Lindsay memoria y l restrepo (ocr)

Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, February 2003, 41-58

' Clear and Present Danger': Trauma, Memory
and Laura Restrepo's La novia oscura

CLAIRE LINDSAY
Goldsmiths', University of London

This article deals with questions of trauma and memory in contemporary Colombian society
and culture. It begins with an outline of the multifarious forms of violence that have
pervaded Colombian history and underlines how they have led to a tendency towards
collective amnesia. Within this context, and drawing on some of the work that has been
I
done in this area in cultural studies, consider the question of literature as cultural
memory. I then go on to focus on the work of one of Colombia's foremost women writers,
Laura Restrepo. My analysis of her most recent novel La novia oscura (1999) reveals a
significant preoccupation with personal and collective trauma and memory, both in terms
of content and form. Ultimately, following a reading of the socio-historical contexts of
literary production in the light of the work of Walter Benjamin and historian Gonzalo
Sánchez, I suggest that we regard Restrepo's novel as a 'flash' of memory at a critical
'moment of danger', which encourages a crucial dialectic between past and present.

Hagamos memoria. Es un riesgo para usted,
querido lector; le puede costar sudor y
lágrimas; no es su culpa. Este pais hace rato
perdió la memoria y todos los días alimenta
esa costumbre. Pero hay tercos que nos
resistimos a ello y nos convertirnos en
personas sumamente inconformes.
(Garzón 2001)

Violence and Amnesia in Colombia
In a recent edition of the national daily newspaper El Espectador, an article laments
Colombia's failure to commemorate significant past events of its history in any
lasting or symbolic way. As an example, the article cites the death of one of the
country's most charismatic and popular political leaders of the twentieth century,
Jorge Eliécer Gaitân,„ claiming that his assassination 'no está en la memoria de las
nuevas generaciones' (Anonymous 2001: 35). Indeed, the article features a photo-
graph depicting the meagre commemoration of his death: a small plaque on the
wall of the building on the Carrera Séptima in downtown Bogotá outside which

Address correspondence to Dr Claire Lindsay, Department of English and Comparative Literature,
Goldsmiths', University of London, New Cross, London 5E14 6NW, UK

C) Queen Mary, University of London, 2003

42 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL, 4.1, FEBRUARY 2003
Gaitin.was killed on 9 April 1948. The plaque is now largely obscured by the shop
signs which adorn the neighbouring businesses of this busy Bogotá street. It is
easily missed amongst the garish, neon advertising of the camera shop and men's
clothing store between which it is crammed, as well as the 'golden arches' of the
McDonald's restaurant some two or three doors down. The assassination of Gaitán,
a politician who might have changed the face of national politics (he was widely
tipped as a future Liberal party presidential candidate), would act as the catalyst
for one of the most pivotal events of Colombia's twentieth-century history: the
so-called bogotazo that sparked off riots throughout the country, which in turn
went on to crystallize the period of prolonged, 'informal' civil war that has come
to be known as La Violencia, in which almost 300,000 people lost their lives.' The
failure to mark appreciably such a determining moment in the county's history
(as well as others since) leads the anonymous writer of the article to accuse
Colombia of being 'el pais del olvido' (Anonymous 2001: 33). Indeed, s/he goes
on to assert that Colombia's lack of significant commemoration of past traumas
such as the assassination of Gillian exacerbates its present difficulties in breaking
out of a seemingly interminable cycle of social and political insecurity, unrest and
violence, an assertion that is reiterated widely in current media discourses in
Colombia, as the epigraph from Luis Garzón illustrates. This assertion also echoes
the warning made by Georges Santayana, Karl Marx, Primo Levi and many others,
that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it It is precisely
these issues of trauma, memory and history in respect of present-day Colombia
which shall concern me in this article. In particular, I shall consider the ways in
which historical trauma has been represented (or 'remembered') in Colombia's
recent cultural production and, more specifically, in the work of one of the
country's foremost women writers, Laura Restrepo. First, however, a brief word
about the particular nature of the country's history of violence is in order.
Garzón daims in his column that the national failure to recall significant past
events of Colombian history has been fostered in recent times by politicians in the
nm up to the 2002 presidential elections. The trajectory of Colombian history itself,
however, has also exacerbated, if not induced, the symptoms of collective amnesia
described by Garzón and the writer in El Espectador. In the last few years particu-
larly Colombia has suffered a sharp escalation in the unresolved armed conflict
that plagued the country during most of the twentieth century and which looks
likely to dominate in the early part of this century. There are almost daily conft-on-
tations between guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), paramilitary organiza-
tions and the Armed Forces. Moreover, the violence affecting Colombia has become
increasingly heterogeneous in nature and can be related to a series of different,
sometimes interrelated conflicts. For example, there are on going battles over land

Gaitân had already put himself forward as a candidate for the 1946 elections, causing a split in the
Liberal party which eventually led to the triumph of Conservative Mario °spina Pérez (Bushnell 1993:
198-99). Indeed, David Bushnell maintairts that it was in this year that La Violencia really began: 'The
wave of violence in Colombia E. . .1 did not begin on April 9, 194& it had begun already, following
the change of administration in 1946' (Bushnell 1993: 204).

