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Review of Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil by Rebecca J. Atencio (2014)

On November 18, 2011, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff launched the National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade or, CNV). The CNV’s mandate included the investigation of torture, disappearances, executions, and other human rights abuses committed between 1946 and 1988. The commission’s period of inquiry covered twenty-one years of military rule, from 1964 to 1985.[1] The National Truth Commission began more than two decades after the dictatorship’s end, and this delay makes Brazil one of the last countries in Latin America to undertake a state-sponsored investigation of human rights violations committed during the Cold War.

Members of the National Truth Commission delivers its final report to President Dilma Rousseff in 2014 — *The National Truth Commission delivers its final report to President Dilma Rousseff in 2014.*
*Source: Isaac Amorim*

Brazil, the third country in Latin America to undergo a democratic transition, has lagged behind many of its neighbors in the fight for truth and accountability. This occurred, in part, because of the gradual nature of the transfer of power. The military regime had achieved a relatively successful socioeconomic record and maintained a significant level of societal support. As a result, the armed forces exercised a high degree of control over democratization and successfully negotiated the conditions of this transition.[2]

Among the most substantial concessions won by the military was the 1979 Amnesty Law, which granted pardons for political or related crimes perpetrated between 1961 and 1979. Interpreted broadly since its passage, the 1979 amnesty has guaranteed impunity for state agents who committed human rights abuses. In Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil, Rebecca J. Atencio, a professor of Brazilian literary and cultural studies, takes 1979 as democratization’s starting point and traces Brazil’s transitional justice process within a regional context.

The first book to analyze institutional and cultural responses in the aftermath of state terrorism in Brazil, Memory’s Turn (2014) seeks to understand the dynamic relationship between transitional justice mechanisms and exceptional cultural works (literature, television, film, and theater). Atencio’s innovative approach attempts to bridge two distinct fields: memory studies and transitional justice studies. Memory’s Turn asks readers to consider whether activity in one realm affects outcomes in the other. Atencio does not argue there is a causal relationship between artistic-cultural production and institutional mechanisms, but she does contend that interplay between the two realms can “magnify and prolong the impact of both and thereby lay the foundation for further institutional steps.”[3]

Atencio primarily concerns her study with the public reception and framing of cultural works. This emphasis leads her to rely on mass media, scholarly criticism, and published interviews by artistic producers (memoirists, actors, network producers, screenwriters) as well as the cultural works themselves. Although Atencio consulted scholars, creators, and activists during her research, she does not include personal interviews in her analysis. The reliance on published statements reflects her desire to understand how cultural producers framed their works and agendas in public debates.

In order to study the interaction between cultural production and transitional justice, Atencio first selected key institutional measures and then identified “linked” works. She considers cultural and institutional acts linked when they launch around the same time, and the general public begins to associate the two events with one another. This creates what Atencio defines as an “imaginary linkage.” Once the public has paired cultural and institutional mechanisms, individuals or groups can leverage the connection in order to promote their agenda. Atencio refers to this multi-part process as a “cycle of cultural memory.”[4]

Over four chapters, Memory’s Turn traces four cycles of cultural memory that took place between the 1970s and early 2010s. Not all works that emerge concurrently with an institutional mechanism become paired, so Atencio focuses her analysis on a few exemplary artistic-cultural productions that achieved this imaginary linkage. Chapter one analyzes how Brazil’s Amnesty Law became associated with two memoirs published by former militants: O que é isso, companheiro by Fernando Gabeira and Os carbonários by Alfredo Sirkis. The following chapter explores the television mini-series Anos rebeldes, partially inspired by Sirkis’s memoir. The show coincided with the impeachment process initiated against Fernando Collor de Mello, Brazil’s first-democratically elected president following the dictatorship, and became tied to popular student protests. In chapter three, she examines Fernando Bonassi’s novel Prova contrária in conjunction with the commission formed to award reparations to the families of those disappeared under the military regime. The final chapter investigates the connection between the play Lembrar é resistir and the establishment of Brazil’s first official site of memory at a former torture center in São Paulo.

By evaluating individual cycles of cultural memory, Memory’s Turn moves chronologically from the dictatorship’s end to the present day. Atencio brings these case studies together in her concluding chapter, which analyzes the longer arc of transitional justice and collective memory processes in Brazil within a global context. Ultimately, Atencio concludes that the linkage between cultural works and institutional mechanisms can foster wider public engagement and new efforts to reckon with the past.[5] As a result, cultural producers, along with human rights groups and activists, have led the turn to memory in Brazil and pressured the state to abandon its politics of silence.

