The Falklands War is an open wound, a sore that still oozes on the body of the country. It hurts, is uncomfortable, looks on its side, reappears on sleepless nights or breaks out in the middle of a nightmare. With all this real and symbolic burden of death and loss, it was impossible for literature not to take charge of reflecting in its stories the fateful days of 1982 and its consequences on the Argentine social fabric. Writers love wounds and swiping over them.
When the war was still on the front page of the newspapers, but the illusion of victory had already vanished, two writers decided to turn the war into fiction: Fogwill, with his novel Los Pichiciegos, and Carlos Gardini, with his short story “Primera línea” (published a year later in the book of stories of the same name). The novel quickly became a classic of Argentine narrative, giving the backing that Fogwill needed to consolidate itself among the shining names of the democratic transition. Gardini's work still awaits a fair demand.
Argentine fiction has always had an urgent version, written with a speed that brings it closer to periodism, and a more relaxed becoming. Since those founding texts, fiction has not stopped producing a literature that revolves around war. It's true, there are never many texts at once. One cannot speak of a literary boom around the Malvinas, but its presence has been constant throughout these years. As if every so often it was necessary to conjure up the ghosts of war unreason, as if it were necessary to plant cairns that would map the bewilderment and pain that this subject still generates, even in writers who were not even born when the war happened. Such is the case of Sebastián Ávila (1985), author of Ovejas, who won the Futurock Novel Prize 2021, the last literary milestone so far.
Between Fogwill and Ávila, between Gardini and this compilation, Malvinas never stopped appearing in the imagination of local writers: novels, stories, poems, plays, chronicles. Fictions that take place on the islands, on the continent, during the war, in the following years, today. Tragedies, police, black humor, science fiction, intimate novels, experimental texts, own or collected experiences. Own and others' lives. The terrible shadow of war on a literature accustomed to history, politics and testimony.
If the origin of national fiction is marked by violence, especially political violence, and if our narrative never despised taking charge of historical events, the Malvinas fits perfectly within those parameters. Because Malvinas is much more than a lost war, it is the military dictatorship sending thousands of conscripted soldiers to death or mutilation (physical, mental), it is a triumphalist people, a crowd that first applauded and then insulted, it is a generation whose soundtrack was sung in Spanish, it is denial in the following years and is the tepid flourishing of a social consciousness, of a common cause, of a shared pain in recent decades.
The seventeen short stories that make up this compilation, written especially for this book, mark a continuity with the corpus of stories about the Malvinas War. They are stories that speak of a past time, but that also challenge the present moment of his writing. The view that these authors have on the war conflict, on its consequence on the protagonists or their environment, also says a lot about these days. This is what happens in “Far from Home”, the story by Luis Gusmán that opens this book as a way to see and feel the war by observing a tomb in the Puna of a fallen combatant.
Writing is — maybe — remembering. Several of the stories in this book use the first person to build a story of memories of those days. It doesn't matter to what extent they are autobiographical, how much real experience is there — if real experience can be such in a fiction — but it cannot be left out in that light, to a greater or lesser extent.
“Rear Guard”, by Jorge Consiglio, is one of those narrations marked by autobiographical zeal (the narrator's surname is the same as the author): the routine of a soldier who did not go to the battlefield, but stayed in the rear and lives the war as a dead time (although deaths occur thousands of kilometers away). The view of war conflict since childhood is the approach chosen by Roque Larraquy in “Why did I play English”, a story that projects war on children's ties, always laden with cruelty and injustice, as a kind of Creole “Lord of the Flies” in 1982.
During the war there was a “us” and a “them”, a “me” and a “you” that refer to what each one experienced in those days. Clara Obligado's synchronous cut in the choral history of “Preterito Imperfect” allows her to observe the war from multiple perspectives and sensations. War is a tragedy, but it can also be a political excuse or the background of an intimate story, far from war events.
The female experience of war is linked to the adolescence of the protagonists. Mónica Yemayel, in “Las chicas del 63″, recalls the young years in the 70s that abruptly culminated in 1982, with the sinking of the General Belgrano Cruise. History is reconstructed with memory, but also with the journalistic chronicles of those days. “We had a mission. Write letters to soldiers fighting for our islands,” Gloria Peirano writes at the beginning of “A Soldier's Letter”. The correspondence between girls and combatants, which generated an erotic current between the heroic act of men and the admirative expectation of women, loses its romantic tone when the reality of combat appears in the thought of the protagonist. For her part, María Sonia Cristoff, in “Darkening Exercises”, crosses a story of friendship between girls with espionage and betrayal of unpredictable consequences: “As if the war had taken something from us that we were not yet able to record,” writes the author.
Carla Maliandi, in “Ismael”, opts for a story that escapes the usual realism to venture into the fantasy genre. The narrator is a preadolescent who shares her room with the presence of a soldier, a presence that will remain for a long time in her life.
As the protagonists (and authors) do not participate directly in the experience of the war, they resort to what others have experienced, as does the protagonist of Mariano Quirós' “The Man in the Teller”, who is linked to an ex-combatant, an “Indian” from northern Argentina, many years after the clashes. In a much more autobiographical way, Mauro Libertella in “Our Portable Wars” summarizes and classifies his links and knowledge of the Falklands War. The social and literary consequences of a conflict seen by someone who was born the year after the events.
Literary references also appear in “The kiss of the cockroach woman” by Raquel Robles. Manuel Puig is an excuse to get into the lives of two marginal characters, one of them marked by war and desire. The body as a place of battle and vindication.
In “Fragments of an impossible story”, Maria Teresa Andruetto uses the testimonial collage of articles and statements from those days to tell a story marked by tragedy. The cold and waiting burst into Perla Suez's “Permafrost”. The war front, the fears of two soldiers standing guard, the defeat that is becoming increasingly palpable in a climate as inhospitable as reality.
The most stark of the war appears in “All the time in the world”, by Marcelo Figueras. The life of a combatant becomes present in the midst of confrontation. To remember as a form of survival, to survive as a way of being a witness and protagonist of the madness to which the military government dragged an entire generation.
Edgardo Scott, in “History of the plane”, starts from a real event, the installation of a war plane in a square of Lanús Oeste, to imagine a futuristic and dystopian Argentina. In a climate close to the thriller, “Enemy Army”, by Hernán Ronsino, he presents the miseries of an army prepared for accommodation and blackmail rather than for battle with the external enemy.
Ariana Harwicz uses a hybrid form of narrative and uses the form of a play to portray the pain, disenchantment and bitterness of soldiers. “Nothing was completely over: neither the deranged jargon of that time nor the still-intelligible whisper of history. No, Cufré said to himself, nothing completely ended”, wrote Andrés Rivera in In This Sweet Land. The same can be said of the Falklands War. Nothing completely ends and it is in literature that this lack of ending is best reflected, the discomfort of a story that resists being just past.
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