LINDSAY: 'CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER' 43
rights not only in the coffee-growing regions but also in newer areas of coloniz-
ation, in the country's coca-growing regions. There is also the violence stemming
from labour unrest in the agricultural sector (particularly in the regions of Urubá
and Magdalena Medio) as well as in the mining sector, especially in areas devoted
to the extraction of emeralds and petroleum. As Colombian historian Gonzalo
Sánchez writes:
Con el tiempo, estas zonas se han ido convirtiendo en pintos estratégicos de
confr ontación entre el Estado, las compañías mineras y la guerrilla, a costa de la
sociedad. Estado, guerrilla y multinacionales petroleras en muchos casos arreglan
sus ganancias, sus pérdidas y sus demostraciones de fuerza a costa de terceros.
(Sánchez 2000: 274)
ln addition, in recent years the violence that traditionally racked rural areas has
moved increasingly into major urban centres and taken on a number of diverse
manifestations: political assassinations, kidnappings, murders committed by hired
assassins or sicarios, the activities of popular militia groups (some with links to
insurgent organizations) and operations of 'social cleansing', frequently carried
out with the complicity of the official 'guardians' of public order, the police and
Armed Forces.
These many forms of violence have had a profound effect on the fabric of
Colombian society as well as on the national psyche, displacing thousands of
Colombians from their homes and leaving thousands more living in fear. In terms
of internal displacement, the figures have seen an alarming increase in the last
couple of decades. Between 1985 and 1996 the total number of displaced persons
in the country doubled (from 89,510 to 181,010), the largest percentage of those
being in the region of Antioquia (45%), where the greatest number of massacres
took place (Sánchez 2000). At present, the number stands at over 300,000 (although
the British Times recently reported a figure of over two million displaced persons
nationally) and the epicentre has moved to the department of Sa.ntander. 2 Sanchez
underlines how such multifarious forms of violence have affected not only the
location of thousands of the country's inhabitants but also the substance of social
life throughout Colombia: 'se ha producido una ostensible contracción de lo púb-
lico, convertido ahora en el territorio del miedo y de la fuerza, y una exaltación
de la esfera privada' (Sánchez 2000: 283). Furthermore, as Sánchez points out, 'such
new forms of irregular sociability are affecting the ways people construct memory
and comprehend time' (Sánchez 2001: 9). For example, for the sicario, life is an
instant where neither the past nor the future exists: 'Sicarios take consumer society
to an extreme: they convert life, their own lives and those of their victims, into
objects of economic transactions, into disposable objects' (Salazar 1990: 200). With
violence having become such a quotidian affair in Colombia, the time of the living
has become intertwined inexorably with the time of the dead, as Sánchez goes on
to explain:
Personal and political calendars have filled up with crosses. But in contrast to
what happened in the countries in the Southern Cone such as Argentina, where

2
'Colombia moves to flush rebels from safe haven', The Times, 22 February 2002, p. 20.

past violence, long officially denied, was recognised, dramatised, and exorcised
in a great national process of exposure and self-criticism, in Colombia, on the
contrary, violence and massacres tend to be routinized and incessantly displaced
to a kind of frontier between memory and non-memory. (Sánchez 2001: 9)
Nevertheless, some resistance to the tendency towards 'non-memory', such as that
described in the article in El Espectador, appears to be growing in Colombia at
present both in the form of increasingly frequent demonstrations in the country's
major cities, and in the establishment of grass movements and organizations such
as Nunca Mils? Furthermore, the nation's cultural production, to which I now turn,
is proving to be another significant 'site of memory', for, as a number of scholars
have pointed out, in Colombia, i Si bien la situación politica ha empeorado, en
términos de producción cultural, pese al recrudecimiento del conflicto, se ha
experimentado un auge notable' (Fernández 2000: 760).4
Memory, Narrative and Fiction
In his 1994 novel La virgen de los sicarios, Fernando Vallejo makes a similar accu-
sation of amnesia of his native Colombia to that of the article in El Espectador.
Returning to Medellin, after many years of exile to be confronted with the escalating
violence of the city's comunas and the dispensability of its inhabitants through the
actions of sicarios, the protagonist, the grammarian Fernando, provocatively
declares, 'Yo soy la memoria de Colombia y su conciencia y después de mi no
sigue nada' (Vallejo 1994: 21). This statement is interesting in a number of respects.
First, it is notable that Fernando/Vallejo effectively attributes himself the ultimate
role in cultural memorization by virtue of the production of this literary account
of his return to Medellin.' Set in the period following the demise of Pablo Escobar,
La virgen de los sicarios, while not the first nor the only work of fiction on this
subject, is an important account of 'los hábitos de los sicarios, su afin de consumo
y su ideología' (Jaramillo 2000: 433) as well as the story of the protagonist's love
affairs with two assassins, Alexis and Wilmar. 6 Indeed, the book's recent adapta-
tion to the cinema and the film's international distribution have confirmed the
significance of Vallejo's text As Héctor Fernandez points out:

3
Nunca Más is a coalition of nineteen human rights movements whose stated aim is 'to recover
historical memory, in order to struggle against impunity for war crimes and gross human rights
violations' committed in Colombia. See NACLA Report on the Americas 2000a: 40. There are also a
growing number of women's movements that have been established in recent decades in Colombia.
For more on these, see the special issue, Mujeres que escribieron en el siglo XX: Construcción del femenismo
en Colombia, of En otras palabras, 7 (2000).
4
This assertion is reinforced by José Cardona López who writes that i rLiteratural, sobre todo,
ha continuado en sus desarrollos' (Cardon Lc5pez 2000: 380), as well as Sally Taylor when she writes
that 'Contrary to the political situation. Colombia continues to be a country of poets, thinkers and
readers', in 'The Book Scene in Colombia — Update May 99', http://www.publishersweekly.corn/
articles/19056_82.ap
Fiéctor D. Ferndndez claims that the novel is semi-autobiographical and that consequently there
is no need to distinguish between author and protagonist: 'Según las declaraciones del autor, las
diferencias entre él v. el protagonista del relato es "de una millonésima", L..] En este caso, dado el
contexto, opto por no distinguir entre Vallejo y el personaje' (Fernández 2000: 766, n. 2).
6
On the subject of sicarios, see Salazar 1990 and Ramos 200 0 .

