The politics of remembering and contested narratives

Following Argentina's return to democratic rule in 1983, then president Raúl Alfonsín created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparción de Personas, CONADEP) to investigate the disappearances of individuals carried out under the direction of the military dictatorship during the years 1976–83.Footnote ¹⁴ First-hand narratives of human rights violations experienced under military rule during this period were collected by CONADEP and published under the title of Nunca más (Never Again);Footnote ¹⁵ this document became the authoritative text on human rights violations committed by the military junta, including the systematic disappearances of thousands of individuals and the abuses that occurred in hundreds of secret detention centres scattered across Argentina.Footnote ¹⁶

In recent years, the consecutive governments of Néstor Kirchner (2003–07) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–15) have officially recognized the sheer magnitude of the issue of the disappeared, endorsed new cultural models of collective remembrance and commemoration, and issued a number of presidential decrees that declared previous laws limiting prosecutions under the Alfonsín administration, and other policies of impunity pursued by the Menem government,Footnote ¹⁷ null and void.Footnote ¹⁸ As a result, in November 2018, the Argentine attorney-general reported that 867 people had been found guilty of crimes against humanity.Footnote ¹⁹

However, despite the considerable political and legal gains achieved in recent years, individuals and families affected by State violence continue to feel a sense of injustice over a number of unresolved legacies of this violent past. Firstly, questions about the fate and the whereabouts of thousands of individuals who were disappeared remain unanswered by those responsible in the armed forces. With their loved ones thrown into the ocean by security forces, most of the families of the disappeared – many of whom had already been traumatized by the abduction and permanent disappearance of their children or partners – have had their trauma compounded by being unable to bury their loved ones’ bodies.Footnote ²⁰ Secondly, while the organization Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) has recovered the identities and reunited the families of over 100 illegally appropriated babies and children, the organization estimates that 300–400 individuals are still living under false identities and remain unaware of the truth about their past.Footnote ²¹ Thirdly, while legal proceedings in relation to State terrorism continue, many Argentines with whom the author spoke talked about the slow process of justice and described their lack of faith in a judicial system that had previously failed them, and which continues to accommodate biased judges who on some occasions sentence those convicted to house arrest, under which they are able to live “relatively freely in comfort”.Footnote ²²

Many of the womenFootnote ²³ with whom the author spoke were concerned that political and judicial gains to bring those accused of human rights violations to trial could be lost with a change of government. This has happened before,Footnote ²⁴ and it seems to be coming to pass again: on winning office in 2012, President Mauricio Macri declared that it was time to turn the pageFootnote ²⁵ and refused to acknowledge the figure of 30,000 disappeared persons.Footnote ²⁶ While President Macri promised to continue the trials and to let the judiciary act independently, many human rights activists remain sceptical.

In what was a new constitutional cycle in Argentina's history from 1983, the testimonial narrative of Nunca más established what had happened during the years 1976–83. However, it also sent a clear message about what should be left behind or forgotten. Significantly, victims of the armed political movement during the 1973–76 period were not included in the CONADEP report and the right-wing sectors of Argentine society have challenged the report ever since, claiming that CONADEP leader Ernesto Sabato denounced one side of events while remaining silent about the “terrorism” that occurred prior to the military takeover in 1976.Footnote ²⁷ Sabato responded to these accusations of partiality, saying that it was not the Commission's central role to investigate the violent activities of the armed guerrilla groups during the period 1973–76.Footnote ²⁸ However, the omission of the testimonials of the victims of the armed guerrilla groups meant that certain groups’ experiences were not included in this new democratic chapter of Argentine history.Footnote ²⁹

Since the CONADEP report has been so influential and foundational to the creation of a “new public truth” within Argentine society,Footnote ³⁰ and has subsequently been used as the principal reference point for memory issues in Argentina, the omission of some groups’ experiences has had serious implications for the entrenchment of ideological divisions within cultures of memory. While the report repudiates the political violence in the lead-up to the military coup, this issue is confined to the prologue, and as such, the report as a whole ignores this period of Argentina's past.Footnote ³¹ In the years since the return to democratic rule, family members of victims of the armed guerrilla movement have made attempts to come to a sense of peace about their memories of a violent past. However, during the years of the consecutive Kirchner governments, the families’ feelings of victimization were reignited by what they saw as political efforts to remember one side of history while forgetting another.Footnote ³²

