The Legacy of a Decision: Militancy and Motherhood in Matilde Sanchez's El Dock

El exceso de verdad puede enloquecer y aniquilar la conciencia moral de un pueblo.

Rodolfo Walsh

On Mothers:
Beyond the Law

Mothers are key ethical and political figures in Matilde Sanchez's El Dock (1993), as could not be otherwise in the Argentina of the 1990s. Within the context of post-dictatorship politics, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Madres) became paradigmatic models of the search for truth and the demand for justice. Given the marginalized and subaltern role that mothers have occupied in Argentine society, the Madres not only claim their biological rights as the basis of their protests, but also construct a place for the figure of the mother on the political scene. Mothers then become the public voices of their disappeared sons and daughters.

El Dock can be read as a tribute to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In fact, Matilde Sánchez wrote the prologue, and edited and transcribed the autobiography of Hebe de Bonafini, the leader of the Madres, titled Historia de una vida. Hebe de Bonafini (1985). Much like Bonafini's testimony of motherhood and political militancy, the figure of the mother in El Dock is an ethico-political construction and not a biological or essential figure for woman: the novel itself is the narrator's written construction of that role.¹ But this is where the similarity between the two texts ends, because if the Madres must necessarily confront the State and demand that it live up to the letter of the law, then the novel proposes to go beyond this critical role and posits another form of motherhood that not only challenges the law, but also seeks to completely displace it.

The political militancy that El Dock discusses is no longer that of the Madres in relation to the legacy of the dictatorship, but of the storming of a military compound in the name of saving the newly re-established democracy.² El Dock therefore rewrites political militancy: it is not only an act of dissidence or resistance—the imposition of a counter-hegemonic force—but rather the articulation of a radical re-inscription of the law. That is why the figure of the mother in this novel is articulated within the ethico-political exigency of democracy. It is in this sense that the words of Hebe de Bonafini in Sánchez's prologue should be understood: "'Yo no pierdo las esperanzas; algún día un hijo, cualquier hijo, va a cruzar esta Plaza para entrar a la Casa de Gobierno. Estoy segura de que lo veré, así tenga que vivir cien años; por eso no pierdo las esperanzas. No sé qué hijo, cuál hijo, pero va a cruzar la Plaza para tomarla y va a ser un hijo mío'" (Prologue 13). Not only do mothers constitute a criterion for political legitimacy; their legacy now cannot be thought apart from the context of democracy.

The novel begins by explaining the production of multiple histories. While convalescing from an illness, the narrator watches a news report on television and sees the image of a dead woman: Poli, a childhood friend turned guerrillera who kills herself after a failed attack on a military regiment in an area called "el Dock." The image of the dead guerrillera is the starting point for a narration that both recalls a past and creates the conditions for the future, given that the narrator will become responsible for telling the dead friend's story, as well as for the care of Leo, Poli's son. In fact, telling the story and "becoming" a mother are intertwined in the novel, and responsibility constitutes the narration itself. And it also names the act of reading, because it is through Leo ("I read") and the different interpretations of Poli's story (the story of her life and the decision that marked her death...