Antes que nada, el libro, al igual que la mayor parte de la obra de Vallejo, es E. . .1
Uil ejercicio de la memoria, una lucha contra el tiempo. f. .1 El escritor anizioqueo
escribe una novela sobre la muerte, sobre el infierno, porque le atormenta que en
Colombia, frente al constante desfile de muertos, se le dé tan escasa importancia
a la memoria de los fallecidos. Para él, la peor ligereza de sus compatriotas radica
en el poco peso y honra que confieren a los sacrificados en el conflicto. (Fernández
2000: 760)
Thus, in the absence of 'official' forms of commemoration, literary fiction is
afforded a central role in the construction of collective memory by both Vallejo
and his critics.
Indeed, while literature remains 'curiously underestimated' in prevailing dis-
cussions of cultural memory, as Jonathan Crewe points out, 'the historical func-
tioning of literature as cultural memory can hardly be disputed' (Crewe 1999: 76).
Crewe maintains that both are determined by 'communal fictionalising, idealising
and monamentalising impulses' (Crewe 1999: 76), an association which is under-
lined also by Mieke Bal:
Because memory is made up of socially constituted forms, narratives and relations,
but is also amenable to individual acts of intervention in it, memory is always
open to social revision and manipulation. This makes it an instance of fiction rather
than imprint. (Bal 2000: xiii, my emphasis)

The assertions of Crewe and Bal are reinforced by connections established pri-
marily through psychoanalytic accounts between memory and narrative, which
have been well documented in much of the recent work done on trauma in cultural
studies. For example, in her work on Holocaust survivors, Doris Laub observes
that 'the "not-telling" of a story serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny' (Felman
& Laub 1992: 79). Irene Kacandes explains further that the relief of symptoms
brought on by the experience of trauma requires the creation of a coherent narrative
about the event/5 that inflicted the trauma: 'this process is sometimes referred to
as the translation of traumatic memory into narrative memory' (Kacandes 1999:
55). Whilst the creation of a story might be painful or difficult, it is deemed essential
in order to effect healing, as Kacandes describes: 'a circuit of communication must
come into being, the components of which are an enunciator (the trauma victim-
patient), a story (the narrative of the traumatic event) and an enabler for that story
(the listener-analyst)'. Kacandes points out a further connection between memory
and literature, that while a story may be written in isolation, 'to be considered
"told", it must be received through the act of reading' (Kacandes 1999: 56). 7 It is
this almost inescapable connection between memory and narrative fiction that I
find suggestive in a number of ways in the following discussion. Before developing
this further, however, I want to return to the quotation from Vallejo.
Fernando's declaration in La virgen de los sicarios is significant further still, in my
view, in that the speaker who daims to assume the mantle of cultural memory in

7
Indeed, as Helmut Peitsch describes, American psychoanalyst Martin Bergman presents literature
as an alternative way of dealing with trauma in contrast to repression or denial —namely transforming
trauma. See the introduction to Peitsch et al. 1999: xix.

that quotation is a man of letters. What is more, Vallejo asserts his literary account
as the ultimate form of remembrance: 'después de mi, no sigue nada 1 . 8 Vallejo's
assertion, I would argue, is indicative of a time-honoured propensity in the patri-
archal literary establishment (not only in Colombia) to regard solely the work of
an exclusive group of male writers as comprising the official 'canon'. This has
been mirrored by a similar trend in the area of history where, as June Purvis
observes, 'the majority of historical works are written by men and [are] generally
about men' (Purvis 1994: 141). Thus, traditionally, a nation's literature and history
- its forms of institutionalized memory - have been constructed or dominated in
large part by a canonical male hegemony. Indeed, much of the existing critical
scholarship on contemporary Colombian letters presents such an androcentric pic-
ture, especially with regard to the subjects of history and violence in fiction. The
prevailing image is of a national literature written by a small number of authors
such as Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazdbal, Rafael Humberto Moreno Duran, Alvaro
Mutis and, of course, Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Indeed, the so-called `novela de La
Violencia' that grew out of Colombia's mid-twentieth-century civil trauma, accord-
ing to studies such as Jonathan 'Fittlees Violencia y literatura en Colombia for
example, has been written entirely by male novelists. 9 Montserrat Ordóñez sub-
stantiates this proclivity when she writes that 'Literary production, in Colombia,
belongs to the realm of male writers. r. . 1 Until trecently1 Colombia has had a
literary history coming from and geared to a world of exclusively masculine values'
(Ordóñez 1990: 132-33).
As the work of Ordóñez has revealed, however, despite the disregard still shown
to them in the academy, there has been no lack of literary fiction produced by
women writers in Colombia, including work dealing with the themes of history
and violence in the country. Like the plaque commemorating the death of Gaitin
in downtown Bogota- , women writers' literary production in Colombia has been
obscured, in this case by the patriarchal disposition of the literary establishment.
Feminist critics of Colombian literature have pointed out that, in recent years
particularly (and notwithstanding the earlier work of writers such as Elisa M6jica),
there has been a growing body of work by women writers which deals with major
events in the country's past such as La Violencia, the growth of guerrilla movements
and the 1985 storming of the Palace of Justice, to cite just a few examples.'
Therefore, in the light of Crewe's comments regarding literature as cultural
memory, I would like to take issue with the accusations of amnesia made in El
Espectador with which I began this article, as well as dispute the assertion made
by Vallejo in his novel, with all of its implications. In the remainder of this article,
I shall focus on one of the 'tercos' mentioned by Garzón in the epigraph, who,

As Maria Mercedes Jaramillo writes, Vallejo represents himself in the novel as 'un anciano homosex-
ual de conservadoras costumbres y de espíritu elitista' (Jaramillo 2000: 431).
9
See littler 1989, Kohut 1994, Pineda Botero & Williams 1989, and Mesa 2000, none of which make
any reference to women writers.
iri
For more on this see the discussion of the work of Ana Maria Jaramillo, Olga Behar and Mary Dara
Orozco in Ortiz 1997; 115-48. Furthermore, the area of feminist literary criticism in Colombia is
growing. For two of the most important volumes published in this area in recent years, see Jaramillo
et al. 1991 and Jaramillo et al. 1995.

