Interview with Uruguayan American author Jorge Majfud by Brazilian journalist Raúl Fitipaldi
Raúl Fitipaldi: In this Great Homeland of political, social, and economic exiles due to imperialism and capitalism, how were our childhoods condemned?
Jorge Majfud: As in every one of the tragedies that have struck different peoples on different continents, there is a generation marked by fire, with the same fire with which the previous generation was marked, the one that witnessed and suffered the events. It is the generation of children who had to live and grow up in that context of witnesses being forced into silence. We are the Silent Generation, not only because our elders always, for fear of reprisals, insisted that we not speak in school or public about everything we inevitably knew, but also because of the silence and indifference of most of the post-dictatorship media, the cultural apparatus, and, more recently, because of the forced indifference of the new generation, who are tired of their parents or grandparents insisting on remembering.
RF: Why these changes?
JM: It’s natural to a certain extent, but also, in a highly political case like the rescue of memory, it has been under strategic attack: it bears the mark of secret agencies (those great storytellers, those truly invisible hands of the market and politics) and the mark of the capital of lobbies and corporations, gods unattainable by mere mortals. It’s not said, or it’s scarce, that someone who remembers the Jewish Holocaust of 80 years ago is politicized. However, any other vindication of memory is discredited as a political act and, worse still, as an act of corruption. Memory isn’t something that is rescued once and for all; it must be kept alive, or it dies. In Argentina, for example, there is a strategic discussion about whether there were 15,000 or 30,000 disappeared, as if 15,000 or 10,000 disappeared would in any way mitigate the brutality on a national and international scale, as was the case with Operation Condor.
RF: The pain of yesterday’s children isn’t taken very seriously either.
JM: As is often the case with the pain of children in general. Like when girls had their ears pierced. «They weren’t suffering.» Like bulls in a bullfight, they can’t express themselves, so they don’t suffer, or their suffering isn’t real, just as was the case with the suffering of women, the poor, Indigenous people, and Black people. Children who take any experience, no matter how brutal, as something normal couldn’t complain; therefore, their suffering wasn’t real, profound, or human-like that of an actual human being. Not without irony, it is precisely the generation most vulnerable in their emotions, memories, fears, and anxieties that is least considered in social narratives and historical analyses. The paradox is multiple since Generation Zero is the one that will have to deal with national traumas in a more profound and more lasting way. As if that tragedy weren’t enough, the chronological experience of a child has nothing to do with that of an adult. From the ages of five to fifteen or from ten to twenty, the existential period is equivalent to an entire lifetime. From 45 to 55, for example, is a different, less extensive period, barely a single stage, sometimes brief, rarely so profound as to leave an indelible mark on individuals.
RF: Have dictatorships been something like a permanent memory that feeds back into our memories and keeps us alert for any fascist outbreak?
JM: Only relatively. Although Latin American countries share a similar history of dispossession, colonization, and imperialist brutality, not all suffered equally or to the same extent. The people who had the misfortune of being born on soil rich in the resources needed to develop the northwestern empires throughout the Modern Era were the ones who suffered the most, for the longest, and who ended up poorer, more corrupt, and with more economic, political, and social violence. On the other hand, a financial dictatorship can be brutal in disposing of an entire country and the world as a whole (as is today’s Ultra Capitalism, as a prelude to Post Capitalism). Still, it is rarely experienced on an emotional, traumatic level due to its high level of abstraction. This is why resistance to its rule is minimal, almost impossible, and can only be experienced through its consequences, which are rarely attributed to its cause. Therefore, both trauma and learning are not inevitable but depend on a militancy of memory.
RF: Today, you dedicate yourself to teaching and cultivating memory through literature. Do you think children and young people today understand the fascist messages conveyed by figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Milei, and Bukele, among others?
JM: There’s always a group that understands this, that reclaims memory, but to answer that question, let’s look at the problem for a moment in general, social, and historical terms.
An individual reproduces their ancestors’ ancestral hopes and fears as if they were something new. What we feel now was felt by hundreds of generations before us. The same fire also integrates this ahistorical factor. The fire of yesterday and the fire of today are the same fires. On the other hand, generations don’t experience, politically speaking, the same thing as their predecessors. Unlike the existential, ahistorical condition of the individual, from a social and historical dynamic, I suspect that generations experience three different levels of the same trauma, the same tragedy. As I’ve explained elsewhere, we have:
1. A generation is seduced by fascist violence to resolve its deep frustrations.
2. The next generation suffers profound trauma due to massive war or fascist dictatorships (generally, fascisms are dictatorships that serve capitalist empires, but it is not impossible to find examples of fascism that claim to be leftist or in the form of liberal democracies; basically, fascism is nationalist, anti-intellectualist, yearns for the past, is reactionary, and needs to control public and private life, usually through censorship, fear, and the fragmentation of work and concepts, privileging faith, propaganda, and impassioned sermons over criticism and complex analysis).
3. The third generation—that of children, like the protagonist in The Same Fire and ours in the military dictatorships of Latin America during the Cold War—retains an awareness of brutality and works to expose the traumas of the previous generation. The recovery of memory is its main tool of dehumanization.
4. The fourth generation repeats the first. If it does not forget or deny the tragedy of the second generation, at least it does not feel it. They are more willing to ignore or downplay historical events and the memory of their grandparents, something we are clearly seeing today in many countries, both satellites and Argentina, with the attack on enlightened education, against those who insist on remembering those who disappeared during the last dictatorship, as in empires themselves (this is the case of the United States and its cultural and police reaction to historical revisions, which are «unpatriotic»). So, this generation begins to play with fascism once again, as did the generation that preceded their grandparents, until the next generation must suffer and repeat the catastrophe and traumas of the second generation.
RF: Can you explain a little more about what you mean by history and memory?
JM: Of course, history and memory are not the same thing. The former, especially official histories, the histories fossilized by the cultural industry, such as cinema, commercial literature, the press, and social narratives in general, are made up of strategic forgettings. Power can never tell its story without forgetting, without forgetting. For example, when John Wayne’s iconic film The Alamo dramatizes the heroic resistance of Anglo settlers in Texas, it omits the detail that they weren’t fighting for freedom but to reinstate slavery where the Mexicans had outlawed it. The same goes for the Two Demons Theory or the «We Were at War» theory imposed by the CIA through its militaristic narrators in Latin America. Official history is always mythological, from its narrative to its monuments, with heroes going into battle dressed like they were for a gala ball and riding expensive white horses, which was like going to war in Ukraine in a Lamborghini.
Now, when someone appears trying to rescue the memory buried along with the corpses of glorious historical events, they are accused of being unpatriotic, a heretic, or a dangerous radical who wants to destroy the West.
But that’s not all. The omissions of official histories also occur in very subtle and effective ways, such as when, at best, a newspaper tells all the facts but dedicates a headline to what a politician said and a small-print note on the fifth page about a genocide. In other words, even when the story doesn’t hide relevant facts, it effortlessly defines what is essential and what is irrelevant, with a consistency that causes the irrelevant to eventually disappear from the collective consciousness.
Another way is through politicians’ simplistic but demagogic narratives. Two or three days ago, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stated, «A process of Islamization is taking place in Europe that is far removed from the values of our civilization.» Millions applauded this logic, which we criticized in «The Slow Suicide of the West» when, in 2002, we responded to another famous Italian woman with the same ideas, Oriana Fallaci.
The most obvious things are not seen, just as we tend not to see our noses because they are too close to our eyes. The West rises with «rage and pride» at the Islamization of the West for being something that is «very far from the values of our civilization,» when it has been the West that has invaded every corner of the world throughout Asia, Africa, and America for the last five centuries and up until yesterday, with its armies and missionaries to impose by force of sword, whip, cannon, and banks the strategic Christianization of everything else that was neither Christian nor shared «our values.» In other words, it is not just a matter of strategic forgetfulness but also of the eternal presumption that our laws, our policies, our religion, our race, our culture, and our morals are superior, special, and therefore, must be applied by force and with bloodshed to others (in the name of love and freedom), but never the other way around. The golden rule of international and intercultural relations, reciprocity, has never been applied when it meant a danger to the interests of the powerful. Then, the dispossessed, oppressed, and massacred react. We demonize them to continue killing them, as we did with the natives around the world and continue to do with any independent rebel.
RF: What fears does the adult Jorge Majfud recreate as heirs to the Condor Plan period, the Trujillos, Ríos Montt, Somozas, Pinochet, Videla, «Goyo» Álvarez, and other more recent monsters like Janine Agnes?
JM: They are the fears of returning to the second generation, the ones that must suffer the traumas and brutality of fascism, as I told you before. At my age, I don’t have many personal fears. Not even death worries me. I’m concerned about the suffering of the new generation, our children, who will have to pay not only the massive debts that generations have created for the benefit of a micro-elite but also the consequences of this global injustice that, sooner or later, ends in a painful, though necessary and inevitable, revolution or rebellion, with tragedy multiplied by the reaction of fascists like those you just mentioned, who are ultimately only functional lackeys, banana republic generals who carry out the dirty work that our generation witnessed firsthand, such as kidnapping, torture, rape, murder, and disappearance. These things don’t happen on a battlefield where two equals face each other, but rather in the cowardly dungeons of the «saviors of the homeland» or in the camps of poor refugees who are emotionlessly massacred by the intelligent, multi-million-dollar bombs of the same powerful psychopaths as always.
RF: Why do we need to read your new book, The Same Fire?
JM: I don’t think anyone needs to read any of my books, regardless of the genre. I only propose problems, sometimes possible solutions, when it comes to analytical books or essays. Regarding novels, I propose many things, not solutions or entertainment. Suppose there’s someone there who’s interested, fine. If not, there’s no drama, either.
What people need (and always from my point of view, which is not the point of view of any chosen person, but quite the opposite) is that people need to be less submissive and more decisive in their search for truth, from the social to the individual, from ethics to aesthetics, from a sense of justice to a sense of dignity and worth.
https://editorialcuatrolunas.com/libros/narrativa/el-mismo-fuego/
Escritos Críticos 
Debe estar conectado para enviar un comentario.