From the issue dated September 5, 2003
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The True 'Desaparecidos'By ARIEL DORFMANWe have grown strangely used to them over the last 25 years, those women with a
The misfortune of women who search for information about their missing husbands, sons, fathers, brothers, lovers is as haplessly old as the wars and slaughterhouses with which we humans have disgraced ourselves throughout our history. What is specifically new about the iconic representation of woe, which anyone who owns a television set can now recognize and identify, is not the repression or the pain but rather the form of spectacle that these demonstrations have taken, how the performance of that pain is conceivable only in the context of present-day globalization. Indeed, those marching women brandishing black-and-white photos have become so natural to our eyes, so much a part of the mythical landscape of our time, that we tend to forget that there was a time, not very long ago, when photographs did not constitute an automatic ingredient of that sort of protest. As far as I can tell, the first time photos were displayed as a means of responding to the state terror that uses disappearance as a form of control and punishment was in June 1977, when a group of Chilean women whose relatives had been arrested by General Pinochet's secret police after the 1973 coup decided to go on a hunger strike to force the authorities to acknowledge those detentions. That they chose to do so in the regional offices of the United Nations in Santiago may have initially been because of the relative safety that an international organization provided under a dictatorship but, more crucially, suggests that their targeted audience was potentially the wide world beyond the country's frontiers rather than their fellow countrymen, most of whom had no way of being informed about even the existence of this prolonged sit-in. I am not sure if the organizers immediately realized how influential and far-reaching the image they had created was to become in their own struggle, and they certainly could not have anticipated the ways in which it would be adopted by people with similar dilemmas all over the globe. What probably mattered most to them was that the exhibition of those photos fiercely expressed the core of their tragedy. The central drama of those women was, after all, that they had no body with which to contradict the denial of responsibility by the authorities, no way of countering the refusal of the judges to accept writs of habeas corpus because, to put it bluntly, there was no corpus. No body. Dead or alive. The photo became a substitute for that body that the government officials contended had never been arrested, a way of bringing into visibility someone who was at that very moment being hidden from view, whose corpse, if indeed the detainee had been killed, was being denied the right to denounce the crime committed against it (the only vocabulary left to the dead). When the relatives showed bystanders that replica in celluloid, they were making present, material, and lifelike what had been phantasmagorically removed from their hands. They were calling attention to a moment that had existed in the past when that loved one had been alive, and a finger had clicked on a camera; they were demanding a moment in the future when that loved one could once again stand in front of them, could step out of the photo and into life, could climb out of their memory and into life. It was only in the months and years that followed, as the relatives took their protest into the streets, that they discovered that, beyond telling the essence of their predicament with extreme efficiency and extraordinary poetry, those stark semblances of the missing also answered the needs of the contemporary news media -- its time constraints, its hunger for visually striking imagery, its audiences with their short attention spans. And when the police attacked the women, jailed them, ripped the photos from their dresses or kicked the placards upon which the photos had been reproduced, those scenes were transmitted over and over to the world. In the violence done to the relatives because they dared to remember and bring their memories into communal spaces, the regime was being forced to publicly re-enact the secret, covert outrage done to the original bodies in the dank privacy of jails and basements and concentration camps. Making that violence globally visible was a particularly apt response to disappearance because that extreme form of repression originated, in fact, in a strategy of the dictatorship that had a global component from the start. The new rulers of Chile were determined to integrate their country into the worldwide market and join what they called the "civilized concert of nations" -- a membership that entailed two contradictory requirements. On one hand, the need to terrorize a restless and recalcitrant populace into submission and make it economically and politically pliant for the experiment of what was, quite blatantly, called "shock therapy"; coupled, on the other hand, with the need to present an immaculate face to the international community and therefore distance officials from any acts of barbarism. And disappearances perfectly fit that bill: Dissidents and revolutionaries could be conveniently tortured to death without any of their executioners ever being held accountable; terror could reign in the whispers of the mind without the government's having to openly admit being the source of those whispers, that terror. It is this perverse tactic of invisibility that the bodies of the women and the photos pinned