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

13. Alicia Kozameh

Alicia Kozameh is a striking woman with abundant, curly auburn hair that crowns her slender figure. Her large, wide eyes reflect both seriousness and vulnerability. She is a dual soul: a woman of great strength and conviction, and a woman wounded by the turmoil she still carries within. Alicia is frank, outspoken, and sincerely interested in others. Alicia Kozameh THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Alicia Kozameh | The Author and Her Work Alicia Kozameh was born in 1953 in the city of Rosario, province of Santa Fe. Like Córdoba and La Plata, Rosario is one of the Argentine cities (other than Buenos Aires) that provide the best opportunities for higher education. Kozameh ’s father, Enrique, was a banker of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox origin. Her mother’s family was Jewish, of Syrian origin. Raquel Ades de Kozameh converted to Catholicism in order to marry into her husband’s family. At this time anti-Semitism was prevalent, and the Kozameh family insisted on rearing Alicia as a Catholic. Her older sister Liliana su¬ered brain damage at childbirth and was severely handicapped. This created a dysfunctional atmosphere in her family life. Much of the sister’s care fell upon Alicia, who was four years her junior. Kozameh felt that her parents’ lack of understanding and support of her was due to their frustration with her sister’s condition. Kozameh’s mother was a housewife, and her father traveled from city to city working in various branches of the Banco de la Nación Argentina (National Bank of Argentina); therefore, Kozameh changed schools frequently. She attended Catholic high schools, and when she was a student at Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia (Our Lady of Mercy), she helped to close down the school as part of the political rebellion called the Rosariazo, a city-wide political manifestation against the government. This was the late 1960s, a time of political unrest and strained relations between the government and the leftist activists. Her sister died around this time, and Kozameh, who had endured both her sister’s hardships and her di~cult relationship with her parents, grew even more distant from her mother and father. She left her home at age seventeen and lived in a boarding house while studying at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario (National University of Rosario). She also began her involvement with politics and activism, which led to a lifelong search for justice and equality. In the early 1970s, while she studied philosophy and literature at the university, she became a member of the PRT, or Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (Workers Revolutionary Party). Eventually, Kozameh became so involved in political activism that the PRT advised her to change her activity and hide, lest she be arrested and possibly murdered. In 1975 she was apprehended and jailed by the military regime and was kept in the infamous sótano (“basement”) of the Rosario Police Station for fourteen months. After that she was transferred to the prison of Villa Devoto, in Buenos Aires. Three years later, and due alicia kozameh 309 to the pressure of groups like Amnesty International, she was released from prison. Kozameh went into exile in California in 1980, where she took odd jobs such as house-cleaning to survive. She had always felt the need to write, and in California she made the time to write down her experiences. She published her first novel, Pasos bajo el agua (Steps under Water), in 1987. This work is a novel based on the three years and three months that she spent imprisoned during the military dictatorship. Here she aimed to go beyond a mere testimonial to create an intense work of fiction based on life experience. The protagonist is a woman by the name of Sara, yet the point of view fluctuates between first and third persons, and other voices are heard throughout the work, which includes diaries, letters, notes, and other forms of communication. The novel is political, but it also deals with relationships and loss both of friends and of a sense of self. Throughout the piece, the victimized protagonist gradually rediscovers her own body and identity. Kozameh is currently working on a film adaptation of this novel with Gastón Biraben, an Argentine director who lives in Los Angeles. Kozameh wrote her second novel, Patas de avestruz (Ostrich Legs), in 1989, but did not publish it in Spanish. A professor at the University...