Although Brazil’s long period of official silence presents some challenges to transitional justice studies, the Brazilian case emerges as a test case to assess the impact of delayed mechanisms. Unlike its regional counterparts, Brazil has adopted a more gradual approach to reckoning with its authoritarian past. The first institutional measure, a reparations program, did not arrive until ten years after the democratic transition. As trials and memory work continue to progress throughout Latin America, Brazil provides insight into how and why transitional justice approaches change over time. Shifting social and political landscapes influence trajectories and outcomes.

Memory’s Turn traces the evolution of Brazil’s transitional justice process and acknowledges its complexities without treating the Brazilian experience as unusual or exceptional. By placing Brazil within a regional context, Rebecca Atencio offers a unique theoretical insight for transitional justice studies. Memory’s Turn provides scholars a model for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between legal mechanisms and cultural works in post-conflict societies. Over the long term, Atencio’s theoretical framework will apply to other national and regional contexts and help scholars better understand the long-term impact of transitional justice measures in post-conflict societies.

[1] “Brazilian Truth Commission Has Historic Responsibility,” International Center for Transitional Justice, last modified May 11, 2012, https://www.ictj.org/news/brazilian-truth-commission-has-historic-responsibility.

[2] Zoltan Barany, The Soldier and the Changing State: Building Democratic Armies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 128.

[3] Rebecca J. Atencio, Memory’s Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 8.

[4] Ibid, 6-8.

[5] Ibid, 125.

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The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura (2013)

By Rebecca Johnston

Leonardo Padura is arguably one of Cuba’s most untouchable writers. He made his name first as an investigative journalist, and then as the author of the Havana Quartet detective series, sometimes described as “morality tales for the post-Soviet era.” The Man Who Loved Dogs is by far his most ambitious work. A painstakingly-researched historical novel, it is the culmination of Padura’s twenty-year journey, beginning at the final home of Soviet exile Leon Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico and concluding with the National Prize for Literature, Cuba’s highest literary honor. It has received nearly universal critical praise, with the bemusing exception of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Their dissatisfaction may have stemmed from the premise in their review that Padura’s book is about “why revolutions and revolutionaries fail,” which it is not.

The Man Who Loved Dogs is largely a novel about struggle. The complex narrative follows the lives of three protagonists, one of whom is also the narrator, across two continents and several decades. The first, Leon Trotsky, struggles to remain politically relevant after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, fighting to maintain an alternative to Stalin’s form of communism through his global opposition movement and the Fourth International. Next is Spanish revolutionary Ramón Mercader, struggling to defend the ideals handed down to him from Moscow, pledging unwavering obedience first to his radical Marxist lover África, then to his sociopathic mother Caridad, and finally to a coercive state bureaucracy. Finally, the narrator, Iván Cárdenas Maturell, struggles to survive the reconstitutive process by which Fidel Castro’s Cuban government seeks to shape him into the “New Soviet Man.” The novel subjects Iván to a series of “falls,” one after another, until, as he puts it, “they fucked me for the rest of my life.” Throughout the book, all three protagonists struggle to come to terms with their actions, to determine who they are, and what meaning their lives may have had.

Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico, ca. 1938 (via Wikimedia Commons).

All of this struggle raises the question of what it is that the characters are struggling for. At times, the fight seems to be an end in and of itself, something the characters often seem aware of. Ramón joins the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War, “convinced that his life only had meaning if he was able to defend with a rifle the ideas in which he believed.” At the same time, those ideals “had been only recently discovered by many,” and yet he and those around him had “prepared themselves for sacrifice.” Trotsky’s first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, lays the death of their daughter at Trotsky’s feet, “accusing him of having marginalized Zinushka from the political struggle and of having thus pushed her to her death.” For Sokolovskaya, denying Zina a role in that battle was more deadly than the tuberculosis consuming her lungs. For each of them, struggle itself was a method of survival.

There are external motivations for these struggles as well. On accepting a Jason Bourne-style pact, the Soviet government transforms Ramón into Soldier 13, an entity that “did what they asked him to out of obedience and conviction.” Indeed, the importance of obedience dominates Ramón’s entire political career. Early on, África makes it clear to him that the Party is always right and obedience to the Party is mandatory, even though you may never understand the Party. Similarly, Iván’s rise from his falls was contingent on obedience to the Party line. He is given continual “correctives” until his writing falls within the acceptable standards set for him by the Cuban government, itself obeying the order to adopt them from the Soviet model.

Proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in Barcelona, 14 April 1931 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Central to both these instances of obedience, and key to understanding the book, is a denial of access to knowledge. When Iván speaks with his friend Dany about conducting research on Trotsky, Dany emphasizes the inherent danger of particular forms of knowledge. “I’m not going to become a Trotskyist or any shit like that,” Iván spits in defense. “What I need is to know…k-n-o-w, you get it? Or is it also forbidden to know?” To which Dany replies: “But you already know that Trotsky is fire!” Any type of knowledge that falls outside the Party line is potentially deadly. As a writer and radio worker, Iván is responsible for propagandizing the “correct” form of knowledge, making his transgression even more dangerous than that of a typical citizen. While Iván is coerced to shun any knowledge of Trotsky, Ramón is called upon to eliminate him in the most literal fashion. He accepts the Soviet government’s “first sacred principle: obedience,” allowing himself to be denied an understanding of truth, and ultimately destroying this alternative interpreter and propagandizer of knowledge.

Aside from Iván and Ramón, Padura shows us one of the twentieth centuries’ most violent displays of state control of knowledge: Stalin’s show trials. During the Soviet Terror of the 1930s, it was not enough to confess to being a Trotskyist-Bukharinite Japanese-German fascist spy. Defendants were made to perform self-criticism, ultimately regurgitating newly-fashioned realities of their nonexistent transgressions in public court. The Soviet government had the power to extract these false confessions, even from its own executioners, and then to force them to speak them into reality. Understanding the power of this performance is why Ramón’s handlers in Moscow bring him to not just any show trial, but the trial of Genrikh Yagoda, the former head of the NKVD (later the KGB). The lesson here for Ramón was precisely about truth, which in his case means one thing: obedience. As his handler puts it: “No one resists. Not even Yagoda. Neither will Yezhov when his turn comes.” Spoiler: Nikolai Yezhov, Yagoda’s successor, doesn’t even last another two years.

Soviet newspaper “Perekovka” (“Reforging”), front page announcing the replacement of Genrikh Yagoda by Nikolai Yezhov, 1936 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Trotsky, on the other hand, is more characterized by disobedience than anything else, and his own struggle helps to put the others in perspective. Our narrator tells us: “The struggle on which he had to focus from that moment on would be one against men, against a faction, never against the Idea.” Trotsky’s struggle was against Stalin and anyone who bought into Stalin’s interpretation of the “Idea.” The Idea, he explains, is “the truth of the revolution,” and he wishes to “throw himself into the void and proclaim the need for a new party capable of recovering” it. His crusade had always been to establish himself as the bearer of that truth, for the sake of which he committed bloody “excesses” that he would later claim to regret. Whereas Ramón and Iván are coerced to obediently accept and promote the Soviet government’s Truth, Trotsky seeks to convince others that he is the one with the real Truth, so everyone should obey him. The guilt over his “excesses,” and the fear that his command over Truth might transform him into “a pseudo-communist czar” like Stalin, was ultimately insufficient to dissuade him altogether.

Josef Stalin, 1949 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Tragically for the book’s heroes, it turns out they were struggling for nothing. In fighting “men” instead of the “Idea,” Trotsky forgot, as Dany reminds us, to “think about people.” They are the ones, after all, creating the ideas. The Soviet government certainly recognized as much, since in ordering Ramón to destroy Trotsky, they sought to destroy a particular set of ideas that threatened their own. Of course, we’ve heard these critiques of Soviet-style communism before. But at the heart of Padura’s book is something much farther reaching: it is the impossibility of utopia, communist or otherwise, and moreover, the destruction of knowledge that utopian projects inherently entail. For Padura, the construction of any utopia is a violent struggle over control of the “truth,” a struggle that leaves no room for the people for whom the utopia is supposedly built. Trotsky even acknowledges as much when he notes that the first executions from the show trials spelled the “death rattle of utopia;” Iván and Ramón were its “gullible” victims. It is no mistake, as Dany concludes, that the only utopia available to them is the one beyond the grave.

Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

Also by Rebecca Johnston on Not Even Past:
Policing Art in Early Soviet Russia.

You may also like:
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba, by Jonathan C. Brown.
The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba, by Frank A. Guridy.

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

by Kristie Flannery

In his introduction to Confederates in the Attic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz recounts the very strange moment when his weekend sleep-in was rudely interrupted by the loud cracking of gunfire.

The noise came from an unexpected Civil War re-enactment being filmed outside of his bedroom window. Horwitz had once been a little boy who would spend hours engrossed in an old, enormous book of Civil War sketches, captivated by images of Yankee and Dixie soldiers engaged in battle. But despite spending a number of years working as a war correspondent, it was this surprise encounter with the “men in grey” that prompted Horwitz to turn the critical gaze of the journalist upon his own and his country’s enduring fascination with the bloody conflict that pitted American against American in 1861-1865.

