© Shamoni Sarkar
Whoever thought
absence could have such a presence in so many different ways? “Absence” is a
word that Severo Sarduy uses repeatedly in La
Simulación, his collection of essays on metaphor. The absence that he
speaks of is the absence of a fixed essence, or a referent. He seems to be
saying that our world is filled with copies, representations and
re-representations that make us feel that we have lost track of their origins
(or our origins). Then he goes on to make an even stronger statement: There is no origin; there never was.
Thinking about
origins and absences reminded me of my day trip to the city of La Plata in
Argentina in October 2011. La Plata is a city that was built for a purpose. By
the late 1800s, Buenos Aires Province was expanding too quickly for the
government to control. Buenos Aires City was at the time both the provincial
and national capital, but this dual responsibility was gradually taking a toll
on the distribution of administrative duties. The governor Dardo Rocha founded
La Plata in 1882, naming it the new capital of Buenos Aires Province.
The city was one
of the first few in the world to be “rationally planned”. Unlike other cities,
it was not a space that grew and evolved organically. Instead, it was “built”
from scratch on a large plot of previously barren land. The dimensions of the
city were clearly mapped out. It was to be a uniform grid. Streets would not be
named but numbered (streets in Buenos Aires are named after generals,
politicians or other Latin American cities). There were to be small plazas with
“espacios verdes” (green spaces) every six blocks. One long diagonal would cut
across the city, while Street #32 would encircle it, forming its periphery. La
Plata is sometimes popularly referred to as “The City of Jules Verne”. Some
believe that its design was inspired by the utopian city France-Ville in
Verne’s 1879 novel The Begum’s Fortune.
In the story, public health and sanitation were priorities in the design of
France-Ville. Like France-Ville, La Plata was to be a truly modern city—
rationally ordered, clean, and existing for the good of the citizens only. The
term coined in the 19th century for this kind of engineering was
‘hygienism’.
Sarduy speaks of
the ideas of recreation and copy when he speaks of the Latin American Baroque.
For example, in the art of the Americas, he says, one sees an attempt to
assimilate the religious and mythological codes found in Spanish Renaissance
painting and reproduce it as something different— something that transgresses
the limits of the ‘original’. But the new work retains all the while evidence
of the intent— of the struggle to
break away. It retains the presence of what preceded it. Likewise, new urban
utopias (like La Plata) and the incorporation of rationality too are forms of a
Baroque ideal because they attempt to recreate. Although they do not seem to be
influenced by the old, as is the art that Sarduy speaks of earlier, they
nevertheless recreate themselves because they see the necessity to be something
new, unshackled from history. Sarduy’s assertion that neither originals nor
copies really exist seems strangely encouraging when seen in the context of the
Latin American city. But if there is no original, what do we have? Sarduy thinks that all we have is ambiguity, struggle and
incompletion. And he sees potential in incompletion— grey space for the
creation of new things.
But as I walked
down the streets of La Plata, the air felt different from the way it did in
Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires’s grandeur and rustiness were natural and palpable.
Remnants of Europe left in the architecture were given new life by the swagger
of the city around it. In La Plata, I felt like I was walking through a
slightly mythical space— space that existed in dimensions but whose physical
presence one could not feel. Someone told me that La Plata was constructed as a
city that did not change with the progression of time. Reading Sarduy on
absence reminded me of my visit to this city because it seemed ‘absent’ in both
space and time. But it wasn’t a sense of absence that pushed me away. Rather, I
felt the urge to take in more. There was
a sense there that could be touched and defined. I just had to come upon it
suddenly.
According to
Sarduy, portraiture and mimesis are ways for human beings to leave their
imprint on the world; in portraits people tend to leave signs of what makes
them human— dark eyes, the shape of the face, or ways of dressing. The canvas
not only immortalizes the human form, but also gives it wholeness and a truth.
But for Sarduy, the wholeness of form can never be reached. The only truth
exists in hints and fragments.