Since the return to democracy, members of both memorial groupsFootnote ³³ have been engaged in endless mourning and remembering, as their painful memories vie for pre-eminence in a constant struggle for political, social and legal recognition in which (again) there are only winners and losers.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, debates about how the period of political violence and State terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s should be collectively remembered by the nation have caused deep political and societal divisions. The various actors who have taken part in these debates have linked their political programmes and orientations with the memories of a violent past,Footnote ³⁵ resulting in the polarization of groups struggling to overcome the injustices of public recognition over whose history should ultimately be acknowledged.Footnote ³⁶ As Barbara, whose father, José Miguel, was killed by the armed guerrilla movement in 1976, said:

This dynamic has created a sense of enmity between the two “memorial groups” struggling for justice and for the memory of their loved ones to be recognized and legitimated in the public sphere. As those who personally experienced suffering have talked of their experiences with others, memory has become a common language through which individuals have been able to articulate and share their traumatic experiences. As a result, memory has become a dominant form of belonging in Argentina. Members of particular political and ideological groups have created a shared fabric of a life-world in which remembering their loved ones who were affected by political and State violence is central. The spread of these community-based groups, whereby being a group member means assuming a shared identity and subscribing to a shared group past, has resulted in the “pluralization and problematization of memory”.Footnote ³⁸ As the boundaries of memory parallel the boundaries of group identity, there is a sense of competitive victimhood as groups compete for the recognition and legitimization of their memories of victimhood, at the exclusion of others, within collective forms of remembrance.Footnote ³⁹

Argentine writer Graciela Scheines likens Argentine history to being a “living burden” that produces “sorrow and anguish”.Footnote ⁴⁰ Widespread abuses by the State and by armed political groups have left behind a powerful legacy of deep pain in Argentina. This was abundantly clear as the individuals interviewed by the author related their traumatic experiences with what seemed to be the same emotional charge as they had shown more than thirty-five years ago, when some of them gave their first public testimonies. Both groups were as committed as ever to the daily task of bearing witness to those experiences that had irrevocably changed the course of their lives.

Traumatic remembrance

While public discussions of historical justice and memory are usually associated with memorials, museums, and artistic and literary works, much less exploration has been made of individuals’ private ways of remembering those who are missing. For families of those disappeared in relation to the 1976–83 State terror in Argentina, the task of remembering traumatic violence is to remember it fully, again and again, every day, until every tragic moment is relived, so that events which had been previously suppressed, distorted or altogether written out of history are never forgotten.

Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo wrote extensively about living with the deep memories of trauma and the challenges of envisioning a future in the midst of the destruction of one's emotional and cognitive capacities. Delbo uses the term “deep memory”, as distinct to common or intellectual memory, to refer to those memories that record the physical imprint of a traumatic event within the individual, causing the past to continuously and unexpectedly rupture trauma survivors’ reconstructed realities.Footnote ⁴¹ Deep memories are felt within the body and can be triggered by associations with particular sensations or objects. They do not fade over time and remain alive in the present.

Watching a loved one being violently kidnapped or disappeared has had long-lasting effects for many of the women with whom the author spoke. For example, Cristina, whose husband Carlos was kidnapped and disappeared, and who herself survived a violent attack with her five-day-old baby by the military's security forces, explained how she has lived with her memories of violence:

Cristina's comment attests to the way in which those affected by political and State violence in Argentina have become “a symptom of history that they cannot entirely possess”.Footnote ⁴³ Cristina's body has become a site and focus for her memories of trauma, which remain ever vulnerable to revival. This raises an important issue about the long-term consequences of living with deep memories that are too painful to acknowledge in a person's everyday reality and identity.

Cristina said there was no way to avoid remembering the violence that she and her family lived through. She said that she was constantly and unexpectedly faced with feeling deep pain in the subtlest ways. For example, she recounted how the trauma she experienced more than three decades ago continues to emerge in recurring dreams:

The trauma Cristina lives with has “no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after”.Footnote ⁴⁵ Her narrative lays bare the way in which the distressing memory of her husband's disappearance, juxtaposed with her own survival, returns repeatedly through her unconscious, placing her in a perpetual state of torment. Caruth argues that the “oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” is what lies at the heart of a traumatic experience.Footnote ⁴⁶ Cristina's dream suggests that what is terrifying for her is the way in which the event of her husband's disappearance returns in all its fullness, but in a way that it was never experienced at the time it occurred. When Cristina asks, “Where have you been all this time? I have been looking for you everywhere”, one can gain a clear sense of the anxiety she unconsciously feels in being incapable of finding her husband. What also becomes clear is her inability to accept her husband's disappearance and death as permanent and final, because she dreams that he finally returns to her. Cristina's memories of trauma in the framework of her dreams show how her “narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality – the escape from a death, or from its referential force – rather attests to its endless impact” on her life.Footnote ⁴⁷

