Returning: the journey to the islands in contemporary narratives about Malvinas

Abstract

Due to its character as a traumatic incident, the Malvinas War remains a historic event to which discourses return time and again to explore, update and negotiate meanings.Surrounded by relentless narrations where literature is central, I choose works that consider the journey to Malvinas as a recurring topic of contemporary narratives as my standing point. The accounts of the journey persist both in genres of a more testimonial nature (journals and chronicles), and in fictional literature and film. Through them, we can outline a series of questions about war memories. The answers?which are always hypothetical, plastic and versatile in nature? are offered by each piece of material.The journey, associated to movement, enables a return to the past through the questions of the present. A particular perceptive structure is put into play: that of the travellers who wander in order to interact with the territory that unsettles them. From that journey ?linked to the movement that defines and constitutes it?, I am interested in its ability to interact with time. In this paper, I am interested in studying some aspects of the journey in relation to memory, focusing on the link between bodies and affections, experience and writing, and past and present, as shown in the documentary La forma exacta de las islas (2012) by Edgardo Dieleke and Daniel Casabé, as well as in Fantasmas de Malvinas. Un libro de viajes (2008) by Federico Lorenz. Both pieces of work insist on building a memory made up of multiple ways of reading the war experience and of seeing the island territory located at the end of the world.