to their clothes fracture, that the photos of their resistance and repression further perturb and disrupt, a cycle of visual transgressions that was to grow amazingly into a worldwide movement. It is incredible, after all, that one small gesture by one solitary woman in a violated Chilean home -- one woman who looks at the faded image of her absent loved one and comes to understand that its public exposure can keep him alive inside her and in the world, that one modest, unpretentious image speaking louder than all the machinery of State -- finally spreads and extends its reach until it is imitated all over the world. The ferocity with which the masters of those many misdeveloped nations have dragged their societies, quite literally kicking and screaming, into modernity is answered by a denunciation of the consequences of that process, using none other than the central invention of modernity -- photography -- shrewdly appropriated by the victims. Two possibilities of globalization face to face: the high technology of systematic fear employed by tyrants, their scientific use of torture, censorship, propaganda, and, of course, spying through cameras, confronted with the cunning and defiance of multitudes of humiliated women with their low-tech performances, their snapshots of bodies that refuse to be silenced. The technology of dictators that tries to turn the lives of their subjects into fictions, confronting the technology of the rebels who use what is, after all, no more substantial and material than a replica, a trace on a piece of paper, a representation of existence, to shove denied reality back into the dictator's face. Two ways of using and abusing science: one that is secretive and affirms the right to exist only of those who have monopolized its knowledge and chained that knowledge to destruction; and another, more democratic form of science, that puts in the hands of people everywhere the means to recreate and multiply their own existence. At a time in history when it is all too easy to feel defenseless, passive, and irrelevant in the face of a global-world-profiteering-disorder that often seems to be beyond the control of even its most dominant elites, it is heartening to see how some of the least powerful people on this earth can score a victory of the imagination against their enemies, can prove that it is possible for the modernity of human rights to defeat the modernity of inhuman authoritarianism. Indeed, I would venture to suggest that the relatives of the disappeared are handing us a model for how other humans can make use of the forces of globalization to make this world a less threatening home for us all. And yet, a note of caution. If you go through a little booklet published many years ago by the Association of Relatives of Arrested and Disappeared Persons in Chile, which lists and seeks to portray some of the peasants abducted by the authorities since 1973, you will notice, on the very first page, six names with respective spaces for their photos. Two of these spaces are blank -- those meant for Antonio Aninao Morales and Juan Salinas Salinas. Of those two, not even a photograph remains. They are men who lived their 20th-century lives without once being photographed. Let me repeat this: They were never captured by the process invented by Louis Daguerre more than 100 years before their birth. It is only the kidnapping of Salinas and Aninao that, paradoxically, calls them at all to our attention among the millions who are too poor or marginalized to have been captured by a camera, who are outside the eyes of modernity. And if you continue to read the booklet, on each page there are several more unphotographed peasants, until the last page where all four of those named are without an image. That deep blankness ends up being the only visual evidence that they ever existed. These are the true desaparecidos of humanity, those who are missing because, in reality, the modern world acts as if, all this while, they had never been there at all, members of orphaned countries that seem to flicker into public consciousness only when they cause trouble, when they upset strategic balances or unhinge the lives of those who watch from the comfort of television screens. They were missing before the police came for them. They came late to the distribution of words, techniques, and knowledge and, yes, to the saving grace of photography itself, perhaps suspecting that they would merit neither a footnote in the pages of anybody's history book nor even a few seconds on the nightly news. I have spent many hours looking at those empty spaces, wondering how those men lived and how they died, who they were, what their eyes might have told me if I had ever met them. The truth is that I know nothing about them. All that I really receive back from that absence is my own reflection. In the supermarket and superspectacle that our planet is slowly becoming, it is the unknown Salinases and Aninaos of the world who pose the ultimate challenge to globalization. It is one of the great tragedies of our time that we have been unable to organize a world where men like them and their billions of brothers and sisters from all the other continents are included and finally seen, really seen. Everyone on this earth, I believe, is a member of a vastly interconnected humanity, and the recent terrible events of September 11, 2001, would seem to confirm that we ignore that fact at our peril. How can we imagine those who live outside the dominant forms of modernity? Is it even possible? Are we too far away even to represent those lost men, those muted women? Strange as this may sound, I saw a dreadful form