what is private,
identity, individuality, and difference. The challenge lies in “recreating the
images that give rise to the colonizer's language” (21) so as words be used in
alternative manners and in doing so, “modifying the ways society sees itself,
and even, its collective consciousness” (12) (Bernoiz, 2012:5).
…When silence is
Abdication of word tongue and lip
Ashes of once in what was
…Silence
Song word speech
Might I… like Philomena… sing
continue
over
into…
pure utterance.
(She Tries Her Tongue)
The author remarks that the history
of the Afrodiasporic people is a land of “massive, traumatic and fatal
interruptions”, and thus that “writing about the events in a logical and linear
manner would be committing a further act of violence” (Bernoiz, 2012). For this
reason, her prose does not obey Western shapes, but finds inspiration in jazz
compositions, a music bearing strong African roots[7].
With her unique aesthetics, Philip leaves her own identity mark, her own
winding road ends up generating a parabasis[8],
sabotaging like Toni Morrison the central stage from the margins, and
trespassing the borders of language. From an idea triggered in the warmth of
her own “house” that moves out, into the stage of world literature, the erratic
and multifaceted cloud of black letters provokes anguish. This actually reminds
me of Black Cloud (2007), mexican artist Carlos Amorales' installation work
based on a group of 30.000 butterflies in black paper, gathered from South to
North Mexico, and exhibited at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York, in the
Philadelphia Art Museum, and finally, after a transoceanic journey, in Murcia,
Spain. The artist says that he came up with the idea during a sleepless night,
under the suggestion of imminent death at his grandmother's house in Northern
Mexico (Atlas Portátil, 214).
Fig. 1 Black Cloud, 2007.
Huesos
en el desierto [Bones in the Desert]
400
names and more
Covered by a blue cloak, textured with
Prehispanic figures in a clear allusion to the Goddess Coyolxauhqui´s
dismembered body parts, her slender and seductive figure appeared.
The black crescent moon that seems
to crown her, bearing pagan traces, is held by a female figure of naked breasts
and by the open wings of a butterfly. These are the wings of the Monarch butterfly,
the symbol for the Mexican State of Michoacán” (Buigues, 2010).
Fig. 2 Our lady (1999).
Chicana artist Alma López is well
known for her critical interventions against the inherited culture of the
conquest and feminine re-signification of Catholic symbols, like in her most
controversial work, Our Lady, a representation of the new Virgen of Guadalupe.
The Monarch butterfly, characterized by their long annual migration, habits the
US/Canadian border during summer. When fall comes, they travel to the Michoacan
Woods at Oyamel and Mexico, where they stay until they begin their journey back
to Northern lands in spring.
Fig. 3 Santa Niña de Mochis, 1999
Let us take a closer look at this
work, part of a bigger series entitled 1848 Chicanos in the U. S., set after
the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe.
“The space portrayed was created
after the Treaty. The U. S. Manifest Destiny myth of conquest has attempted to
erase, to make invisible those who were/are in that land and I make them
visible. So it is a counter-narrative that has a political theme.” (Román-Odio,
2013: 15). In an interview, Roman-Odio says that this piece was a tribute for
her grandmother after a trip to Mochis, where she was buried, on El Día de los
Muertos. “We were at the cemetery, where many Mexican families go at this time
of the year, and I saw this girl, dressed like an angel, and I asked her
parents if I could take a picture of her. She was so beautiful! And she came to
represent the spirit of my grandmother―of that energy the Santero talked about.
As people in Tijuana made Juan Soldado a saint for helping so many people cross
the border, I made my grandmother a saint―the Santa Niña de Mochis” (Román-Odio,
2013:15).
The 5,000 kilometer long journey of
the Monarch butterflies far exceeds their volatile life span from two to three
weeks. This is a metaphor for the Northward migration journeys and the
precarious corporal politics of Justina and Domitila Juárez López, two Oaxaca
girls that decided to migrate to the United States through the most watched
border in the world, to fulfill the American Dream. A border that, for migrant
women, turns into a living hell. They offer their bodies to that long walk through
the desert, guided only by the coyotes, so as to start living in their flesh
the dramatism of exile and diaspora that characterizes global nomadism. Not
long after, the Embassy tells the girl's family that Justina and Domitila came
to a fatal end; they dehydrated while trying to crossthe burning desert at
Tucson, Arizona. Their deaths left three children orphans.
