Hometown horror
Mirta Bearman left Argentina in 1976, mere months – possibly weeks, even – before the onset of the Dirty War, and before Jorge Rafael Videla’s military government began illegally detaining citizens in secret concentration camps.
Margarita Drago and Paula Luttringer, the two panelists at Tuesday night’s presentation in Watson Auditorium, were not so lucky. They both spent key years in the prime of their lives enduring imprisonment and torture at the hands of their countrymen.
During the question and answer session, Berman, a Spanish professor at Colgate University, asked if the pain had begun to heal after 30 years. Could you, Bearman wondered, ever forgive those men from the past?
‘No,’ Luttringer interrupted, not even letting Bearman finish the inquiry. ‘Never … I don’t want them to be damned in hell. But no redemption. Never.’
Luttringer’s fiery response was one of the highlights of the event, which is the second installment of the semester-long Syracuse Symposium.
This year, the theme is the concept of migration. The event was co-sponsored by LightWork and the Syracuse University Latino-Latin American Studies Program. The two speakers came to the United States and became artists devoted to telling the stories of their time as political prisoners in Argentina.
Drago, a professor of Spanish Language and Literature at York College (N.Y.), read selected excerpts from her memoir, ‘Memory Tracks: Fragments from Prison (1975-1980).’ Luttringer, LightWork’s current artist-in-residence, presented some of her still photography titled, ‘El Lamento de los Muros (The Wailing of the Walls).’
After an introduction by SU English professor Silvio Torres-Saillant, Drago read three chapters and a poem from her book aloud to the audience, each one describing in detail different parts of her five years spent in two different secret prisons.
She also showed a video from her recent return to Argentina for the first time since leaving and fought back tears trying to explain its significance.
As a teacher and professor, Drago said she felt a special responsibility to an audience of college students. She was taken from her home when she still a student and considers it her goal to make sure students today realize it could happen anywhere.
‘I have a mission to educate students, young people, even children,’ Drago said after the presentation. ‘The students are really very interested because they don’t know. Most of the students in this country don’t know the history. It is my goal to make them aware of what happened in my country.’
Luttringer presented next, using a video slideshow of her photos as the backdrop for a series of testimonies she gathered through interviews with other women who suffered similar fates in Argentina. Three students came to the microphone and one-by-one read each testimony aloud, first in Spanish, then English.
Though the first readings of the testimonies were likely lost on those who did not speak Spanish, Luttringer said that having them read in Spanish is integral and important.
‘Even if we come from different cultures and background, we can understand the memories I am trying to share,’ Luttringer said afterward. ‘I need to give my voice, my own language, and then share with you in your language what happened in my country.’
After the event, Bearman said she was not surprised by how Luttringer reacted to her seemingly innocent question. The outburst was justified, and, in a way, admirable.
‘It was such a hard experience that you cannot expect her to react any other way besides emphatically,’ Bearman said. ‘It’s natural for a person to feel hatred for the people who victimized them. I would not have expected her to act any other way.’
Published on September 16, 2008 at 12:00 pm