of hope in the dark blizzard of photos that began to cover the streets of New York precisely after those criminal acts of terror that devastated that city in September 2001. It is an extraordinary recognition of our common humanity that the inhabitants of the most prosperous metropolis in the world, when faced with the infernal dilemma of dealing with the instantaneous and violent disappearance of friends and relatives, whose death could be presumed but not ascertained because of the lack of a body, spontaneously recurred to the same methods of memory and defiance that thousands upon thousands of others from the most remote and often impoverished regions of the planet have invented over the last 25 years to cope with a similar mental hell. I am aware, of course, of the distances and differences that separate the missing of New York and their relatives, friends, and community from those who are desaparecidos in the rest of the world and am wary of conflating those quite distinct tragedies. It is not their own government that has concealed the bodies incinerated in the Twin Towers or mocked those who seek information about their whereabouts. And the photos themselves probably originated in a longstanding American tradition that has proliferated images of lost children on milk cartons and other commercial sites. And yet, the inhabitants of the most modernized society in the world may now be able to connect, in ways that would have been unthinkable before September 11, 2001, to the experience of so many hitherto inaccessible planetary others. How can they not understand, now that they know what it means to have thousands of people suddenly evaporate into nothingness with no body to prove or disprove life or death, how can they not feel closer to an old woman I know in Chile who still awakes after midnight, even now, and listens for footsteps that could be her husband's, even if she knows that 27 years have gone by and that it would be better that he not return -- who would want him to be tortured for those long years? How can they not empathize more, now that they hold up their photos to search for a sliver of certainty, a final witness to their beloved's last moments, those words from some stranger a message sent to us from the dead? How can their hearts not go out to the grandmothers in Argentina determined to track down the children of their sons and daughters born in captivity and farmed out to sterile military families, those grandmothers who want to see in the eyes of those babies now grown up the ultimate inheritance left behind by their dead offspring? As the operation in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center wearily turned from rescue to recovery, as the expectation of one more miracle gave way to the conviction that there could be no more survivors, how could they have not shared the grief of the families of the desaparecidos of other lands, when there is no more hope? If New Yorkers were discovering what the women of the missing in Chile and Cyprus and Cambodia and Brazzaville had also gradually realized, that their flock of photographs shrouding the entire city was ultimately destined to become a transitory burial ground where the living and the dead could commune, a site of the collective mourning imagination; yes, if they came to the understanding that in a city that needed to go on with life this extended graveyard of photos would end up becoming the only scattered monument immediately possible in the months to come; if they deeply grasped their own tragedy -- how can those fundamental, radical experiences of death and vulnerability not also open up millions of Americans to the meaning of disappearance in its multiple forms? How can the horror and wonder of breathing an air filled with the oxygen of the absent dead not help them and us to feel linked to the deep suffering and redemption of so many of our faraway kinsmen across the earth? There is, of course, no guarantee that pain and victimhood lead to empathy, no certainty that this experience would allow the Salinases of the world to emerge from invisibility. Enormous sorrows can lead to self-absorption and indifference. Horror and pain can lead the powerful to vent upon the innocent in faraway lands their rage and frustration. We need to look no further than the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq, the creation of new desaparecidos by the victorious soldiers in the very streets and jails where the murderous Saddam Hussein once reigned. But that is the challenge of the moment: to find ways to make this new global tragedy of terror that springs from September 11, 2001, draw us all closer to each other, not because we can now kill one another more easily and with more devastating effects, but because we share the same need to mourn, the same flesh that can be torn, the same impulse toward compassion. And draws us closer to the day when the most powerful members of humankind can pin to our clothes that blank photo of the disappeared, that image of an emptiness and absence that threatens to devour us all. Yes, perhaps our species is oh so slowly getting ready for the day when enough of us will want to wander the boundaries of this earth until we have brought the lost souls of modernity, like the other missing of the world, back from death and oblivion. Ariel Dorfman, a novelist, essayist, and playwright, is a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University. This essay is based on a speech given last month as the Amnesty International Lecture at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 2, Page B7
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education