In Cristina Pacheco's (2005) fiction
“El oro del desierto/The Gold of the Desert”, the plot revolves around the wait
for the paper, which arrives twice a week, where a list is published with the
names of Mexican repatriates and of dead people. The return of Julia, the
absent mother is mostly awaited. Aware that in the search of the long awaited
improvements in living they could find death, before leaving for the United
States both women place gold incrustations in their teeth. The gold will be the
clue to identify them, may the desert eat through their bones ―similarly to
González Rodríguez's (2004) narration.
Memento Mori
The confusing evanescence of the
desert mirage is interrupted by the bronze sculpture Flor de arena [Sand
Flower] (2012), by Chilean artist Verónica Leiton, built as a Memorial Site at
Campo Algodonero in honour of women victims of femicide, in accordance with the
Inter-American Human Rights Court sentence against the State of Mexico. A
commemorative name panel reads: “In memory of women and girls victims of gender
violence in Ciudad Juárez”.
“The sculpture portrays a young
woman,” adds Leiton (2012) “with her eyes set in the sky, with a thoughtful,
and fully liberating stare, the figure comes out of an enormous desert flower
(a rock shaped like a flower) found in the desert Southwards from Ciudad
Juárez. One of the petals of the flower becomes a cloak, suspended in air. Written
in it are 400 women name representing all missing women”.
Fig. 4 Flor de arena, Verónica Leiton
(2012).
Tengo todavía arena en las
coyunturas y no hay palabras
“Like an echo of silence I will be”
writes Mapuche poet Liliana Ancalao (Comodoro Rivadavia, 1961) in her book of
poems Mujeres a la intemperie - Pu zomo wekun tu mew [Women out in the Open]
(2010). A silence that does not always entails absence. First People's women
voices have been excluded by the Argentininan narrative; as they were from the
racial-sexual map of globalization and urban white feminist policies. However,
this words manage to break the silence by recreating a writing made of two
languages/memories (Mapuzungun and Spanish), very similar to Gloria Anzaldúa's
chicana writing blending Spanish/English/Náhuatl. “Mapuzungun is the language
of reappropriation of pride, the language of reconstruction of memory” writes
Ancalao in El idioma silenciado [The Silenced Language] (2010:1).
“From November, 1978 to January,
1885, the Argentinian State put forth the structural invasion of the Southern
peoples through a genocide also known as “Conquista al desierto” [Conquest of
the Desert][9], except there was no
desert to conquer, only a vast land populated by ancient nations, cohabitant
with the Mapuches: the Aonikén, known as Tehuelches, and the Southern Onas,
Yámanas and Alalkalufes. At the same time, the other side of the border was
going through a similar nightmare with a different name, Pacificación de la
Araucanía [Occupation of Araucanía]. Concentration camps and death camps were
built, at them hundreds of families were kept under inhuman conditions and
became victims of the most heinous humiliations and tortures. The biggest
concentration and death camps were Valcheta and Chinchinales (Río Negro Province)”
(Millán, 2011).
Ancalao’s poetry is a metaphor for
the home, the home of “women out in the open” (in El frío – Wutre/La lluvia –
Mawün/El viento- Kürüf, the cold, the rain, the wind). Her book, divided in
four sections, represents “the concept of the Meli Witran Mapu, the four
orientations and facets which organize Mapuche world view and land; similar to
representations also found in the kultrún (a ceremonial musical instrument) of
the four features of the high deity, Kuse, Fücha, Üllcha and Weche, the four elements,
the four annual nature cycles, the Moon Calendar, te four land orientations in
Mapuche World and ancient identities.” (Spíndola, 2012)
At the beginning, the cold
represents childhood, the rain, and fertility; the wind stands for the supernatural;
and finally, the end of the lifeline, which is the “great beyond”, is
represented by the encounter with other women (the old woman in the raft and
her little sister). Analao (2010) names this condition as “women out in the
open”, invisibilized women whose inaudible voices were trapped within the labyrinth
of gender colonization, in the covenant where colonizing and colonized men pass
power on hmong each other (Bidaseca, Sitios liminales, in press). Ancalao (2010)
portrays once again the Wind – Kürüf:
como un tremendo viento
dicen que fue el malón
un torbellino en contra de los días
y eso que los antiguos eran duros
como rocas
firmes
ahí quedó su sangre
desparramada
me decías abuela
y tu recuerdo es el lago
al que me asomo
para sorber un trago (30).