like him, currently resists the temptation to forget that apparently so pervades
Colombia at present but who, more importantly for this feminist critic, presents a
significant challenge to the largely patriarchal cultural and literary scene I have
just described. In the following section, I shall consider a novel by the writer Laura
Restrepo, a former journalist, political editor of the current affairs magazine Semana
and member of the Peace Commission established in negotiations between govern-
ment and guerrilla movements under the Betancur administration during the early
1980s. Over recent years, Restrepo has built up a considerable body of fiction and
in the process has established herself as a writer of both national and international
stature. Her blend of fiction and history has won several literary prizes for her
novels, some of which have been translated into English.' Despite being one of
the most widely read writers in Colombia, however, her work has remained,
like that of many of her female compatriots, almost entirely ignored by scholars
until now. Indeed, a rather begrudging reference to her in the aforementioned
article by Fernández is indicative of this omission: '[En el ámbito de las letras
colombianas] después de Garcia Marquez y de Mutis, [Fernando Vallejo] es quizás
el autor más conocido y leido de la nación (aunque Laura Restrepo bien pudiera
disputarle este puesto)' (Fernández 2000: 757). Furthermore, Restrepo's growing
body of work has consistently engaged with issues pertaining to contemporary
Colombian history. For example, her first publication, Historia de una traición (1986),
is an account of the failed peace negotiations that led to the Palace of Justice
débacle, and a later novel, El leopardo al sot (1993), 'una novela "pop" con realismo
mágico' (Cardona López 2000: 382), has warring drugs cartels as its central theme.
Restrepo's most recent work, with which I shall be concerned hereon in, is La novia
oscura (1999), a novel in which the author foregrounds issues of history, trauma
and memory in what, as I shall go on to argue, is a highly suggestive manner.
Trauma and Memory in La novia oscura
La novia oscura is set for the most part in the mid to late 1940s, in an oil-producing
town known in 12 the novel as Tora (the indigenous name for present-day
Barrancabermeja). Employing a trope that is common to her other works of
literary fiction, however, the novel is presented as the result of investigations
undertaken by a female journalist in the present day, in this case, in order to
recover the story of one of Tora's most famous prostitutes of that era, Sayonara,
the 'novia oscura' of the novel's title. The protagonist turns out to be an inscrutable
character who, during her heyday working at the Dancing Miramar, becomes a
legend amongst the petroleros for her seductive and mysterious beauty. The book
spans a period of a number of years, beginning with Sayonara's arrival in town
as a nameless, apparently amnesiac young girl of indeterminate age. In the course

" Her work also includes La isla de la pasión (1989) and Du lce compañía (1995)/The Angel of Galilea
(1998) which won the Premio Sor Juana and Prix France Culture, Historia de una traición (1986)/ Historia
Elf tin entusiasmo (1998) and El leopardo al sol (1993)/ Leopard in the Sun (1999).
Barrancabermeja is an important agricultural, commercial, transportation and petroleum-producing
centre in the department of Santander. Established on the site of an Indian village called La Tora by
Jiménez de Quesada in 1536, the settlement was first called Barrancas Coloradas b y the early colonists
and then eventually Ba_n-ancabermeja (Davis 1993: 86).

48 HISPANIC RESEARCH J OURNAL, 4.1, FEBRUARY 2003
of the novel, we follow her period of apprenticeship, 'naming' and initiation under
her madrina, Todos los Santos, 'childlike' friendship with cart driver Sacramento,
her later doomed love affair with a character called El Payanés and a strike by
petroleum workers at the Tropical Oil Company. Ultimately, both the love affair
with El Payanés and the strike come to an end: Sayonara marries and takes to the
road with Sacramento in order to establish a family for her four sisters; and the
novel concludes with her leaving them and returning to Tora on her own, in search
of her former lover.
Restrepo draws attention to the issues of trauma, history and memory in this
novel in a number of different ways. First, there is the amnesiac protagonist who
distracts the journalist from her original assignment, to report on the theft of
gasoline by a local cartel. The narrator learns that, on Sayonara's arrival in Tora
all those years ago,
se vio que la chiquita no era amiga de comentarios ni chismes, menos aún si
versaban sobre su propia persona, y clue mantenía tal hermetismo de estatua sobre
su pasado que hacia pensar en razones adoloridas o culposas para ocultarlo.
Cuando le preguntaban dónde naciste, cómo te llamas, cuántos años tienes, se
escabullía por atajos hacia un silencio despoblado de recuerdos. (Restrepo 1999: 43)
The young woman turns out to demonstrate all the classic signs of a dissociative
disorder: she proves to be prone to introspection (she is described by Todos los
Santos as 'lejana y absorta', 66), highly selective deployment of attention rayer
no quena [escribir] y hoy sf quiero', 38) and she often appears to retreat to a corner
of her mind, locking herself away in her own hermetically-sealed world ('Se
atiborraba de golosinas a deshoras y no probaba bocado del almuerzo; salía a
alborotar a la calle cuando el barrio se aplacaba en la siesta y se quedaba dormida
en medio de las parrandas; no aceptaba citas ni compromisos con horario exacto,
y si los aceptaba no los cumplía', 246). Intrigued by these classic signs of trauma,
the journalist painstakingly recovers the details of Sayonara's childhood. It turns
out that years before Sayonara's brother, Emiliano, died in military custody and
her mother Matilde subsequently committed suicide by setting fire to herself out-
side the barracks where he was stationed, leaving Sayonara and her sisters to be
abandoned by their father not long after the event. In terms of a case study of its
protagonist, therefore, this is a novel which explicitly depicts trauma in the sense
that it represents 'perpetrations of violence against characters who are traumatised
by violence', as Kacandes puts it (Kacandes 1999: 56).
In addition to depicting the personal trauma of its amnesiac protagonist, La
novia oscura can also be seen as a novel that 'performs' trauma by 'eliding, repeating
and fragmenting components of the story' (Kacandes 1999: 56). Restrepo's text is
structured around a series of interviews conducted by the journalist-narrator with
the 'surviving' Todos los Santos, Sacramento, one of the other prostitutes, Olga,
as well as characters such as former Tropical Oil manager, Frank Brasco. This leads
to a constant oscillation between past and present in the novel as well as the
frequent use of flashbacks. Together these might be seen to reflect a kind of 'poesis
of trauma', as Maureen Turim calls it, producing an effect which she proposes
v
inscribets1 in narratives a shattering of complacency' and suggests 'the haunting

