One Hundred Years of Forgotteness: Aesth-Ethics of Memory in Latin America

Abstract

This paper is a response to the following question: how can we listen to, render audible, and thus resist the kind of erasures and institutional forms of oblivion imposed by power and political structures in Latin America? I propose to answer this question through the study of literary and artistic responses to a paradigmatic case of this kind of oblivion in the history of Colombia, namely, the matanza de las bananeras. By following the ways in which the case has been “recovered” in its undecidable character, first in One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, and then in José Alejandro Restrepo’s Musa Paradisíaca, I intend to show a concrete example of why, as Arendt suggests, “in their stubbornness, facts are superior to power,” and that “persuasion and violence can destroy truth, but they can never replace it.” I begin my argument with a discussion of Ángela Uribe’s use of the case of the matanza and her treatment of García Márquez’s depiction as a refutation of Arendt’s statement. I take Uribe’s analysis as a provocation to build my own reading of the kind of memory and survival of the matanzamade possible by García Márquez’s novel, and continued by Restrepo’s installation. I conclude by showing how, in both cases, the matanzastubbornly resists oblivion, even though, as Arendt suggests, the historical truth has indeed been destroyed.