The
Wind, or Kürüf, brought the eclipse “but it will also go away” (Mujeres a la
intemperie, 30), and will give room for the blossoming of contemporary Mapuche
poetry, which is being built over “the blue time of memory, that which whirls
below the earth, carrying the ancient elders' whispers about a blue dream” (Colipan,
2000, in Spíndola, 2012). [CORRECTOR2] The woman poet continues: “I still have sand in the joints and no words”
(Ancalao, 2010).[CORRECTOR3]
The
poet's voice is spoken by other Mapuche women: “There goes the prayer of
Ignacia Quintulaf” (30). These are the women that are zumo kimche, or wise
women, to whom Ancalao summons and dedicates her book, naming them in one group
in the first page of her poem book. By doing this she is making a map of her
own subjectivity which covers, from top (her ancestors which left this earth)
to bottom (grand-grandmothers, maternal grandmother, great-aunts, mother, ñañas
(yem)[10];
lamngen, zomokimche, cousin-aunts, nieces, daughters, grand-nieces, and
finally, the earth that breaths under their delicate and firm steps” (Ancalao,
2010)
“Cuando
me muera-Feichi Lali” [When I Die] is the last poem, which starts with an
excerpt of an oral narrative:
“Disparen nomás, estoy
acostumbrado a morir”.
Ancalao speaks about a long history
of racism, colonialism and violence. The poem mourns:
cuando me muera deberé cruzar el río
cuando me muera deberé cruzar el río
qué perro hará de guía si no tengo
un perro flaco que olerá mi cobardía
irá a mi lado
y estará la vieja en la balsa
le entregará dos llankas
para que me cruce
las piedras arrancadas de cuajo
de mi garganta
de mi estómago
crecidas en los dolores
en los gritos que no pude gritar
cuando se agrandaban mis ojos
y hacía que vivía
entregaré esas piedras
y no habrá más
seguro lágrimas
porque no pude encontrarle el
secreto a esta vida
porque me fui
detrás de los fantasmas
buscando tramas
y arañas
y cántaros
y hojas
reconocerá la vieja su valor?
Subiremos con mi perro
la balsa se deslizará en la tarde
hacia el oeste (…) (36-40)
At this point, the old woman in the
raft comes to scene, as well as the concept of memory and the pouring rain
which prevents the earth from swallowing the woman.
hasta cuándo aguantaremos
pará la lluvia dios es demasiada
no la bebe la tierra se atraganta
y somos casi nada
trozos de tiza borrados por el
agua. (24)
Memory Politics for feminicidio
The concept of “feminicidio” [in
spanish, different from femicidio]
was developed by United States' writer Carol Orlock in 1974, and first used in
public by the feminist Diana Russell before the International Tribunal on
Crimes against Women at Brussels. It is a political concept with high
recognition in Latin America. It has been translated in Mexico by Lagarde
(2006) as feminicidio to refer to “femicide violence”:
“Feminicidio
spreads in an ideological and social climate of 'machismo' and misogyny, of
normalized violence against women, and in the absence of legal and government
policies; conditions that generate an insecure environment for women, putting
their lives in danger and favoring the conjuncture of crimes which we demand be
clarified and eliminated”. (Cited in Healy, 2008)
The concept, created to define
women's violent gender-based killings, aimed at challenging neutral words like
“homicide” or “murder”, and extract them from the private sphere and individual
pathology. Ever since the 2009 ruling of the Inter-American Court on Human
Rights (IACHR) on November 16th, femicide ―along with its attempt to be
classified as a subcategory og genocide― has suffered a direct blow. The
concept has not been able to gain recognition within the Court's decision in
the case of “Campo Algodonero: Claudia Ivette González, Esmeralda Herrera
Monreal and Laura Berenice Ramos Monárrez against the United Mexican States”. Abramovich
(2010) states that the Court does not follow the theory of a systematic
violence pattern, but seems instead to prefer a more lenient State responsibility
based on the created risk doctrine with the addition of due diligence
prevention duty, an obligation reinforced by Article 7 of the Convention of
Belém do Pará (2011:14).