return in the traumatic: already multiple and repetitious in its first occurrence,
trauma faces its reexperience as invasive memory or displaced symptom' (Turim
2001: 209-10). Indeed, Restrepo's narrator reveals the flashbacks to the past and
the memory work to be at times painful and difficult for her respondents in the
course of her investigations. For example, when it comes to reliving more
unpleasant times such as that of Sayonara's marriage to Sacramento, the narrator
observes:
Estamos pasando por dias extraftos, de poco hablar y de menos entender,
marcados por el mal sabor que en Sacramento y en las viejas seloras produce la
permanente rememoración de los acontecimientos posteriores a la boda. Mis
preguntas han convocado los recuerdos amargos y ahora no hallo cómo romper
esos parapetos de s il encio tras los cuales Sacramento se ahoga en culpas, la Olg-uita
en lagrimas y Todos los Santos en recriminaciones. (352)
Furthermore, insofar as the text is made up of different and often competing
narratives or versions of 'reality', based on the diverse accounts of the journalist's
respondents, Restrepo's novel could be read also as a l dialogized text 1 . 13 In this
regard, La novia osara is therefore not only a novel 'of' or about trauma and
memory, but also a novel as memory, in that it represents both in form and content
the 'communal fictionalising, idealising, monumentalising impulses' mentioned
earlier by Jonathan Crewe. One significant example of these conflicting accounts
(and the 'communal fictionalising') arises precisely when the journalist investigates
the details of Sayonara's family tragedy. She discovers that there are several ver-
sions regarding the imprisonment and eventual death of Emiliano in an under-
ground pit as an army recruit in the town of Ambalema. One version centres on
racism in the army, claiming that Emiliano was punished for hitting a sergeant
who had taunted him about his ethnicity (we learn that Ma tilde was an indigenous
woman of Hiwi descent) and another purports that he was taken to book for 'un
enredo de faldas'. In turn, the army maintains its ignorance of the whole affair, as
one official informs the journalist: 'Aquí no hay, ni ha habido nunca, enterrados
vivos, ni emparedados, ni degollados, ni ning/ln invento de ésos' (186). The
description of the circumstances surrounding Matilde's suicide is significant
further still as it not only reinforces the sense of official manipulation but also
illustrates the complete erasure of memory. The journalist learns that for some
time after the incident, floral tributes were placed on the spot where Matilde took
her own life until the army built a sentry box in exactly the same place 'para
dejar ni el recuerdo', as one of the town's inhabitants puts it The owner of the
local hotel goes on to confirm that: 'Muchos le ponen fe a la santidad de Matilde
y aseguran que hace milagros, pero para mi no es santa sino prócer y mártir de
la patria porque con su sacrificio quiso limpiar la maldad que se ha visto en este
pueblo, y si en Francia tienen a su Juana de Arco, en Ambalema tenemos a la
nuestra' (177) .
On one level, therefore, Sayonara's family tragedy can be read as a collective
trauma, in that it is seen to be emblematic of a wider national condition. Indeed,

13
1 have borrowed the term from Carolyn Pinet (1997: 91).

as Annette Kuhn observes more generally, the family 'provides the model for
every other memory-community [. . .1 that shared remembering and complicit for-
getting that goes on in families provide the model for other communities — most
especially for the idea of nation as family, with its assumption of a past need in
common by all its members, a past that binds them together today and will con-
tinue to do so into the future' (Kuhn 2000: 193). Restrepo herself has hinted at the
wider significance of Sayonara's story in her assertion that La novia oscura 'es como
una metáfora de mi pais' (Maurell 2000). As a consequence, Sayonara's amnesia
might thus be associated with Colombia's own apparent failure to remember its
past, as described in the opening section of this article. Given that, as Liliane
Weissberg points out, 'events can only be recalled if they (or their mode of narra-
tive) fit within a framework of contemporary interests' (Weissberg 1999: 15), it
appears that in Sayonara's case the prevailing social conditions or 'interests', such
as those in present day Colombia it would seem, preclude remembering.
On another level, however, the individual and collective are interwoven in such
a way in La novia oscura that the novel itself functions precisely as a kind of
'counter-force' (Peitsch 1999: xvii) to the amnesia afflicting present-day Colombia.
That is, in the novel Sayonara's personal trajectory is always embedded in, even
inseparable from developments in the wider context of Colombian history. For
example, Sayonara's relationship with El Payanés is framed by two scenes that
also reflect a significant deterioration in the country's social and political stability.
Both scenes take place at the banks of the river Magdalena: the first, early on in
the novel, constitutes the lovers' first date' and a Sunday outing on the river with
the other prostitutes of Tora, the second the moment immediately after their break
up. On the first occasion the lovers notice a body floating in the river:
- ¿Lo habrá matado la chusma o la contrachusm.a? — preguntaba Payanés
mientras las demás seguían bailando como si no hubieran visto.
— Nunca se sabe — contestó Sayonara.
- ¿Bajan muchos?
— Cada dia ma's. No sé por qué los muertos buscan el rio; quien sabe adónde
quieren que los lieve. (152)
As the dialogue suggests, the body is clearly a victim of the political killings of La
Violencia, during which period the novel is set. As Paul Oquist points out, the
dumping of cadavers became a common practice during this time: 'one terrorizing
effect in numerous localities [.. .1 was the periodic appearance of bodies, often
mangled at some symbolic site or floating in rivers having been thrown from the
same bridge' (Oquist 1980: 121). On the second occasion, however, there is a greater
number of bodies swarming in the river, as described in the following paragraph:
Aunque la noche impedía ver a los muertos que arrastraba la corriente, Sayonara
los sintió pasar, inofensivos en su trAnsito lento y blanco. Bajaban de uno en uno,
abrazados en pareja o a veces en ronda, tornados de la mano, transforrnados en
esponja, materia porosa que flotaba apacible, pálida, por fin impregnada de luna
después de haber derramado en la orilla, hace ya tanto tiempo, todo el desasosiego
y el dolor de la sangre. Sayonara, la niña de los adioses, metió los pies entre el
agua para estar cerca de ellos y contuvo el panico cuando a su paso le rozaron

