In: HeLix - Dossiers zur romanischen Literaturwissenschaft, 5 (2012), pp. 104-123

Abstract

Susana Romano Sued’s Procedimiento. Memoria de la Perla y la Ribera is an intense hybrid text in which the forms of testimony, conveyed by the poetic prose, have erected a double construction. One side of this construction is a tomb of the missing, those disappeared in the clandestine detention centers (CDC); the other side is a monument to the will to survive. The writing presents ghostly voices and bodies and at the same time inserts them in their everyday desperate suffering, without any concessions and often with sharp irony. The narration is built upon bodily sensation, and jailers are all the more sadistic since they confront Jewish women. All of the ideological ingredients of radical evil are articulated via actions, and only writing, as a space of conscience and memory, escapes this evil and supports the will to survive. Language becomes a transgressor; the fragmentation of the world is reflected in the fragmentation of discourse and in the multiple voices that create it. In this degraded scene, the word insists on “poetically capturing the testimony and transforming the memory in a factor of clarification of the subjectivity and of transmission of the experience.” These peculiar forms of speech, this complex staging of a multiple and open textuality are the subjects of this study.