The decision recognizes the
existence of “a culture of discrimination against women” and is exhibited as an
“emblematic precedent in Human Rights Inter-American System case-law
development”. This was the first time the IACHR looks into a case of
structural, gender-based violence against women, i.e., the type of violence
defined in Article 1 in CBDP. In its final ruling, the IACHR states that the
three victims' murders (Laura Berenice Ramos, Claudia Ivette González, and
Esmeralda Herrera Monreal) were “gender-based”, namely, they are consistent
with “feminicidio”[11],
and are part of a larger context of violence against women in Ciudad Juárez (p.
1).
Anthropologist Rita Segato[CORRECTOR4] (2010) contributed to the challenge of conceptualization which, one
way or another, questioned us as scholars and feminist activists after the
Court decision. I quote: “Que, a pesar de que toda violencia feminicida o
femicida es un epifenómeno de las relaciones de género, pueden y deben
distinguirse dos tipos de la misma: 1. la que puede ser referida a relaciones
interpersonales – violencia doméstica - o a la personalidad del agresor –
crímenes seriales -; y 2. las que tienen características no personalizables –
destrucción del cuerpo de las mujeres del bando enemigo en la escena bélica
informal de las guerras contemporáneas, y en la trata” (p. 11). She suggests
using the term “geno-femicide” [femigenocidio] for systematic and impersonal
crimes on women (and feminized men) with the sole objective of destroying them
because they are women, and which prevent us from personalizing or
individualizing the motive of the perpetrator, or the relationship between the
victim and the perpetrator (…). Thus, we would use feminicidio to describe “all
misogynistic crimes against women, whether associated with interpersonal or
impersonal gender relations. We would add the prefix “geno” to name those
feminicidios oriented towards women as genus, that is, as an impersonal gender”
(5).
Some Latin American countries have
already passed on legislation on these issues: Costa Rica did so in 2007, followed
by Guatemala in 2008, Chile in 2008, and Perú and Argentina in 2012; though it
is true that the long-term conflict at Guatemala prevents any comparison with
political contexts at the rest of the countries. If the blurriness governing
gender crimes is such that recognition in local legal precedents becomes
impaired, we will probably be advised against the even more ambiguous categorization
of the term feminicidio as a “war”. However, Maldonado (2009) states that, in
Guatemala's case “one of the clearest weaknesses in the investigation was lack
of scientific grounds and technical techniques in the handling of evidence, the
victim's and perpetrator's profiles”. This is actually the rule in all our
countries.
At Ciudad Juárez, the decision of
the Inter-American Court of Human Rights forced the Mexican State to, among
other things, build a memorial for the murdered women that was raised in
August, 2012. At Quebrada de San Lorenzo, Salta (Argentina), the father of
Cassandre Bouvier, a woman who was murdered with her best friend on August 15,
2011, took it upon himself to formally ask the President of my country to build
a memorial in the place where they were killed. “I dream this to be the reflection
of Franco-Argentine friendship against the crime of feminicide” he states in an
interview.
Fifteen years have passed since the
murder of María Soledad Morales in Argentinian Province of Catamarca. She was a
young, 17-years-old girl, and the implications of her crime echoed so strongly
as to overthrow a feudal institution, shaken society with marchas del silencio
[Silent Walks]. This was a crime we had no name for back then, but we do now.
At present, we must also address the reality of the guilty parties being free
of charge, the fact that the thirty-two people accused of cover-up never made
it to trial stage, and that the memorial bronze panel at Colegio del Carmen,
the school María Soledad attended, passes unnoticed to most youngsters. The
gorge where her mutilated and disfigured body was found now has a monolith,
made by a local artist, that curious tourist stop to inspect and where some of
the local people leave letters asking for miracles.