Cristina's story is an example of just how difficult it is for the women interviewed to cope on a daily basis, when their existence has been so disfigured by the violent wrenching away of a loved one. In witnessing the recall of such deep memory, it becomes clear that no amount of public truth-telling can ease the pain of the women's deep memories that persist outside the parameters of closure.Footnote ⁴⁸ Suffering a deep sense of defencelessness and powerlessness from being unable to prevent her husband's disappearance, as well as being unable to predict at the time what might happen to herself and her children, Cristina has had to find a way of living with the fear, uncertainty and guilt that comes from being a survivor of State terror. She still sometimes found herself paralyzed by uncertainty, but she told the author that she had put herself repeatedly in danger in order to help others. She explained this further:

Cristina's narrative shows how the locus of pain remains with the individual long after experiencing the original trauma. The voice that Cristina hears – telling her to put herself directly in the way of danger – comes from the original wounding that she suffered: the experience of being unable to save her husband and prevent the violent treatment of her children. As Dori Laub argues:

Laub's understanding of trauma suggests Cristina will not transcend or overcome the trauma she experienced, but will rather undergo a ceaseless cycle of repetition and re-enactment of the original trauma throughout her life.

The interviewees’ testimonies reveal how their deeply embodied memories never leave them, and can inhibit the sense of relief and finality that the concepts of truth and justice are supposed to deliver.Footnote ⁵¹ While we, as the international community, might wish for closure on the past in order to reach transitional justice goals, it is revealing how deep memory defies closure or indeed any type of certainty. This is particularly true for families of the disappeared, for whom the effects of the loss of a cherished family member are compounded because the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones often remains a complete mystery.

The absence of bodily remains and a lack of knowledge about the fate and whereabouts of loved ones is a loss without end for family members, who become physically and emotionally exhausted as they endure a life of relentless uncertainty.Footnote ⁵² Being a partner of a disappeared person has been painful and distressing on a number of levels for Cristina, who believes the uncertainty about what happened to those who were disappeared will never leave her:

The loss of loved ones, and the associated social and personal implications, have placed most of the female relatives of the disappeared in a state of limbo. The way that disappearance plays out – the feeling of being in limbo – can make it difficult for the women to go a day without mourning their loved ones. When loss is converted into absence, argues LaCapra, “one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted”.Footnote ⁵⁴ The women with whom the author spoke struggle to acknowledge or accept the loss of their loved ones; instead, they embrace their absence. Another mother has said: “Let there be no healing of wounds … let them remain open. Because if the wounds still bleed, there will be no forgetting.”Footnote ⁵⁵

“Memory is the ultimate form of justice”, writes Roger Errera.Footnote ⁵⁶ The family members of the disappeared act as guardians of memory of State violence and repression, as a way of countering corruption within the judicial system. In so doing, they work against the “erosion” of memory caused not only by the passing of time and the nonchalance of a society preoccupied with other pressing concerns, but also by the counter-efforts of those trying to forget.Footnote ⁵⁷ By publicly remembering their loved ones, the women call into being those who are no longer present but call out to be made so; they reclaim and restore the humanity of those individuals whom the military regime attempted to leave in the absences of memory. Justice cannot repair what was broken, bring back those who are lost or reverse time to return society to the earlier status quo. Indeed, the sense of injustice families feel in relation to the disappearance of their loved ones will not magically “disappear” just because of the political and legal gains they have received since 2004. Cristina told the author:

However, the interviewed women's “labors of memory-justice” are at their core forms of resistance “to the counter-moral course of time, to a force that constantly threatens to erase the events and persons of the past and to wash away whatever traces, whatever footprints in the sand they have left”.Footnote ⁵⁹ Not only does justice cast its light on the past, but by bearing witness and bringing the facts “from their refuge in the past” into the present, it also restores the “moral truth” of the past.Footnote ⁶⁰ The women's labours of memory-justice act as a bridge between time past and present; they become a moral response, purging the past of its injustices and restoring justice to the affected parties—both present and absent.

Booth believes that the work of memory-justice “keeps alive the passion for revenge and retribution, fuels an inextinguishable resentment, chains the will to the ‘it was’”.Footnote ⁶¹ The women with whom the author spoke do not hold on to feelings of revenge, but they do maintain a deep resentment toward individuals in the military and security forces. This deep resentment motivates them to give oral testimony despite the emotional pain involved in doing so. Persistence and resentment find their outlet in the endurance of the women's work of memory-justice. These qualities work to address a void that nothing can fill. Punishing perpetrators and receiving legal and moral recognition for the loss of victims is, for the families of the disappeared, to see repair insofar as it is possible.

