I have recently been at a
sociological congress in Buenos Aires, and on my last morning in the city, a
Sunday, I walked to the Plaza de Mayo.
The name of the square celebrates the start of the independence struggle
against the Spanish empire. The
cathedral there – its facade looks like a Roman temple – has the tomb of
the Liberator, San Martin. At the
opposite end of the Avenida de Mayo, which leads out of the square, is the
imposing building of the national Congress. The place is a powerful symbolic site for the Argentine
republic.
 |
| Picture taken 2009 by Paula |
That’s doubtless why it was
chosen for the extraordinary action by the women known as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo – the Mothers of May Square. In sight of a cathedral full of images of the Mother of God,
the Madres broke the silence imposed by Argentina’s military
dictatorship about the arrest, torture, and murder of thousands of left-wing
activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even the generals found it hard to deny a mother’s right to ask
what had happened to her child.
I guess many of the women at the
first gatherings must already have known. If so, what they were doing was a first stage of public
mourning, as well as criticism of the dictatorship. The death of that generation of young intellectuals is still
felt in Argentina’s universities and public life.
After the dictatorship ended, the Madres continued a long campaign to
document the ‘disappearances’ case by case.
I mourn them too, and not just
abstractly. They were part of my
generation of intellectuals, the new left of the sixties and seventies. Though an ocean and a continent away, I
understand something of what the Argentine comrades were about, something of
the energies and hopes that went under in many parts of the world, in that
decade of repressions from the Prague Spring to the Argentine darkness.
I’ve been wondering if there is a
more general interplay between mourning and activism. Some forms of activism, at least, are deeply coloured by
loss. AIDS activism, indigenous
land rights activism, and campaigns about femicide, all deal with irrecoverable
loss. Activism in such
circumstances involves public mourning as well as social change.
The campaigns against nuclear
weapons, which now seem to have faded, surely involved an anticipatory mourning
for the end of human life. And in
the environmental movement there is mourning for the habitats, species and
experiences already gone, as well as for the losses to come.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. A politics that has no space for
mourning would be unbearably cheerful, and we have enough of that in the
self-help section of airport bookshops.
Politics is about constructing social futures, for good or evil. I think a transformative politics has
to respond to the full range of social experience, not just a narrow band. There are versions of progressive
politics that leach out the emotion: a mechanical marxism is one, an obsession with measurable outcomes is another.
The difficult side is
that a transformative politics has to grapple with the destructive as well as
constructive possibilities in human life.
Politics has to do this at a collective level, as intimate relations,
and therapy, do at a personal level.
That means engaging with the emotions that destruction produces. There’s a book by W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction,
which I’ve thought about a lot; it reflects on the mass bombing of World War II
Germany, and pulls no punches about the effects. Well worth a read; not for the faint-hearted.
The Plaza de Mayo, it turned out,
was not a good place to explore these thoughts, even on a Sunday morning. It’s now a tourist hub, with buses of
sightseers, a souvenir market, a museum.
There is a political demonstration there, but it’s not about the
disappeared. It’s a camp set up by
veterans of the Malvinas war, with belligerent banners against the English, and
declarations of patriotism.
“Patria o muerte”, one of the slogans said, Fatherland or Death. Thirty-five years ago, Argentina got both.