In addition, we are faced with the
issue of not being able to account events in a non-horrid manner. The very
concept of violence is a word bearing a strong emotive charge, somewhat
unpleasing when said aloud. What follows is the spectacularization of
everything related to Juárez As speakers from the Ivory Tower, we are commited
to these issues, but at the same time distance makes us insensible, while real
women continue to live their lives down there. We are faced with a difficult
and complex point of view: the point of view of a woman of a stigmatized
origin, much like the violent Juaritos, who sees her life grow harder each time
her town is perceived as the only place in the world where these crimes occur,
and every time she is portrayed as a barbarian. In other words, scholarship is
criticized for being a generator of universal victims, under the “savior
rhetoric” of Northern feminism, which recently has made a conservative turn by
depicting Third World women as people in need of “saving" (from whom?).
Rojas (2005) speaks of a “rhetoric
of contempt”, in relation with the disrespect, negligence or invisibility of
gender violence, which can only be explained by its deep roots in a local
sexist culture, derogative of women, which has a profound impact on Mexican
society. Of course, the same situation occurs in any of our societies.
Following Rita Segato, the greatest danger is for violence to become a lingua
franca, that is, a common language between human beings, marked in bodies that
function as extensions of geographical sovereignty. Just like texts, messages
of cruelty, mutilation and assault can be written on and read on them, and
exhibited as a morbid spectacle. We are dealing with a type of violence whose
intelligibility is told in our colonization history. Further on to the South,
Mapuche feminine poetry reinscribes other geographies in the memory of
violence. Liliana Ancalao says:
“It happened only a hundred years
ago, however, in the eyes of my generation it seems to have happened in a
mythical time. The Mapuche people could walk freely in their own land, and
people talked to the mapu spirits. Mapuzungun means the language of the land
(…). Mapuzungun became a language used to describe pain, the language to
express the heartbreak of watching men, women and children being
enslaved”. (Ancalao, 2010)[CORRECTOR5]
This
primary violence engages in dialogue with Beloved, and can also be found in
Zong!, Huesos en el desierto, and in all artistic interventions.
Final Thoughts
This text, which is a set of
thoughts, may be seen as a memorial. Since the beginning, writing is a type of
rupture or sculpture on a text, be it a stone, a vessel, a paper, a body or
many bodies, a name or many names carved into a bronze panel. Even if there is
no body, neither found nor missing, or we are only faced with “bones in the
desert”, our strength relies in having been able to reunite them all and having
cracked the grounds of common-sense; successfully altering the regime of what
is visible and claimable, by joining together Art and Politics.
The list has no end, but we are
hopeful that one day it will have one. At present, Southern Feminist Movements
need to be noisy enough as to resist the silence spiral and the dead-end of
time. We postulate a Third Feminism that challenges Northern conservative Feminism,
and the whole of society on the issue of gender-based violences as the sole
reason for our domination, inscribes itself within a genealogy of post-colonial
memory from our South, and pieces together the voices of women oppressed for
existing in the world (for sex/gender, ethnia, or class reasons).
It is for this reason that writing
from a Southern de-colonizing feminist point of view is now a pressing matter.
In Beloved, Christian (2007) sees that visibility is only understandable
from African perspective, that is, from the perspective of Afrocentrism,
according to which slavery, human trafficking and slave trafficking across the
Black Atlantic add an interpretation to the psychoanalytic, marxist or formalist
versions. In her critique to the Eurocentric legacy which de-nigrates (to
become black) African religious traditions and turns them into mere
superstitions, she explains the dialogue between Sethe and Beloved's spirit. In
order to sustain this new approach of the novel, Christian talks from her “own
Caribbean culture” (Christian, 2007).
“Poetry and thought are only joined
when each of them keeps its own separate being” states Paul Celan, the Romanian
writer who inspired Salcedo's work (cited in Speranza Atlas portátil 160,
original in Spanish). On the language Celan chooses to write on ―German―,
Speranza notes that it coincides with
the language that marked the horror of the Shoah where Celan's parents died.