The memory-justice work carried out by the families of the disappeared is not an attempt to heal their wounds; in their minds, this would deny justice its due. Instead, the families give oral testimony to ensure that the crimes committed by the military continue to have a “moral reality” within Argentine society.Footnote ⁶² In the face of so much uncertainty, they wish to be at least certain that the truth of what happened to their loved ones will not become separated from the passage of time, acting as a force that exonerates perpetrators. The women with whom the author spoke were committed to publicly naming every single individual disappeared by the military until their own death, to stop the winds of forgetting from extinguishing their loved ones’ names, thereby fulfilling their obligation to the dead.

In their testimonials, the women re-create the lives of the disappeared, name their names, describe their personalities and call them back into being. When they tell their stories of the past, the women can hear how they themselves are in these stories; most feel as though they are trapped in old stories. While they do not necessarily want to be trapped, the women with whom the author spoke were hesitant to let go of these stories because they do not feel that there is another place where they can belong. For some of the women, their compulsion to tell their painful story again and again – their need to be heard – indeed appeared to be as Laub describes it: “The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their story; they also needed to tell their story in order to survive.”Footnote ⁶³ Raquel explained how being haunted by the memory of her missing children and grandchildren locks her into the state of being consumed by their absence:

Raquel expresses her desire to remain with ambiguity, and as she does so she expresses her resistance to any form of conceptual or narrative closure which may be required within a transitional justice paradigm. She made a decision a long time ago to be engaged with a process of endless bereavement, and remains tied to the historical and social effects that she is recounting.Footnote ⁶⁵ The women find themselves bound to the disappeared in such an entangled way that loss will continue to be a part of their identity and the mourning will never end. The need of the disappeared to be remembered has become inseparable from the needs of the members of their families who remain without them. Rather than seek any sort of resolution or reconciliation, the women have allowed the past to take possession of their present lives, and with this has come the dismissal of any dissonant discourse.

The emotional currency of memorial groups

Memory belongs in the “intermediary realm” between individuals; it develops and grows out of the interplay of interpersonal relations, and as such, emotions play an important role in this process.Footnote ⁶⁶ The bonds formed between individuals situated within competing memorial groups in Argentina have resulted in the creation of precise collective memories. Much of the power of these collective memories has in part been derived from the strong emotions that they provoke, further feeding already heightened political and social tensions.

In particular, the recovery of knowledge about what happened to the disappeared and making this knowledge public through the giving of oral testimony have been crucial activities in recovering the past for human rights organizations and families. Graciela, whose partner Ricardo was disappeared in 1976, said:

Graciela has an ability to affect others, and to be affected, when she repeatedly and openly relates the emotional story of the disappearance of her partner by the military. As she relates her account, something she does most days, her private emotional experience “feeds” into collective memory through an important social psychological process called the “social sharing of emotions”.Footnote ⁶⁸ Research shows that emotions are essentially interpersonal communicative acts, involving long-term social processes: the more individuals are upset, the more likely they are to share their story with others and to elicit vivid and long-lasting memories of the event.Footnote ⁶⁹ As individuals repeatedly relate their emotional experiences to others, the social group gradually assimilates those experiences and, as a result, is furnished with new emotional knowledge.Footnote ⁷⁰ Exploring how emotions can both circulate between individuals and shape subjectivities is crucial to our understanding of how emotions can form and mobilize individuals or groups in different ways over a period of time. This process can influence the way a historical experience is organized in memory and perhaps recalled in the future.Footnote ⁷¹

The social sharing of emotions can further contribute to a culture of animosity and resentment among and between different memorial groups. In her model of the sociality of emotions, Sara Ahmed suggests that how we feel about others shapes individual and group perceptions and that this process is what aligns us with a collective.Footnote ⁷² One's perception of another involves a form of “contact” between the individual and the “other” that is shaped by longer histories of contact: “These histories have already impressed upon the surface of the bodies at the same time as they create new impressions.”Footnote ⁷³ It is the “moment of contact”, shaped and informed by past histories, that allows the proximity of the “other” to thus be perceived as threatening.Footnote ⁷⁴ This point was clearly articulated by Barbara, who said that to talk about her father is to recuperate his memory. As she was only very young when her father was killed, Barbara has relied on newspaper cuttings and anecdotes from his colleagues to paint a picture of who her father really was. The role her journalist father played in the violence of the 1970s before his death – unsolved in her mind – can be a source of intense frustration. “He never killed anyone, I'm sure of it”, Barbara told the author.

