The document discusses the concept of "postmemory" and its relationship to remembering traumatic past events. Postmemory describes the experience of those who grew up after a trauma, with only indirect or second-hand knowledge of it. It is a powerful form of memory, derived from imagination and projection rather than direct recollection. However, some argue the term implies too strong a connection to the past and does not capture the disconnection experienced by those generations removed from the trauma. The document also includes several poems by Federico García Lorca that seem to reference death, war, and the passage of time.

1. Producing the place for a paradoxical memory:
García Montero’s epitaph for Federico García
Lorca in “A Federico, con unas violetas”
Margarita García Candeira
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

2. The term is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from
survivor memory, its secondary or second-generation memory quality, its
basis in displacement, its belatedness. Postmemory is a powerful form of
memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is
mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and
creation
(Marianne Hirsch 1999:8).

3. The term postmemory risks, I think, becoming unwittingly
symptomatic of the desire of the generation of survivors’ children to
connect to the past of their parents, a desire that remains frustrated. This
desire is so strong because of the radical dis-connection with that past,
because of ‘absent memory’. To describe this situation of disconnection
by means of a term that implies connection may not ultimately help to
understand the specificity of the problems of children of survivors and of
the special dynamics between survivor parents and children.
(Ernst von Alphen 2006:487).

4. Ahora
siento otra vez mi cuerpo poblarse de veletas
y lo veo extendido
sobre generaciones de ventanas antiguas
mientras la noche avanza solitaria y perfecta.
(“Sonata triste para la luna de Granada”, El jardín extranjero, 1983)
Now
I feel again how my body is invaded by weathercocks
and I see it extended
over generations of ancient windows
while the night advances lonely and perfect.
(“Sad sonata for Granada’s moon”, The foreign garden, 1983)

5. Aquí
no tuvimos batallas, sino espera.
La guerra fue un camión que nos buscaba,
detenido en la puerta,
partiendo con sus ojos encendidos
de espía
y al abrigo del mar.
“Como cada mañana” (El jardín extranjero, 1983)
Here
we did not have battles but only waits.
War was a truck waiting for us,
stopped at the door,
departing with its flaming eyes
of a spy
and protected from the sea.
“Like every morning” (The foreign garden, 1983)

6. Despite his emblematic victimhood, then, Lorca becomes a
politicized body that mediates the active forgetting of a
violent, turbulent, and traumatic past, a body through which a
politics of consensus might be reinforced and affective
engagements with the past evacuated. This collective
memorialization of Lorca’s life is thus promoted by the state as
long as it grants a harmonic national (and political) identity
over the collective wounds of the past
(Dinverno, 2005:30).

7. “A Federico, con unas violetas” (fragmentos)
Has llegado de nuevo. Te esperaba
para tenderte el brazo perdido de los humos,
la curva de los muelles, la soledad ajena
de Columbia University
y esta ceniza fría
en los párpados rotos
de la ciudad sin sueño.
“To Federico, with some violets” (fragments)
You have arrived again. I expected you
to offer you the lost arm of the smokes,
the curves of the docks, the alien loneliness
of Columbia University7
and this cold ash
in the broken eyelids
of the sleepless city.

8. En este Sur
de vigas y de luces
puede llegar la muerte una mañana,
pero extraña
la experiencia que tiene la historia entre sus muslos
de milenario amor,
paciente amor salvaje
contra todos nosotros.
In this South
of beams and of lights
death can arrive in one simple morning,
but is strange
the experience history keeps between her musles
of millenary love,
patient and wild love
against all of us.

9. Has llegado hasta Harlem,
bajo el sordo rumor de los motores
vas a quedarte mudo,
con tu sudor a solas, con el miedo,
para ver cómo cierra los ojos de la muerte,
cómo besa los labios de su último amante.
You have reached Harlem,
underneath the dumb rumour of the engines
you are going to become speechless,
alone with your sweat, with the fear,
to see how it kisses the death’s eyes,
how it kisses its last lover’s lips.

10. Aquellos ojos nuestros
esperan ser tendidos
sobre mil novecientos diecisiete
corazones en sitio.
Ya ves, sólo decirte
que es posible la vida, que me espera
como una herida abierta sobre otra bocana,
para surgir debajo de los números,
romper la soledad, tomar la calle,
y disponer las fechas en su sitio.
Those eyes of us
are waiting to be displayed
upon nineteen seventeen
hearts under siege.
eou see, only to tell you
that life is possible, that it is waiting for me
as a scar opened upon another entrance,
to arise from underneath the numbers,
to break the loneliness, to siege the streets,
and to place the dates in their correct place.

11. Hoy no puede pesar sobre esta sombra
un ramo de violetas,
y es dulce así dejarlas
frescas entre la niebla
con un rumor de cuerpos que no cesa
y esta lágrima extraña
que llamamos historia.
Today a bunch of violets
cannot result heavy upon this shadow,
and it is sweet to leave them like that
fresh between the mist
with an endless rumour of bodies
and this strange tear
that we call history.