“In order to keep on writing after Auschwitz, it was necessary to expropriate
oneself from language and self-translate into a new estranged language with a
change of heart that recreates it (“All of Celan's poetry is a German
translation”, wrote George Steiner[CORRECTOR6] , quoted by Speranza, 2013: 160)
This is well known for writers who,
struggling between the “Major I” [Yo mayúsculo] and the “minor I” [yo
minúsuculo] publicly say that literature will not free its readers, nor
metaphors will “overthrow fossilized powers”, but it will merely introduce a
change in the ordinary pace of our lives. Still inhabited by the anguish of the
Master's discourse, and the metaphor of the desert, the Mapuche woman poet
writes: “I still have sand in my joints and no words left” [Tengo todavía arena en las coyunturas y no
hay palabras] (Ancalao, 2010)[CORRECTOR7] . Philip explains that her search is aimed at finding ways of “not
telling” a story (Zong' story), echoing Toni Morrison's statement “This is not
a story to pass on”. Thus, she manages to solve the conflict of an apocalyptic
climate of primary violence, but even more importantly is the fact that the
hypnotic imagery brought about when reading her will forever engrave our memories.
Word becomes i-mage (imago), and follows the borders of a particular silhouette
that will then transfigure. She is, in a way, inviting her readers to imagine
other disjointed silhouettes (known in Statistics as “point clouds”, which may
become tridimensional data) to live on through the narration. She strengthens
the boundaries of writing and even of her own art, to allow us to confirm, us
alone, that “this is not a story to pass on”.
Imprescriptibility, Memory Politics,
and fights against impunity have become counter-narratives mapped in our
geographies; blindly testing alternative paths in the outskirts of the
consecutive transformations of our intuitive mappings, consequences of our
attempts to strengthen the weak corners of feminist praxis. Indeed, Beloved
suggests that when we follow their footsteps we realize that women's lives have
not disappeared entirely, and that we need to advocate in favor of public
policies that help us claim those lives and never forget. A day will come when
there will be no more dead women because of femicide.
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[1]
This paper is part of the Proyecto CONICET “Violencias en las mujeres subalternas. Representaciones
de la desigualdad de género y la diferencia en las políticas culturales”
[Violences Against Subaltern Women: Gender Inequality Representations and the
Different Cultural Politics], headed by K.
Bidaseca at Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San
Martín. A preliminary version of this research was
presented at the “Tercer Feminismo y Arte: Políticas de la memoria y genealogías
(pos)coloniales de la violencia en el XXXI” - International Congress of the
Latin American Studies Association, Washington DC, 2013; in the Panel “Decolonial Feminisms: Art, Practice,
and Scholarship Decolonial Feminisms: Art, Practice, and Scholarship,
coordinated by Sonia Alvarez
(University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Tara Daly (Holyoke College) and Claudia
J. De Lima Costa (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brasil). The author
would like to express her upmost gratitude to two exceptional women, Liliana Ancalao and Rita Segato, for sharing her goals and dreams. This paper is
dedicated to all women victims of femicide.
[2] Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio.
Her novels thematize the issue of blackness in the United States, especially centering
in black women She published Beloved in 1987, which got her the Pullitzer Prize
in 1988, and later on, in 1993, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Other famous
works are Blue Eyes (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1978), The Knights
Isle (1981), Love (2004), and more recently, A Mercy. For
the English version of this article, I have based on the 2005 Vintage edition.
[3] Bidaseca, K. (2010). Perturbando el texto colonial. Los Estudios
(pos)coloniales en América latina, Buenos Aires, Ed. SB.
[4] Entre 1882 y 1895 entre un tercio y la mitad de la tasa media de mortalidad
negra correspondía a niños menores de 5 años (Bhabha, 2002: 28)
Between 1882 and
1895, between one third and half of the average rate of black deaths were
children under 5 years (Bhabha, 2002: 28)
[5] Nacida en el caribe en Trinidad y
Tobago en 1947. Por She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks recibió el Premio de la Casa de las Américas en 1988 y el
reconocimiento internacional. Su prolífica obra incluye además de poemas, ensayos, y obras de teatro: Coups and Calypsos (1996);
Harriet´s daughter (2000); The redemption of Al Bumen: A morality Play (1994);
The Streets (1994).