Barbara described her internal anguish at the lack of evidence provided by those attempting to vilify her father as a member of a right-wing paramilitary group, and the frustration she has suffered when her efforts to clear her father's name have been thwarted. She often dreams of her father when she is facing great inner turmoil in her life, and she sees him as her protector, not someone who was violent. She shared that reading his poetry helped her know that her father wasn't a monster, but that he was killed for speaking publicly about his beliefs. Barbara does not know who killed her father, and told the author that her efforts to leave the past behind are to no avail. She said:

What is happening in Barbara's case is explained by Brison, who writes:

Barbara struggles with feelings of stigmatization and public shame because of the presumed role her father played in the terror inflicted by the military. Because of her interface with political and social judgements about the actions of her father in the past, Barbara feels ashamed that she herself has done something wrong; she feels that she is to blame in some way for her father's actions. Current political and social conditions produce within Barbara an ambiguous coexistence between feelings of shame and pride. She carries these contradictory emotions within herself, experiencing great anxiety at being unable to restore her father's memory in the public sphere and attain a sense of pride about who she is.

In Barbara's case, she has failed to elicit for herself a sense of social recognition. As Honneth explains: “Recognition itself must possess the character of affective approval or encouragement.”Footnote ⁷⁷ These affects, suggests Watkins, “are the corporeal instantiation of recognition, the sensations one may feel in being recognized, which accumulate over time, fostering a sense of self-worth”.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moments of recognition therefore function as an affective force. Barbara's perception that political, social and cultural recognition is withheld from her when she remembers her father creates feelings of having failed in the eyes of the “ideal other”.Footnote ⁷⁹

In Barbara's example, recognition functions in a negative way, and carries with it the resultant force of negative affects. Barbara's sense of shame and her shattered sense of self-worth bind her negatively to others in her failure to “live up to” others. Not only does Barbara have the impression that the government and human rights organizations are marginalizing her personal memories of her father, but these groups also leave her with the impression that she has something to feel shameful about. She feels that she cannot be a legitimate and recognized player in Argentina's collective memorial culture.

Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn write that the link between individuals is predicated on the possibility and expectation of empathy. However, when individuals’ vital needs either go unheeded or are ignored by others, those individuals lose the expectation that their needs will in some way be met.Footnote ⁸⁰ Though she was of a different political persuasion, Barbara was told by government agencies that she did not have the right to claim assistance as a victim of the military dictatorship because her father was deemed a fascist. Barbara said:

The lack of receptivity for her grief and trauma has made Barbara feel as if she is not regarded as a citizen with equal rights within Argentine society. Barbara feels there is no understanding or empathy for her experience of loss, and feels desperately alone as a result. “Being discriminated against for the ideology of my father doesn't give me the motivation to keep fighting [for his memory]”, she told me. Barbara does not feel that she is able to engage within her environment interpersonally, and as such she is unable to elicit a sense of mutuality. She is left feeling that she has nobody within the government or human rights organizations on whom she can count.

In Argentina, considerable social damage has been caused by the significant absence of empathy for the grief of those in different memorial cultures. This has denied both groups of women what they desire: the acknowledgement and empathic engagement with their suffering by those individuals instrumental in, and directly responsible for, causing their emotional pain. What is then produced is a lack of what Ahmed calls “fellow feeling”:Footnote ⁸² the women's pain cannot be shared through empathy with others in different memorial groups. But what happens to empathic engagement when traumatic memories pass not only between bodies but across generations?Footnote ⁸³

Intergenerational transmission of memory

Susana Kaiser has conducted research on how the experience of living under terror has been transmitted to following generations, and how the psychic remains of fear have manifested themselves in Argentina's post-dictatorship generation. In her interviews with Argentine youth who were born during or following the period of military dictatorship, Kaiser illustrates how fear has persisted throughout the years: it has been transmitted by those who were directly affected by the violence to those who were mostly too young to remember. Kaiser believes the “witness generation's” transmission of memories has influenced and shaped the post-dictatorship generation's ways of thinking and acting.Footnote ⁸⁴

For example, most parents of those interviewed had told their children to avoid activities that had been targeted for repression in the past. One young woman, mimicking her father's voice and gestures, told Kaiser that her father can put her in a state of paranoia on passing a police station as he says, “Let's cross the street”. “He always does that,” she told Kaiser.Footnote ⁸⁵ By witnessing her father's embodied reaction, the daughter understands the embodiment of terror associated with the police station in the past. In another example, Laura talked about how “revolutionary” books by Marx and Lenin were well hidden in her home during the dictatorship. She believes the attitudes and experiences of the parents have been crucial in shaping the fear of the next generation:

While the children of the witnessing generation that Kaiser interviewed did not think the political conditions were comparable to those that brought about the dictatorship, many discussed being afraid of being tortured, and could not discard the possibility of a repeat of the violence in the future. As long as torturers’ identities are still unknown and they continue to roam freely within society, it stands to reason that “if they did it once they could do it again”.Footnote ⁸⁷

Those in the next generation of Argentines have become witnesses not to the original trauma, but to the affective traces that trauma has left on their ancestors. For the children of the witnessing generation and for those who were very young during the dictatorship period, recognizing and acknowledging the psychic life of their parents and relatives in their own psychic life means uncovering and deciphering their ancestors’ unspoken suffering and painful history as well as their guilt, shame and crime.Footnote ⁸⁸ Marianne Hirsch remarks: “For survivors of trauma, the gap between generations is the breach between a traumatic memory located in the body and the mediated knowledge of those who were born after.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Taking up Hirsch's idea, Esther Faye suggests that a repressed, mnemic registration of an individual's traumatic past in one generation can be experienced as a traumatic memory “at a later time and place” in another generation.Footnote ⁹⁰

In particular, the generation of Argentine individuals who have recovered their identity in recent years with the assistance of Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo has been forced to cope with exceedingly difficult dilemmas, including the decision to condemn the persons they have for decades called their parents. They have had to cope with extreme confusion and powerlessness as their identities have been turned upside down and they have been made to feel as if they have been torn into parts. They have also had to open up to whole new families and grapple with new categories to define those who had previously been family. Many individuals who have managed to recover their true identity have had to deal with anger, loneliness and grief on learning that they have been lied to for decades.

These individuals form part of a generation of young people who continue to work to ensure that their deep memories of trauma are kept alive for decades to come, as they seek to recover their real identities and to recuperate the “unspoken suffering and secret histories” of their disappeared and deceased parents.Footnote ⁹¹ Though they may have never known their parents, the children of the disappeared have nonetheless received and assimilated the effects of their parents’ traumatic histories belatedly, through the narratives and actions of the previous generation. In this way, trauma both solidifies and blurs generational differences.Footnote ⁹² What does this mean for Argentina now and in the future?

It becomes clear that without understanding the transmission of affective memory, we cannot possibly understand Argentine social or public life; we cannot hope to understand the forces that are at play to keep such deep animosities in place decades after the end of the dictatorship. Affect is created as the women repetitively share their narratives of violence and loss in the public sphere. Affect is that which is said and which remains unsaid in the oral testimony encounter. It is that which can communicate and motivate overtly and publicly – but it is also an excess that may remain unprocessed and misrecognized, evading consciousness yet provoking behaviour all the same. In the same way that Laura feels fear and paranoia on passing by a police station because her father would regularly tell her to cross the road away from it, or in the way that hundreds of children who have recovered their identities feel they imbibe the suffering of their disappeared parents, we can see that the migration of affect between bodies carries ideas along with it. The next generation of Argentines’ histories of family trauma and suffering will continue to flare as the transmission of affect ignites the memory of their ancestors’ fate. Traumatic memory will always be, in this regard, an issue of the present.

This article has explored the production, circulation and transmission of memories of the political and State violence of the 1970s and 1980s within two groups of Argentine women. In doing so, it has demonstrated the ways in which unresolved legacies of violence continue to haunt Argentine society – a deeply paradoxical concept, considering that Argentina pioneered many of the justice-seeking and truth-telling mechanisms designed to “deal with” the past in transitioning democracies. The article has taken a twofold approach to considering why this may be so. It firstly investigated the evolving and complex historical, political, social, cultural and legal factors that have shaped the cultures of remembrance in post-dictatorial Argentina. It secondly focused on a different kind of narrative about remembering and forgetting in a traumatized society – one that is concerned with the workings of deep memory and the transmission of emotions and affects. The author contends that these two kinds of narratives are inevitably and inescapably intertwined. The two stories of what happened to memory in Argentina need to be considered alongside each other, as a way of arriving at a much more complex, layered and dynamic picture of Argentina's memorial cultures and as a way of understanding why, decades later, Argentina continues to grapple with its past. In the next section, parallels between the Argentine and Sri Lankan contexts will be drawn to explore the historical legacies, as well as the key notions of affect, that Sri Lanka will need to address in order to prevent a repetition of the Argentine experience.