Confederates in the Attic is an informative and entertaining record of the extended road trip that Horwitz made through the Confederate heartland of the United States to investigate how Americans and southerners in particular continue to remember the war, and to make sense of that strange and enduring Confederate pride. Along the way Hortwitz gets to know a number of interesting people. His exchanges with Civil War enthusiasts from all walks of life spur the narrative along. They include the famous Civil War Historian Shelby Foote, female members of the Daughters of the Confederacy who devote considerable effort to finding Dixie soldiers in family trees, and bands of modern day “hardcore” Civil War re-enactors; factory workers who devote much of their free time and money to re-living as authentically as possible the experiences of nineteenth-century Confederate soldiers. For these rough and ready men who are perhaps the most interesting Horwitz introduces us to, this means sewing their own Civil War uniforms, dressing up to march for miles through wild country in ill-fitting boots, and spending nights in open, near-freezing conditions under thin blankets, spooning together for warmth.

Of course race cannot be left out of a book about the Civil War past or present. Horwitz does not meet one Civil War-obsessed African American in his travels. He concludes through his many conversations with white southerners who cherish the memory of the Confederacy that slavery has been conveniently forgotten in popular conceptions of why the South ceded from the Union and went to war against it. Horwitz provides a sobering account of the role the Civil War plays in modern racial violence; how in 1995 the ostentatious display of the confederate flag could lead one young man to kill another young man, and how the Klan is never really far away.

Horwitz demonstrates that the Civil War is very much still alive in the imaginations of Americans and shapes the way in which many perceive themselves and the world they live in. Confederates in the Attic is a must read for anyone studying the US Civil War and modern US history, or history and memory. It is a wonderful resource for teachers who want to get their students excited about this history and its continued influence on the present. It is truly a delight to read and would make a perfect gift for anyone who enjoys history.

You may also enjoy hearing UT professor of History Jacqueline Jones read from her book “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.”

Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History by Karl Jacoby (2008)

by Nathan E. McCormack

In Shadows at Dawn, Karl Jacoby examines the way that perspective influences historical memory and the role that political power plays in selecting which memories become codified in the historical narrative. Jacoby does this through a study of the Camp Grant Massacre—the death of approximately 140 Apache at the hands of a group of white and Hispanic settlers and Tohono O’odham natives in April 1871 in the Aravaipa Valley in Arizona.

Jacoby examines the settlement of the Arizona-Mexico border region from four perspectives, those of the Apache and O’odham natives, the settlers from Mexico, and settlers from the United States. He relates each group’s story individually, highlighting events forgotten, dismissed, or emphasized, and demonstrating the way each group created a unique narrative about a shared event. In doing so, he calls attention to the influence of numerous factors, that influence the creation of history and group memory, including a culture’s worldview and its political position within the larger social context.

Divided into two overall sections—before and after the Aravaipa massacre—Jacoby begins each group’s narrative with its arrival in the area northeast of the Gulf of California, in present-day southern Arizona (in the case of the O’odham, whose arrival in the area is uncertain, a discussion of its lifestyle before the other groups’ arrivals). Jacoby discusses each group’s interaction with the others from its own perspective, which he gleans by studying historical and biographical narratives, or artifacts with analogous function among the indigenous groups. By addressing the way each group interpreted common events common, for example the cause each group attributed to the Aravaipa attack, Jacoby theorizes about the way that each group envisioned its role in the conflict, and more broadly, the way that it interpreted life in the rugged Arizona territory.

Jacoby’s study presents a fairly straightforward analysis of the events leading up to the Araviapa Canyon attack and does not attempt to present a theoretical explanation for the violence of the frontier or colonialism. The major contribution of Shadows at Dawn, however, is Jacoby’s portrait of each group’s distinctive perspective on the same time period—and, in some cases, the same events. This is particularly useful in postcolonial or subaltern studies, for recovering the voices that are lost when, as is frequently the case, only the history of the dominant or victorious community has been preserved. Jacoby’s approach, however, also highlights the difficulty of subaltern histories—preserving the perspective of conquered peoples, which tends to be lost or destroyed. What fragments remain—in his account the calendar sticks of the Apache serve as an example of these historical remnants—generally paint an unclear or incomplete picture, at best, and the historian must engage in some degree of speculation to construct a narrative based upon them. This is particularly true when dealing with semi-literate groups like indigenous North Americans.

Despite this difficulty, Jacoby utilizes the extant material effectively and acknowledges the challenges that it presents. The result is unique both in its approach and analysis and makes for a readable and accessible study, which avoids the all-too-common trap of theoretical overreaching.

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