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Article Excerpt
A general of a revolutionary army invades a woman's home and attacks her in front of her children. Years later, the woman's daughter who witnessed the event, still wishes to kill the man, yearning for a gun that would fire a hundred shots.
After being confronted with the pain of a mother who lost her child in a bombing, an enraged woman slaps a soldier's face. She cries out: "Eso es. Nos haceis hijos para luego matarlos" (That's it. You give us babies only to kill them; Leon 150). (1)
Nothing in these two brief paragraphs is all too unusual in any given representation of revolutionary struggles in the early twentieth century. There is however, one particular aspect that marks these scenes from Nellie Campobello's Cartucho. Tales from the Struggles in Northern Mexico and Maria Teresa Leon's short story "Luz para los duraznos y las muchachas" or "Light for the Peaches and the Girls" as women's narratives of revolution. Even though these texts stem from radically different historical, social and cultural contexts--the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War respectively--they share a deferment of violence that is both strategic and compulsive. Marked by a perpetual trace of violence, Campobello's novel and Leon's short story speak to the incommensurability between a traumatic event and its representation. Naturally, the use of the term "trace" consciously invokes the work of Jacques Derrida. A trace, writes Gayatri Spivak commenting on Derrida, is a track "of a previous differentiation and a continuous deferment" (423). The analysis that follows therefore seeks to identify such a trace in the texts. I will suggest that the precise rhetorical maneuver in Campobello's novel and Leon's short stories novel is a constant "setting off" and "pushing away" of the question of violence.
My focus on women's narratives does not aim to describe an autonomous and even essential female subject, "neither a homogenizing subject nor a conception of a fixed totality" (Lowe and Lloyd 17). Rather, my goal here is to understand the discursive construction of gendered itineraries that appear in women's representation of revolution and war in the early twentieth century. Male authors' engagements with violence certainly share some of these issues and also relate to what Bat-Ami Bar On has called the "un/speakability of violence" (13). It is in women's representations, however, where the discontinuities between violence, political emancipation and agency during revolutionary struggles in the twentieth century come across most clearly.
Horribly Banal
The above mentioned examples from Cartucho and "Luz para los duraznos y las muchachas" reflect the ways in which different forms of violence circulate and intersect in the texts. The allusion to the mother's rape and the daughter's desire for retribution, the dead child and even the slap in the soldier's face are, at one level, acts of explicit, physical violence. Similar acts, whether committed in the public or the domestic sphere, are common; indeed they are sometimes considered "horribly banal" (Djebar 150) or even inconsequential in any given revolutionary struggle. A particular governing body--or those who aim to overthrow that same governing body--usually sanctions acts of violence committed in the public arena. Its victims can be men, women and children, civilians and soldiers, who are codified as the enemy to be injured, conquered and even annihilated. But violence also occurs in the domestic domain, and, while not officially sanctioned, its manifestations are usually tolerated and sometimes even encouraged. The victims of this violence are, almost always, women and children, while its culprits only rarely need to face the consequences of their actions. Catherine MacKinnon argues: "the trouble has been that men do in war what they do in peace, only more so, so when it comes to women, the complacency that surrounds peacetime extends to wartime, no matter what the law says" (53).
A further analysis of such acts of explicit physical violence, as they appear narrated in Campobello's novel and Leon's short story, reveals that separating what takes place in the domestic domain from what takes place in the public effaces the political and ideological dimensions of women's participation in revolutions and wars: acts of violence perpetrated in the domestic domain, the space that women traditionally occupy, are often not deemed to be political. Campobello and Leon address this issue by disavowing the "repose of the warrior." In a study of guerrilla warfare and state-sponsored repression in Latin America, Franco explains that the origin of the concept of the "repose of the warrior" relies on the separation between the public space and the private space
... of the house (brothel), home and convent, that is spaces which were clearly marked as "feminine." These spaces gave women a certain territorial but restricted power base and at the same time offered the "felicitous" spaces of the repose of the warrior. (12, my emphasis)
While both authors' texts reveal the oppressive nature of such a "felicitous" space, they also show that either leaving or even destroying the repose does not automatically imply an undeviating path towards women's emancipation and enfranchisement. Moreover, the compulsive need to construct the "repose of the warrior" as a space separate from the violence of revolution and war silences women's multifaceted participation in revolutionary struggles.
Elaine Scarry has argued that "the main purpose and outcome of war is injuring" (62), and while this main purpose is, according to Scarry, usually omitted, redescribed or held in a visible but marginal position in military histories and militarized language, the disowning of domestic violence and thereby domestic injuring during revolutions and wars proves to be even more persistent. The problem with this kind of violence is not only that such acts, at least until very recently, have been difficult to identify: the path to both disclosure and justice has been thorny and meandering. The issue of rape and sexual assault during armed conflicts is a case in point. (2)
Physical violence intersects also with other, less explicit forms of violence in the texts. Epistemic violence elides women's participation in revolutions and wars, thereby effacing women's agency in representations of such struggles. Both Leon and Campobello are in many ways writing from within and against a taboo that prevents women writers from fully engaging with different levels of violence. In most representations of women's itineraries in the cultural production of revolution, preexisting discursive conventions silence and erase the complexities that women's participation in these struggles implied. Thus women writers often articulate stories of revolution, war and violence using recognizable images, metaphors and tropes, not because they have internalized hegemonic narratives, but because these emerge out of the discursive battlefields that do not account for the complexity of women's struggles. In the particular cases of Campobello and Leon the difficulties entailed in writing and publishing about revolutions for women writers in...
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