The Unspoken Speaking: Silence and Identity in Hilma Contreras’ Entre Dos Silencios

THE UNSPOKEN SPEAKING: SILENCE AND IDENTITY IN HILMA CONTRERAS’ ENTRE DOS SILENCIOS Sarah Wamester Bares Millsaps College Taking the epigraph as a point of departure: “Silencio antes de nacer/ Silencio después de morir/Vivir anhelante entre dos silencios” (Contreras 1), this paper explores the connections between silence and identity in Entre dos silencios, Hilma Contreras’ collection of short vignettes. Grounding its analysis in contemporary theory on the role of silence and speech in narratives of the dictatorship, this text uses a close reading of the ways in which the narration seeks to at once reveal and conceal characters’ inmost thoughts and desires to show that Contreras’ text lays bare the panoptic tendencies of society, both within and without the dictatorship. Despite humanity’s deep desire to probe the depths of each person’s consciousness, the text, in its constitution of that which is unknowable within it, affirms the persistence of a space in each person that remains out of reach. Hilma Contreras begins Entre dos silencios, her short collection of texts—generally characterized as short stories but perhaps better-termed vignettes—with an unpunctuated three-line epigraph, presented first on a blank page before the collection and then again on the first page of the opening text, “Plenitud:” Silencio antes de nacer Silencio después de morir Vivir anhelante entre dos silencios (Silence before birth Silence after death To live deeply desiring between two silences).1 While the book does register a substantial presence of death, the silence before birth is not treated at all within the space of the narrative; and even in the texts in which death is present, the afterlife is never the subject. The texts clearly concentrate on what it means “to live deeply desiring” (vivir anhelante), and more specifically, those who live, wait, long and desire between the two silences. Although this “to live deeply desiring” is riddled with profound silences, the epigraph seems to preclude interpretation— the silences that matter are accounted for; all others are subsumed under this mantra, vitiated of additional meaning. Yet an epigraph that so clearly and precisely interprets the book’s title—more of an epitaph than C  2010 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 79 The Latin Americanist, March 2010 an epigraph in its finality—is more than a bit suspicious. It brings to mind Maurice Blanchot’s wise caution: “Keep watch over absent meaning” (Blanchot 42, italics his). In this essay, I will seek to explore not so much the silences of “before birth” or “after death,” but those that Contreras places in that space between silences, the “to live deeply desiring” that constitutes our existence. Narratives of writers who have lived through dictatorship and oppression are often written and analyzed in terms of silence and speech. In the context of dictatorship, silence has clear and direct connections with resistance (the refusal to speak, for example, when one is arrested), oppression (the inability to speak due to threats, imprisonment, torture, censorship) and complicity (not speaking out against injustice, despite awareness). Silence has also been conceptualized in terms of trauma and an inability to speak, as language loses its ability to anchor meaning in the context of events that defy understanding: “our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience” (Adorno 362). Speech, on the other hand, has been associated with resistance and triumph over oppression and oppressive regimes, (truth-telling, testifying, attesting, truth commissions, testimonio narratives) and also with questions of identity. In the introduction to El mundo alucinante, Reinaldo Arenas makes the startling declaration that his most useful piece of research in writing the life story of the perennially unorthodox, rebellious, wandering and persecuted Fray Servando Teresa de Mier “was discovering that you and I are the same person”2 (Arenas 23). For George Yúdice, the testimonial writer “does not speak for or represent a community but rather performs an act of identity-formation that is simultaneously personal and collective” (Yúdice 42). Entre dos silencios has been interpreted alongside Contreras’ other, more overtly political works, such as La tierra está bramando; when this association is made...