Born in the Caribbean in
Trinidad and Tobago in 1947. She Tries Her Tongue On, Her Silence Softly Breaks
received the prize of the Casa de las Americas in 1988 and international
recognition. His prolific work also includes poems, essays, and plays: Coups
and Calypsos (1996), Harriet's daughter (2000) The redemption of Al Bumen: A
morality play (1994), The Streets (1994).
[6] La decisión judicial
Gregson vs Gilbert es el único documento público existente en relación con la
matanza.
The court
decision Gregson vs Gilbert is the only existing public document in connection
with the killing
[7] "Jazz
is a musical art form that originated in the United States through the
confrontation of blacks with European music. The instrumentation, melody and
harmony of jazz are derived primarily from the Western musical tradition. The
rhythm, phrasing and sound production, and the harmony of blues elements
derived from African music and African-American musical concept. ” Joachim-Ernst Berendt in The Jazz Book: From
Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond (1981).
[8] “Parábasis” (del griego antiguo,"parabaino enfoque")
fue uno de los varios momentos de la comedia ática antigua. Es una figura que
representa el margen del teatro griego antiguo en que un personaje o el
coro intenta sabotear la escena principal, incluso quitándose las máscaras,
para interpelar al público ilustre que se ubica en las primeras filas. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, intelectual migrante reconocida por su crítica poscolonial,
mujer, india e hindú, marxista, deconstruccionista y feminista, habla de una
“parábasis subalterna”. En su libro Crítica de la razón poscolonial,
escribe un capítulo que titula “Cultura” en el que describe el acto de la
crítica de este modo: “A lo máximo que puede aspirar una crítica académica responsable
es a una cautela, una vigilancia, una persistente toma de distancia, siempre
desfasada, con respecto a la implicación plena, un deseo de parábasis
permanente. Cualquier pretensión ulterior dentro del cercamiento académico es
una trampa” (352).
" Digression " (from the
ancient Greek, " parabaino approach " ) was one of several moments of
the old Attic comedy . It is a figure that represents the margin of ancient
Greek drama in which a character or chorus tries to sabotage the main scene ,
even taking off the masks, to interpellate the distinguished audience that sits
in the front rows. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, migrant intellectual known for
his critical postcolonial woman Indian and Hindu , Marxist , deconstructionist
, feminist , speaks of a " subaltern parabasis " . In his book
Critique of postcolonial reason, write a chapter titled " Culture "
which describes the act of review as follows: " At the most we can hope
for an academic review responsible is a caution ,
vigilance, takes away a persistent
, always out of date, with respect to the full involvement , a desire for
permanent digression . Any subsequent claim within the academic enclosure is a
trap " ( 352) .
[9] These racial genocides are known in Argentina as Campaña del Desierto [Desert Campaign] and Pacificación de la Araucanía
(Pacification of the Araucania] in Chile.
[10] According to Mapuche conception, the
dedicatory is first, to the top order of ancient women, kuifikeche, who have already
left the Nagmapu, this earth. “Yem” is the alternative way of “em” to name the
deceased” (Poesía mapuche 133).
[11] “La Corte afirma que utilizará la expresión:
“homicidio de mujeres en razón de género también conocido como “feminicidio”
(citado por Abramovich, 2011: 2).
“The Court states that
use the term" killing of women in gender-also known as "femicide"
(quoted by Abramovich, 2011: 2).
“Written in racialized bodies. Language, memory and genealogies (post) colonial femicide in Latin America” /-“Escritos en los cuerpos racializados. Lenguas, memoria y genealogías (pos)coloniales del feminicidio en América Latina”. Journal of Latin American Communication Research de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Investigadores de la Comunicación (ALAIC), Revista de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Sociología (ALAS) Controversias y Concurrencias Latinoamericanas, Vol. 6, Nro 9, pp. 35.66.
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