los tobillos, se le enredaron en las piernas con viscosidad de algas y le enviaron
mensajes en su peculiar lenguaie, que era gorgoteo de sustancia orgánica
deshaciéndose en sombras, Más tarde, cuando se ocultó la luna y el cielo se nació
de estrellas, no quiso apartarse del rib ni sacar los pies del agua porque tuvo la
seguridad de que la romería silenciosa arrastraba también a sus seres amados,
su madre ardida I.. su idolotrado hermano, que corrían Magdalena abajo
purificados por fin y convertidos en recuerdos mansos, después de tantos años
de sufrir y hacerla sufrir, acechándola como espantos, [. Supo también: yo soy
vo y mis muertos, y se sintió menos sola, como si se hubieran acortado los millones
de pasos de su distancia, (323-24).
The immersion in the water and floating bodies is clearly symbolic of sorne kind
of immersion into memory and also, of course, into history. Indeed, immediately
after this second sojourn in the river, Sayonara does appear to 'come to her senses'
in some respects and emerge from her amnesia: she suddenly reverts to the use
of her real name, Amanda Monteverde, marries Sacramento and even has a final
reunion with her long lost father: significantly, he gives her a porcelain elephant
as a parting gift, an animal which has been traditionally associated with the idea
of lasting memory. Effectively, however, this engagement with memory and his-
tory is short-lived and Sayonara ends the novel much as she began it. Indeed,
history appears to repeat itself: having abandoned her own family, the ironically-
named Sayonara returns to her land of forgetting in order to await, 'bañada y
vestida, de rodillas ante el Cristo de las barbas rubias' (407), a sign of her
former lover.
The break up of Sayonara's relationship with El Payartés also coincides with the
end of the strike at Tropical Oil in the novel.' Like the strike at Ciénaga in Garcia
MArquez's Cien años de soledad (1967), Restrepo's representation of the oil strike in
her novel might be seen as a further attempt to 'rescue from a continuing con-
spiracy of silence an important event in the history of Colombia' ta 1987: 170).
Indeed, the narrator comments upon the significance of the event, the end of which
marks the beginning of a sharp and sudden decline in Tora: `la época de la huelga
de arroz .1 habría de marcar un antes y después en la historia de Tora y sus
gentes' (240). The revolt corresponds to the last of a number of strikes that took
place in Barrancabermeja during the 1930s and 1940s and which, as Enrique
Valencia points out, 'fue la culminación de tm largo proceso de frustraciones e
injusticias' (Valencia 1984: 40). 15 The 1948 strike was deemed to be the most
14
Tropical Oil was a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey. They held the concession in
Barrancabenneja from 1919 until 1951, when it reverted to government control. See Davis 1993: 86,
184, 395.
These two decades constituted a transition between the Liberal (1930-46) and the Second
Conservative Republics (1946-53), a particularly turbulent period of Colombian history, marked by
repeated electoral fraud, a belligerent labour movement and ubiquitous violence throughout the
country. There were six strikes in total held by the Unión Sindical Obrera against the Tropical Oil
Company during this time, taking place in 1924, 1927, 1935, 1938, 1946 and 1948. Further strike action
was taken around this time by Colombian workers against North American banana companies on
the coast, the one at Ciénaga immortalised in Cien años de soledad (1967) by Gabriel Garda Márquez,
as I have mentioned. These companies became targets for strike action by their workers because, as
Enrique Valenda describes, they were gas empresas más grandes del pals y en donde las condiciones
de trabajo eran más malas' (Valencia 1984: 40).

52 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL 4.1, FEBRUARY 2003
successful, as it was supported both by mass demonstrations in Bogotá and also
in part by Jorge Eliécer Gaitan before his death in that same year (Davis 1993:
495). Provoked by a sudden exasperation with the measly balls of rice served up
to workers on a daily basis, the strike lasts twelve days and, according to Resti-epo's
version, has the full support of the population of Tora. In particular, the prostitutes
of La Catunga are seen to play an instrumental role in support of the action,
especially in the printing and distribution of an underground strike bulletin:
Contagiadas por la pasión insurreccional y dirigidas por la Machuca, las prosti-
t-utas de La Catunga entraron en huelga de piernas caídas en adhesión a los
petroleros y abandonaron los bares: cambiaron candongas y diademas por trapos
rojos que se ataron a la cabeza y se lanzaron a las calles, junto con la población
en general, a participar de Ios foros que se annaban en cada esquina y a
protagonizar manifestaciones y multitudinarios desórdenes en apoyo al pliego de
peticiones y, por añadidura cívica, para exigir acueducto y alcantarillado en los
barrios de Tora, que ardían de sed y resequedad. (298)

