"Blindfolded" part of the "Surviving Genocide" series by Raquel Partnoy

Sixteen years ago, when I moved to the United States, I felt that its English language was a kind of shelter which I could use to write on the terror my family and many others had endured during the seven years of dictatorship in Argentina: disappearances, torture, killing at the hands of a terrorist state. This new language has given me the necessary physical and psychological distance to be able to write about what I had experienced during that time. Writing essays, poems, and my book length narrative poem City of Red Horizons, made me concentrate more on the English grammar than on my feelings.

.

I have been nourished by three languages and cultures. My mother’s Yiddish tongue and the Jewish traditions she brought with her to Argentina awakened my love to read Jewish writers and learn about her world as well as to understand more about her sad memories. Argentina was the country her family had chosen when they escaped the horrors of Czarist Russia, I grew up there, and the Spanish language enriched my life through the magnificent Latin American and Spain’s authors. I have memories of myself, an already avid reader at fourteen, going to my city’s bookstores to buy affordable editions of novels by well-known authors. For years I kept that collection which I regarded as my treasure. Later in my life, the English Language allowed me to read the original works of great poets, and also testimonies of Holocaust survivors. As I began to read those testimonies, I noticed many similarities in procedures between the genocide committed during the Holocaust and that perpetrated by the military dictatorship in Argentina. I decided to unify both subjects and paint the series Surviving Genocide. At the same time I wrote an essay on the same subject.

.

Early in my career I used to paint landscapes of Bahía Blanca, my hometown in Argentina. Although I draw large human figures on paper, I had not yet thought about including them in my oil paintings. So it was not by chance that in 1976 small figures began to appear at the doors, windows, and skies of my cityscapes. That was precisely the year when Argentina began to experience one of the cruelest chapters of its history. A military coup took place; thirty thousand people disappeared and were eventually massacred by the government.

.

When my daughter disappeared and my son felt in a state of depression I thought that I would need more than single works to picture what was going on in my country at that time. I began working on series of paintings and also writing essays on the subjects of those paintings that later were included in the catalogs of my exhibits. The figures would grow larger on my canvases and became the main characters of my work. It took me several years to produce the first series of paintings where I was able to start expressing my experience. However, later I realized much had gone unexpressed in those paintings, and then I began writing poems inspired by each of them. It was a sort of dialogue between the image I had in front of me and my memory.

.

The voices of the authors who have experienced injustice, or worry about it, like Adrianne Rich, Silvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Muriel Rukeyser, Whitman, among others, have been the forces that encouraged me to write and tell the story of my family, which is a part of the saddest chapter of my country’s history.

.

Lately, I have started to “translate” my poems to Spanish and this is a very different story. It is not the same thing writing “would they leave my daughter safe on the streets?” than: ¿dejarían ellos libre a mi hija por las calles? or “make them disappear” than “hacerlos desaparecer.” I deeply feel the weight of the Spanish words, they are heavier and more painful than the English ones. While switching from one language to the other I feel that my Jewish roots, and the experience of my ancestors, are always alive in my writings.

.

Although I have devoted most of my years to painting, I believe that both painting and writing have always been the engines that gave me the strength to keep on living and to survive.

.

Raquel Partnoy is an Argentine painter, poet, and essayist who has lived in Washington, D.C. since1994. Her solo exhibits in this city include: Parish Gallery; B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum; Embassy of Argentina; D.C. Jewish Community Center; Studio Gallery. Her work has been featured in: Arte al Día-Documenta 87 - La Plástica Norteamericana; The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology; Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis; CALYX, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women US. Her essays have been published in Women Writing Resistance-Essays on Latin American and the Caribbean; The Jewish Diaspora in Latin American and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory. Her narrative poem City of Red Horizons will be published in Argentina in 2011. Please see more of her poetry at her blog City of Red Horizons and her artwork at her blog Pintores Argentinos. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor