Julián Fuks

Adoption, exile and family are the focus of this exploration of what it means to belong.

Resistance

Marion

Resist: how much of resisting is the tearless acceptance of misfortune, compromising with everyday destruction, tolerating the ruin of those close to you?

Does resisting mean managing to stay on your feet when others are falling, and until what point, until your own legs give way? Does resisting mean struggling in spite of inevitable defeat, shouting despite the hoarseness of your voice, acting despite the hoarseness of your will? It's necessary to learn how to resist, but resisting will never mean surrendering to a fate that's already sealed, it will never mean bowing down before a future that's inevi-table. How much of learning to resist isn't learning to question yourself?

But there are sorrows that are not susceptible to argument, there are pains not subject to exaggeration.

There are stories that are not made up at the table, between gulps and forkfuls, between one chat and another, stories that steer clear of lightness, that do not lend themselves to common ruminations, to everyday words. There are events that do not live on the surface of memory and yet will not allow themselves to be forgotten, will not allow themselves to be repressed. All forgetting can fit inside a pain, that's according to a line of poetry about these uncertain things, but lines of poetry don't always get it right. Sometimes all that fits inside a pain is silence. Not a silence made from the absence of words: a silence that is absence itself.

I can't conceive of a suppression of the self being exploited to the maximum, the systematic destruction of the void that is the self, its transformation into an object of torture. I cannot imagine, and this is why my words become more abstract, the unspeakable circumstances in which staying silent is not a betrayal, in which staying silent is a resistance, the most absolute evidence of commitment and friendship.

Staying silent in order to save the other: stay silent and be destroyed.

 Dictatorships can come back, I know, and I also know that the arbitrariness, the oppressions, the suffering, exist in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of regimes, even when hordes of citizens march biennially to the ballot box.

Can exile be inherited? Might we, the little ones, be as expatriate as our parents? Should we consider ourselves Argentinians deprived of our country, of our fatherland? And is political persecution subject to the norms of heredity?

My second book from Charco Press. I know the phrase “The personal is political” is overused but it’s what this book achieves truly. A story of a family in exile from Argentina and an adopted son interweaved to explore family and national displacement and the wounds they leave behind. 

Resistance

Reviews

Highlights