This idea that
wholeness can never be achieved, and that our repeated attempts to assert our
selves are futile made me wonder if the same could be said not just about Art
but about cities as well. I could now look back on La Plata in a different
light, and consider why I went there in the first place. One of the main
clandestine torture centers during the years of the dictatorship in Argentina
had been in this city. There is now a criminal court there that tries cases of
human rights violations that occurred during those years. On that particular
October day, I had gone to attend the witness testimony of María Isabel
Chorobik de Mariani, the founder of the organization Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers
of Plaza de Mayo). It was the first testimony in a trial that was going to
last for the next several months. Mariani grew up in La Plata in a house of
musicians and architects (creative people were the preferred target of the
military, she told us). From the night of November 24th, 1976
onwards, she would go on to see the deaths of her son and daughter-in-law, and the disappearance of her granddaughter Clara Anahí. During the years that she
searched for her grandchild, she founded the organization to help other women
who were also searching for lost loved ones. She continues to search for Clara today. She put
whatever energy she had left into the running of her organization so that other
women could see that collectively, there was a way.
Strangely, I did
not note down the names of the ‘accused’ that she named in her testimony, nor
any other official details. I was too lost in the sound of the flow of her
words. For most of the time, I felt like I was watching the staging of a tragi-comedy.
Mariani had an extraordinary, matter-of-fact sense of humor, and it was as if
she felt entitled to use it after having gone through so much without humor. Also ironically funny
were the adolescent scribbles on the backs of the chairs that made everything
seem so trivial. One of them said ‘Blink
182’, bringing back my boy-band memories, and then I looked around and
realized that many others in the ‘audience’ were also part of the punk-rock
generation. For a few seconds, I even felt like none of us had any right to be
there. On the platform, I saw the 26 accused sitting on the far left,
well-dressed, with calm faces, as if they had long retired from ordinary jobs. None
of them stirred as Mariani narrated calmly the sequence of events of those
years. She had her back to them, but there was very little space between her
chair and their section of the platform. I was convinced that this part of the
room was filled with the most anger and violence. At one point, Mariani had to
pause after recounting to the jury (and to us) one of the more difficult parts
of her testimony. The audience, who had so far been hypnotized by her composure
and her incredible story, suddenly broke into applause, offering their
admiration and encouragement to keep going. The policemen lining the front
stirred, as if expecting us to start a riot. But calm ensued.
I had to leave
early to go back to Buenos Aires— back to the real world of classes and chaos.
We were once
told about the “logic of fear” adopted by the military government. I tried to
figure out what this could mean. Was it that the environment of fear was so
pervasive inside and outside the torture chambers that it had reached the point
that no other way of controlling things was possible anymore? Were torturer and
tortured locked in some kind of silent agreement that order would be maintained
only through fear and obedience? And was this why it was logical? However,
there was no logic in Mariani’s trial, but only a sense of theater, fragments
of history, and the slightly unbelievable physical presence of those involved
in that history. La Plata was a rational utopia that hosted an irrational,
non-utopian event. What did it mean hosting trials from such an important
period in history in La Plata in
particular? Was it not a way for people to leave an imprint of themselves in a
new space, to conserve traces of their history to give the new space a ‘truth’?
La Plata is the
true Baroque city— it searches for a truth through order and rationality.
Having a criminal court there is like painting a portrait of history, also to
immortalize a truth. But perhaps Sarduy would say that even then it is still
only constructed from diverse fragmentary representations from different times.
But I think La Plata does receive a
strange kind of wholeness by being so new while at the same time giving voice
to the old. However, it is a wholeness that is unstable and could break up into
fragments at any point. Despite this disconcerting sense, why did I still want
to go back? Was it a perverse wish to be caught between the perfect grid and
the imperfect history again? Or did I actually want to come away with something
concrete and good?
I wouldn’t know,
unless I went back.