Drawing parallels between Sri Lanka and Argentina

In Sri Lanka, while transitional justice is in its infancy, important historical parallels to the way the past has been remembered in the Argentine experience are becoming apparent. In the years following the return to democratic rule, Argentine families of the disappeared struggled to have their memories of violence and loss recognized in the public sphere as consecutive governments embraced a politics of forgetting and impunity. Such policies have been similarly emerging in Sri Lanka since the end of the armed conflict in 2009. Though Sri Lanka was declared a “global champion of human rights and democratic accountability” in 2016Footnote ⁹³ and recently granted another two-year extension to implement Resolution 30/1, “Promoting Reconciliation, Accountability and Human Rights”, at the 40th Session of the UN Human Rights Council in March 2019, Sri Lankan communities are at the same time encouraged to “forget the past and move forward”,Footnote ⁹⁴ adopting a similar narrative of forgiveness and reconciliation to that which was espoused in South Africa.Footnote ⁹⁵

The level to which the concepts of truth, memory and justice permeate the public consciousness, particularly in relation to transitional justice discourse, is still to be fully understood.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, questions abound as to whether or not it is too early for memory in Sri Lanka, with families divided over the issue.Footnote ⁹⁷ While some families insist that remembering their missing relatives is an important element on their own personal road to learning to live with the ambiguity resulting from disappearance, other families, who believe their relatives are still alive somewhere, resist the very notion. For these families, participating in processes of “reparative remembering” as part of transitional justice processes is akin to conceding that their loved ones are deceased. As a result, these families demand that the State firstly and urgently fulfil its obligations towards establishing the truth about the fate and whereabouts of their missing relatives and prosecuting the perpetrators of these crimes.Footnote ⁹⁸

Lawyer and researcher Gehan Gunatilleke believes that memorialization has an important role to play in contemporary Sri Lanka, not only in creating a public space for truth, justice and reparations but also in challenging any State reluctance to fulfil its agreed-upon obligations towards realizing transitional justice processes.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, Gunatilleke is also concerned that a contemporary “Sri Lankan version” of transitional justice, which promotes restorative forms of “tolerance”, “forgiveness” and “leniency”, is a preferred narrative among some scholars as well as the Sri Lankan State. He rightly asks, “why are we not learning lessons from the past?”, and contends that “[d]espite recurring violence, the country has been unable to learn from its history and develop an effective approach to combat impunity and prevent violence”.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Over the past four decades, a number of commissions of inquiry have been established in Sri Lanka to deal with its violent past. Most recently, the government-commissioned Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms (CTF) was established, and public consultations were held across Sri Lanka in 2016.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The CTF was mandated to elicit public opinion on how transitional justice processes should be designed and established, and how they should function to meaningfully address the legacy of violence and conflict between 1983 and 2009.Footnote ¹⁰² An overarching theme of the 7,306 oral and written submissions made by families and local and international organizations was the importance of long-term psychosocial support during and following the completion of a transitional justice process.Footnote ¹⁰³ Some submissions to the CTF also claimed that the nation itself had been psychologically affected by the past violence and conflict, and iterated the importance of facilitating a “process for healing of memories for everyone” in order to repair the mistrust among and between Sri Lanka's communities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Like Argentina, Sri Lanka will, for decades to come, deal with a myriad of evolving and complex historical, political, social, cultural and legal factors that shape cultures of remembrance as well as ethnic and religious dimensions that will continually challenge the transitional justice paradigm's goals of tolerance and forgiveness.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ “A reconciliation process always contains paradoxes, tensions, even contradictions. It is neither neat nor easy and at times can seem incongruous”, write Hamber and Kelly.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Indeed, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the peace-building agenda, and similarly to Argentina, Sri Lanka will need to resolve a number of legacies of how past violence is remembered, not least maintaining an inclusive approach to memorialization in order to avoid recognizing some memories of violence while engaging in the forced forgetting of others.

