"Cadáveres que transitan a las semillas": State Violence and the Aporia of Alicia Partnoy's Poetry

Argentina, where she was abducted at gunpoint from her home at noon on 12 January 1977 by uniformed members of the Army representing the military dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla. She was subsequently incarcerated and brutalized for almost three years, yet no charges were ever filed against her. Nor was she ever formally accused of any crime, named in any court documents, informed of being a political prisoner, or court-martialed. Instead, she was held indefinitely and without a writ of habeas corpus via the unconstitutional protocol of the dictatorship. In short, to invoke the lexicon of the period, she had become a "desaparecida." Partnoy was in fact one of an estimated 30,000 such "desaparecidos," or disappeared people, from the genocide in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, during which time the dictatorship attempted to consolidate its autocratic domination of Argentina by kidnapping, torturing, and/or murdering its supposed opposition. In response to that violence, Partnoy writes what is proposed herein as a "poetry of reemergence," meaning a poetry using genre-specific tropes, forms, and figures to enact the symbolic reemergence of the disappeared for their reintroduction into multidirectional meaning systems in the present. In this manner, Partnoy's poetry importantly introduces a paradoxical "present absence" to post-transition and mnemonic discourses in national and transnational literary and public imaginaries, which not only reconceives cultural production concerning torture and genocide, but also contests and ruptures dictatorial and postdictatorial discourses and historiographies.