Tropical Oil's tactic of 'divide and rule', promising promotion and privileges to
those men who return to work, bring the strike to an end and, in the aftermath,
Tora changes irrevocably. The men who are not sacked return to work at the
compound to conditions worse than before. What is more, Tropical Oil begins to
collaborate increasingly with the Conservative establishment in office. On the one
hand, the company starts to provide housing, education and health care for its
more loyal workers and, on the other, it launches a witch hunt for any opposition:
'había tomado la decisión empresarial y rentable de redimir a todas las prostitutas
de la comarca' (326). From that point onwards, hooded gangs roam the city
'humillando a la población y cobrándole a posteriori su "amistad con los bandidos
de la huelga"' (327). By the time Sayonara returns to Tora on her own at the end
of the novel, the repression under the hard-line conservative regime has become
even more severe: 'Las medidas de salud pública se dictaban desde el púlpito, la
Tropical Oil hacia de consejera matrimonial, la Cuarta Brigada decidia cuales
debían ser los pilares de la moral y el señor alcalde, representante en Tora del
Directorio Nacional Conservador, f. .1 era quien señalaba con el dedo a los que
merecían escarmiento y castigo por infringir las leyes éticas, higiénicas, laborales
y de orden público' (389).' For example, not half an hour after setting foot back
in town, Sayonara witnesses the vicious, apparently arbitrary murder of the local
zapatero which, she learns, is little more than an attempt by the Conservative regime
to 'limpiar la zona roja, hasta dejarla llana' (389). While not a formal history of
events that did actually take place in Barrancabermeja, nonetheless Restrepo's
version in La novia oscura records a kind of popular memory of this collective

As David Bushnell writes, 'Since 1949, with the spreading of La Violencia as ample pretext, the
country had operated under a state of siege that gave the government the right to suspend a broad
range of guarantees. [....] Individuals were exposed to arbitrary infringement of their civil rights. E.. .]
from the last stage of the °spina Pérez administration and then continuously under Gómez, Colombia
was under at least a mild civilian dictatorship' (Bushnell 1993: 213).

trauma, detailing the significant role in it of an excluded and often 'forgotten'
minority.'
Reading La novia oscura
If the novel functions as a form of commemoration of such events, however, a
question that remains unanswered, is why, at the turn of the century, should they
continue to hold such fascination for Restrepo? That is, to slightly adapt a question
posed by Thomas Elsaesser, 'why this [book] now?' (Elsaesser 2001: 194). For, as
Natalie Zemon Davies and Randolph Stain point out, 'whenever memory is
invoked we should be asking ourselves: by whom, where, in which context and
against what?' (Davies & Stam 1989: 2).
On one level we might read La novia oscura as part of a more general preoccu-
pation in the cultural production of Latin America in recent decades with issues
of history and memory, a phenomenon which became especially acute in Argentina
in the aftermath of the so-called dirty war, as mentioned by Sánchez in a quotation
at the beginning of this article. Indeed, a new kind of 'historical novel' has become
increasingly popular among Latin American writers in recent years, especially, it
seems, in Colombia.' As Lucia Ortiz points out in her study of contemporary
Colombian literature, 'en los últimos años se observa una tendencia por indagar
en los hechos históricos que en los últimos años han afectado al pais' (Ortiz 1997:
30). The result has been the publication of works such as Noticia de un secuestro
(1996) by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, an account of several prominent kidnappings
in Bogotá in the early 1980s, Cartas cruzadas (1999) by Dario Jaramillo Agudelo, an
epistolary novel about drug trafficking set at a similar time and, of course, La
virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo, which I have already discussed.
Ultimately, however, this reading of Restrepo's novel as part of a wider literary
tendency fails to explain why the author has returned to La Violencia of 1940s and
1950s if, according to Ortiz, the trend has been towards the fictionalizing of more
recent events in Colombia's history, as in the works mentioned above. Whilst La
novia oscura might be seen as one woman writer's (belated) response to the largely
male-dominated genre of 'la novela de La Violencia', it Ls the •socio-historical
circumstances described at the beginning of this article which, in my view, offer
a more suggestive framework for reading Restrepo's novel. For, as Catherine Boyle
points out in her work on violence, memory and contemporary theatre in Chile,
'implicit in any analysis of the past and of memory is an understanding of the
community from which [creative representations of the past] emerge' (Boyle 2000:
105). In the light of Colombia's current condition of violent social and political
turmoil that I described at the beginning of this article, the setting of La novia
oscura in the oil-producing city of "Fora' becomes highly significant. In the past
few years, Barrancabermeja, as it is now known, has been transformed into an
' 7 Indeed, most of the rest of the novel is otherwise concerned with the lives of the women of La
Catunga, detailing their rituals, ceremonies and practices in a way which often demythologises the
more stereotypical image of the prostitute in much Latin American fiction. For more on the latter see
Castillo 1998.
18
See Anna Fome's recent study of two novels by Carmen Boullosa, in which there is a Iong discussion
of the 'new' historical novel (Forné 2001: 23-26).


especially acute example of the multiplicity of violence affecting the rest of the
country. As I mentioned in the opening section of this article, in recent years the
numbers of internally displaced persons due to violence in Colombia has risen
to over 300,000: currently, the most critical case in this regard is, in fact,
Barrancabermeja (Sanchez 2000). Indeed, the situation there has become gradually
more volatile over a number of years so that the city has become a highly charged
site of conflict, a kind of microcosm of the drama being played out on the national
stage. Its barrios are controlled alternately by urban guerrillas of the ELN or the
FARC who, in turn, have been attempting to stave off offensives by right-wing
paramilitary forces, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), who have
gained dominance in almost half the guerrilla-controlled territory in the city.' As
a recent NACLA report documented, 'At times the fighting has been street to
street, with the army and police rarely intervening' (NACLA 2001: 1). Indeed,
human rights workers claim that there is widespread complicity and even collabor-
ation between the public forces and the paramilitaries in acts of 'social cleansing'
designed to rid Barrancabermeja of all perceived 'subversives or oppositional
activists, including human rights workers themselves and prostitutes, whom they
accuse of collaborating with guerrilla groups. As Restrepo herself has pointed out,
'Las zonas donde se hizo la investigación para esta novela son ombligos muy
serios de la guerra' (Dés 2001).
What I would like to suggest is that we regard this context in which Restrepois
novel was produced iii terms of what Walter Benjamin in his 'Theses on the
Philosophy of History' calls a state of emergency. According to Benjamin, we live
in a state of emergency that 'is not the exception, but the rule' and, therefore, 'we
must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with that insight' (Benjamin
1999: 248), Benjamin maintains that the time of the 'now' is what produces the
impetus for historians to write about the past. Indeed, he asserts that 'to articulate
the past historically is not to recognize it 'the way it really was. It means to seize
hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger' (Benjamin 1999: 247).
As Esther Cheung explains in her article on the 'hi/stories' of Hong Kong, a
moment of danger creates 'a kind of existential crisis' in historians and drives
them to make sense of the past (Cheung 2001: 567). 20 What I suggest here is that
Laura Restrepo is writing at a similar 'moment of danger', La novia oscura rep-
resenting a 'flash' of memory at just such a time of 'emergency' as I have
described.' As Cheung writes: 'These moments of danger are E. .1 politically
important times that bring forth a dynamic dialectic of past and present' (Cheung

