Women and Power in Argentine Literature: Stories, Interviews, and Critical Essays

11. Cristina Siscar

Cristina Siscar is a statuesque woman, with large dark eyes and flowing hair. Her movements are slow and measured, like a feline’s. The cadence of her voice is deliberate and smooth. She pauses when she speaks to choose just the right word to convey a precise thought. One senses many levels of depth in her thought, marked by a feminine gentleness, almost frail, yet imposing . Cristina Siscar THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Cristina Siscar | The Author and Her Work Cristina Siscar was born in the Argentine capital city of Buenos Aires in 1947. She was reared in a middle-class family of modest means; her mother was a seamstress and housewife, and her father was an accountant. She comments that in her home there was no library, and no one read. However, as a child she loved to read and began by reading the only book she had at home, an encyclopedia . At first she was methodical about it; she began with the letter “A” and went forward from there. But then one word would lead to another one associated with it, and in this fashion, she claims, she imagined connective threads between one term and another and began to create her own fictions about them. Siscar notes that she read all types of books: borrowed books, library books, recommended books, and more. In school she became the student librarian , and this gave her the possibility of reading all the books she wanted to read. It was then that she began to read legends, a type of writing that has always fascinated her. She believes that her literary vocation became evident to her in high school. Her teachers encouraged her in that direction, and she won several literary contests during those years. When she was nineteen years old, she won a citywide poetry contest, and that confirmed her in her vocation as a writer. After high school she received her degree to become a high school literature teacher from the Instituto Superior del Profesorado Pedro Elizalde (Pedro Elizalde Institute for Teachers). She also studied Ciencias de la Educación (Education Sciences) at the University of Buenos Aires, but this step of her career was truncated by political interventions in the university. These were the years immediately before the military coup of General Videla, and the state universities were seen as sites of political unrest and subversion. Siscar continued to write poetry and began to practice journalism, writing newspaper articles on culture and books. In the early 1970s, the political unrest in Argentina was becoming more and more heated. Siscar, like many of the intellectual young people of that time, was attracted to leftist ideology. She and her husband, together with some colleagues, worked toward establishing a literary magazine to put forth some of their views and convictions. She maintains that she was very dogmatic in her political views then, so much so that she stopped reading literature to read only political ideology. cristina siscar 259 Her political activism reached its peak in 1977, shortly after the military coup of 1976. It was then that her life took a turn for the worse. Her husband, a journalist, was kidnapped and became a desaparecido (missing or disappeared person). He was allegedly murdered by the military dictatorship. Her sister and brother-in-law were also kidnapped and became desaparecidos, as well as many friends and colleagues. She found herself living alone with her son, almost in hiding, reading and writing and keeping a low profile. She knew she was in danger, but did not want to go into exile because to do so would mean leaving her son behind. In 1979 she finally left the country and fled to Brazil and later Paris, where she lived for seven years. As painful as it was for her, she was forced to leave her son in Argentina with her parents because of the Patria Potestad law, which requires a father’s permission for a mother to take a child out of the country. She remarks that she could have claimed her husband was dead and that she was the child’s only parent, but to do so would mean that she had given up her search for her husband, something she was not willing to do. Eventually, Siscar became disillusioned with what seemed to be unrealistic political solutions, and she distanced herself from politics to return to literature , her first...