Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Michigan (InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile)
Laura Alcoba’s trilogy -- Maneges: petite histoire argentine (2007), Le bleu des abeilles (2013), and La danse de l’araignee (2017) – begins in 1975, with a 7-year old Laura living in a guerrilla safe-house during Argentina’s Dirty War (1974-1983). It brings to the fore the displaced identity roles Laura is (forced?) to take in a deeply distorted sociopolitical context. Shortly after her mother decides to leave the house, the military launches a brutal attack on the safe-house, murdering the guerrillas but sparing the days-old daughter of one of them, “placed” in a pro-military family. Laura and her mother arrive in France as child refugee and political refugee respectively. In Le bleu… her struggles with/in a new language and culture are punctuated by a needed but tense epistolary exchange with her father, still jailed in Argentina. This “integration” process is developed further in La danse… which brings the narrative to a close. But, does it? I argue that Alcoba’s public interventions (e.g., interviews) suggest interpretive lines that silence the tensions at work in her texts (e.g., Laura’s anxiety to “efface” her foreign accent) to nudge her interlocutors to question her statements (e.g., her appeal to clichés like “having found in French the language of liberty”). Yet, her interlocutors appear to accept, with unwitting self-complacency, Alcoba’s claims at face value, and her work is read along those lines. In the context of the current refugee crisis, these “blind” reactions are deeply problematic and in need of careful assessment.