Ambika Satkunanathan, human rights activist and commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, believes that since the end of the most recent conflict in Sri Lanka in 2009, the government's failure to recognize the memories of all victims of the conflict “has only served to generate anger, resentment and a sense of disenfranchisement amongst the Tamil people, which in the short-term will make reconciliation impossible, and in the long-term form the catalyst for another conflict”.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Farzana Haniffa, however, also highlights the dangers of competitive victimhood status in Sri Lanka should the experiences and memories of the Muslim community, especially those who were expelled from the Northern Province by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), be omitted from transitional justice processes.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Haniffa reminds us of the need for more nuanced and subtle discussions around victimhood and remembrance for all marginalized groups. For example, one Muslim civilian felt betrayed by the LTTE as a whole, saying:

Gunatilleke calls for a “victim-centred” approach to public memorialization, rather than a State-led approach, to ensure that all affected groups are considered and included.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Currently, while public monuments and memorials in Sri Lanka's capital Colombo commemorate the military causalities of armed conflicts, including servicemen who lost their lives during the most recent civil war, there is as yet no monument which commemorates all victims of armed conflicts.Footnote ¹¹¹

The building of trust between communities and prospects for grassroots reconciliation will also be jeopardized as long as justice remains elusive. A recent report released by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights points to the “slow progress” that Sri Lanka has shown in establishing “meaningful transitional justice measures” and the continued lack of progress in the area of accountability for past crimes. “The risk of new violations increases when impunity for serious crimes continues unchecked”, the report states.Footnote ¹¹² As in Argentina, as long as perpetrators of violence and disappearance seem to manage to keep their identities concealed and continue to live alongside their victims in Sri Lanka, and an endemic silence and denial continues about the fate and whereabouts of missing persons, the past will remain a source of eternal frustration and perceived injustice for families.

Like elsewhere, families of missing persons in Sri Lanka will have different views towards the concept of justice and how it applies to their experiences. And similarly to Argentina, demands for justice may not wane with time as long as the truth about the fate and whereabouts of missing persons remains elusive. Indeed summarizing the results of one study conducted with families of the disappeared in Sri Lanka, Gehan Guntilleke writes that “even a lapse of 28 years had not neutralized the demand among the participants for truth telling and the identification and prosecution of perpetrators”.Footnote ¹¹³

With their loved ones still missing, many families will never be able to bury their loved ones’ bodies and Sri Lankans continue to evoke the memory of their disappeared relatives and make attempts to re-inhabit the world in the face of persistent ambiguity over their loved ones’ fate. Malathi De Alwis believes that Sinhala women whose children were disappeared during the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna uprising (1988–93) continue to identify as family members of disappeared persons.Footnote ¹¹⁴

These unresolved legacies are part of what compels individuals to share their narrative in the public sphere and can play a crucial role in how events are collectively assimilated and remembered. As the significance of violent events and memories of loss are socially shared within and among memorial cultures, individuals’ perceptions and understandings of events are shaped to a significant degree by those sharing their traumatic experiences. The telling and retelling of individuals’ memories never “exhausts” the violence that was inflicted; instead, such testimony symbolizes and even evokes it. A Sinhala mother whose child was disappeared during the late 1980s explained: “They cannot identify him at least to know where he is, to be able to mark the location and to build a memorial to remember him and hold funeral rites.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ For this mother, as long as knowledge of the fate and whereabouts of her son and some form of acknowledgment are lacking, she will continue to attest to the impact of his absence and ensure that it continues to have a moral reality within Sri Lankan society.

As affected individuals in Argentina have repetitively related their emotional experiences to others in the country, the social group has gradually assimilated those experiences, and as a result has been furnished with new emotional knowledge which can create both solidarity and antagonism. As feelings and emotions have been strongly communicated by individuals in their narratives, this in turn has engendered strong feelings in those listening.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As a result, there is a sense that the past never moves on in Argentina but circles, raven-like, round and round. The sharing of narratives both publicly and privately in the Sri Lankan context is similarly done to ensure that the truths of a violent past are shared and never forgotten, for the benefit of the generations to follow.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the words of one survivor of violence:

While some steps have been taken on the road to realizing transitional justice processes in Sri Lanka, the country has a long way to go to produce the conditions necessary for a peaceful coexistence between all communities. Many challenges remain unresolved, and one of the biggest of these is, as mentioned above, how to include the memories of all those who suffered in the public sphere of remembrance, including those of the most marginalized. Otherwise, like in Argentina, competitive ideological battles in the public domain over whose history and political culture should ultimately be recognized and validated will prevail. Warnings abound in Sri Lanka of the risk of fuelling renewed cycles of violence if the multiple narratives and truths around the experiences of conflict are not included in the public sphere of remembrance.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Learning lessons from Argentina, should different groups of victims be compelled to compete for the recognition of their memories in the public sphere as if it were a “scarce resource”,Footnote ¹²⁰ this will ultimately have crucial implications for the shaping of Sri Lankan collective memorial culture and identity. Instead, the author suggests creating a memorial culture within which the complexity of the relationship between violence, power and affect is permitted, in order to create a culture of empathic alignment between different memorial groups and to allow for transformative and discursive possibilities to emerge.