«Las mil caras de mi padre». Narratives from the children of Argentine repressors

Abstract

Among the wide range of textualities produced by the so-called “generation of Argentinean HIJOS”, in recent years some works have appeared that stage a very different experience from that of the authors who have traditionally contributed to this corpus. In fact, it is not about sons and daughters of the victims of the last civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983), but about sons and daughters of repressors, torturers and murderers, who very often discover their parents’ crimes when they are already adults. The aim of the article is to trace a socio-historical journey with regard to the contribution of these subjects to the Argentinean public debate on dictatorial memory, with an emphasis on the founding of the Historias Desobedientes collective in 2018, and then to reflect on a small and heterogeneous corpus of texts – the novel Una misma noche (2012) by Leopoldo Brizuela, the play Mi vida después (2009) by director Lola Arias, the documentary La hija indigna (2018) directed by Abril Dores and the novel-testimony Llevaré su nombre (2021) by Analía Kalinec – able to account for what it has meant for these subjects to rethink their identity after the discovery of their parents’ “other face”.