History and projects: an analysis of silence in lengua madre by María Teresa Andruetto

Abstract

Published in 2012, the novel Lengua madre, by writer María Teresa Andruetto (Córdoba, Argentina), narrates another story about the last Argentine dictatorship, which emphasizes the problem of the indirect civilian complicity with the sistematic suppression of the dictatorial regime. The most distinctive constitutive aspect of this novel within the long and heterogeneous literary series about the recent past is that silence is not a narrative strategy to allow the political indirectly emerge from the text, neither a mechanism for the story to manifest the unspeakable horror of the dictatorship. Paradoxically, in Lengua madre silence is the verbalizing agent driving the main character to search into the past, and leading the reader to critically reflect on the legitimacy of the projects that were brutally canceled in 1976. The main purpose of this article is to offer a brief analysis of silence as a narrative form (character) that refers to the way victims were silenced, but also to the class and gender behaviors that, in a society permeated and broken by terror, coparticipated to some extent in the dictatorial suppression, even before the coup d’etat.