" Historically, the petroleum industry and the need for greater national control over petroleum policy
have been at the heart of the demands of the ELM Pipelines have thus become a favourite target for
terrorist attacks orchestrated by them and other insurgent groups. See Bergquist 2001.
In Cheung's case, the 'moment of danger' to which she refers is the retrocession of Hong Kong to
Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
2
' Indeed, Jean Franco writes that 'Contemporary chronicles of violence L. refer to a social break-
down in iNhich law is either corrupt or does not function, and in which the nation-state — once the
arbiter of law — is itself increasingly seen as delinquent. [...1 This breakdown, that is not exclusive
to Latin America, creates states of exception or emergency that justify intervention by international
organisations or other nations, as in the case with Plan Colombia at the present time' (Franco 2002 1-2).

2001: 569). In the deteriorating Tora of La novia oscura we can see many of Barranca's
current forms of violence and unrest in embryonic form: Restrepo's hooded gangs
the precursors of popular militia groups, the nascent operations of 'social cleansing'
and the beginnings of conflicts between State, multinationals and insurgent groups
as well as the more general threatening atmosphere of violence that remains the
staple of life in Barrancabermeja (as well as elsewhere in Colombia) today. The
parallels between Restrepo's Tora of the 1940s and present-day Barrancabermeja
are striking and, in my view, not entirely coincidental. This assertion is supported
further by Gonzalo Sdnchez's affirmation that Colombia's present situation can be
closely associated with the mid-twentieth-century trauma of La Violencia. He
describes how one particular thesis regarding the present condition of the country
concludes that the Colombian establishment began to lose the current war some
thirty years ago. On the one hand this was due to a military failure to widerstand
the nature of the emerging guerrilla movements of the 1960s, associating them
with banditry rather than recognising them as political forces. On the other hand,
there was a political reason:
the failure of State policies that were unable to accomplish all the necessary tasks
of economic and social reconstruction in the regions most affected by the Violence
of the 1950s, paving the way for the revival of the armed struggle. This is to say,
the failure to resolve the old Violence placed us, almost without our knowing,
in the present violence. (Sánchez 2001: 16)22
Sánchez does not suggest, however, that today's armed struggle is necessarily
the immediate result of these historical precedents: 'No se trata de una historia
predeterminada, sino de un proceso social y politico en el cual hay actores y
motivaciones muy diversos tanto en la indulgencia como en los sectores domi-
nantes, alianzas inestables y contextos internos y externos variables' (Sánchez 2000:
270). Nevertheless, the analogy remains a highly suggestive one in this particular
case, for, as José Cardona López points out: 'Por las razones de su duración y los
efectos de la violencia que genera la vida cotidiana, no es inacertado comparar fel
presentel con el periodo de La Violencia que vivió Colombia entre los cincuentas
y sesentas' (Cardona López 2000: 382). It is precisely suda an analogy, in my view,
that Restrepo's novel encourages. In La novia oscura therefore, Laura Restrepo
undertakes a different kind of 'ejercicio de memoria' to that of Fernando Vallejo
in his novel that I discussed earlier. Restrepo's journalist-narrator acts as an
'enabler' for the telling of a story of collective trauma in which she details the
central role of previously marginalized women as well as underlines the social
and often contested nature of memory itself. In so doing, following Walter
Benjamin, I would argue that the author also effectively draws attention to the
present 'moment of danger', the highly charged context of the book's production
and publication. Ultimately, La novia oscura is thus a timely and poignant work
(what Benjamin might have called 'topical'), underlining in no uncertain terms

n
See also Charles Bergqui.st's essay, 'Waging War and Negotiating Peace: The Contemporary Crisis
in Historical Perspective', in Bergquist et al. 2001: 195-212, where he argues for a fruitful comparison
of the present conflict with that of the War of the Thousand Days.

(and perhaps at no more an appropriate moment for Colombia) the importance
of remembering which, as Homi Bhabha describes, 'is never a quiet act of introspec-
tion or retrospection' but is 'a painful remembering, a putting together of the
dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present' (Bhabha 1994: 63).23

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Este articulo trata de los temas del trauma y la memoria en la cultura contemporánea de
Colombia. El articulo empieza con un resumen de las maniples forms de violencia que
han dominado la historia colombiana y subraya cómo éstas han resultado en una tendencia
a la amnesia colectiva. Dentro de este contexto, consideramos la cuestión de la literatura
como memoria cultural y, en particular, nos enfocamos en la obra de la escritora. colombiana,
Laura Restrepo, Nuestro análisis de su última novela La novia oscura (1999) demuestra
•una obsesión con el trauma y la memoria, tanto personales como colectivos, en cuanto a su
forma y su contenido. A través de una interpretación del contexto sociohistórico a la luz
de la obra de Walter Benjamin y del historiador Gonzalo Sánchez, sugerimos que la novela
representa un 'flash' de memoria en un 'momenta de peligro' que fomenta una dialéctica
decisiva entre el pasado y el presente.

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Lindsay memoria y l restrepo (ocr)

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