I was struck by Teresa Anativia’s answer when Diana Taylor asks her if returning to Villa Grimaldi, the place where decades ago she was tortured, “had upset her.” Anativia answers no because the place is no longer the same, yet she adds: “But my bones hurt.” At this, Taylor elucidates: “‘place’ remains in her; she carries it with her everywhere” (197). This makes me think of spaces, the “places” that witnessed so much pain, like other bodies. If trauma remains in the body, even if memory cannot name it, as the authors we have read during the class have shown us, can these spaces, thought of as other bodies, hold people’s trauma as well? Reading Taylor’s chapter on Villa Grimaldi, one would say perhaps not. The author, especially in her solitary tour of the Chilean dictatorship’s torture site, feels nothing but a certain desperation and distraction (194); she seems to be in search of that trauma but finds only a cold voice recounting the brutalities of dictatorship and the names of the victims who have been peeling away from the sign. Only when she translates from Pedro Matta, another survivor of the torture camp, does she begin to “embody the pain” (200). It is not the place that holds the trauma; it is the body.
And yet, the places catalyze, trigger, the pain, the trauma. I think how Anativia does not recognize Villa Grimaldi, but her bones, her intuition, do. Perhaps places could also hold pain, but it would take a particular sensitivity, a different kind of attention, to hear it. I think about how limpias (cleansings) are not only done to bodies but also to places. And so I bring up the work of H.I.J.O.S. and the Madres and Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. If the military, during the dictatorship, took the streets of the cities to sow terror, the victims take them to denounce, claim, and bring joy. I imagine the escarches of H.I.J.O.S. as the reverse of the work of the military: while the latter, in secret, targeted people to disappear them, the former target the torturers with a lot of noise to highlight them. The work of the military terrorized; the second calls for justice and is done with a “festive” air (162). I imagine, perhaps naively, that they, besides denouncing, are also cleaning the place, in this case, the streets of Buenos Aires: that, by reversing the performance of the military, the streets are also losing that terror they kept so that, little by little, a certain joy can replace it.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. ""You Are Here": H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance" The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. 161-189. Durham: Duke University Press, Taylor, Diana. 2020. "Tortuous Routes: Four Walks through Villa Grimaldi" ¡Presente!: The Poetics of Presence. 175-202. Durham: Duke University Press,