Constelações de vozes: Ouvir, testemunhar e (re)montar em Charlotte Delbo, Elena Poniatowska e Svetlana Aleksiévitch

Abstract

The work that is being announced here is based on an exchange put forward by Jorge Semprún in Writing and Life, which is that he inverts the aporia of testimony: the experience of death in the camps was not unspeakable, but “unlivable”. The big problem afterwards was not telling, but listening. For this reason, in order for the transmission to be affective and effective, the testimony had to be seen as an “artistic object”, a space for creation and re-creation. This gives rise to a premise that could be expanded to include different testimonies. Based on this postulation, we understand that Charlotte Delbo, Elena Poniatowska and Svetlana Aleksiévitch produce testimonial works in which the form that crosses orality and takes shape in writing is seen on the threshold between an “ethics of writing” and an “aesthetics of montage”. Testimony is analyzed here through its transversality. Beyond the Shoah, it is a disseminating modality for dealing with the transnational events of the 20th century. In this research, he examines the accounts of surviving women from the French resistance, imprisoned by the Vichy regime and deported to Auschwitz, as well as the voice of a Jewish woman whom Delbo met in a convalescent sanatorium in the Lager; the accounts of student survivors of the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico and their mothers and sisters who searched for them in Mexico City during the turbulent year of 1968; and the accounts of “child soldiers” about the “colonial war” in Afghanistan and their mothers about their loss, voices that speak as the Soviet regime was coming to an end.These events are not compared in their singularities and uniqueness, but are analyzed as products of powers of exception that make use of the so-called “wild zones”. In the three works taken as objects The Measure of Our Days (1971), Massacre in Mexico (1971) and Zink boys (1989), testimony is a force of listening. Above all, it is an act of speech, a dialectical relationship between saying and listening. To testify is to step out of oneself to meet the Other, and this bridge is made, to a large extent, by the “third witness”. It is a variant of the constela(dor) and its constellations. An action and a product. This figure is proposed through the work of Walter Benjamin, and represents an “explosion” of the collector's image and its inscription in the “interior”. The term constela(dor) is a neologism formed by the pair “constelar” + “dor” and refers to a 20th century inhabitant who records, collects and disseminates the collective memories of those who were swallowed up by the pain of authoritarianism. His refuge is the Other. He does what the Angel of History was prevented from doing by the storms of progress. He stops and listens. His materials are not objects, but bodies, human voices. Through them he confronts the crossroads between representation and catastrophe and produces dialectical planks that operate the constellations that reassemble chaos.