Norma Morandini “In truth there are not two demons, but one: violence”
Barely beginning the conversation, the author of Decir adiós (Decir adiós , by Del Zorzal)—her latest published essay—recounts with a smile that, as the book was coming off the press, her son asked her, somewhat concerned, about the title. She reassured him, explaining that it wasn't a personal farewell. Although, in part, it is. The essay, presented in July in Buenos Aires, closes a cycle on a central theme in Norma Morandini 's life (as a sister, as a journalist, as a legislator): Argentine political violence. But, in effect, it's no longer strictly personal, but rather plural. She defines it as "the end of a trilogy, a farewell to the past, but also a spiritual invocation to God to be properly understood; the book aims to be a contribution to the consolidation of a democratic liturgy."
We're talking about—and with—someone who physically and intellectually lived through the years of lead, including the disappearance and kidnapping of two brothers, threats, exile, and the Trial of the Juntas, which he covered as a journalist for O Globo in Brazil and Cambio 16 in Spain. His works, always somewhat autobiographical, explore, like his life, those dark times and, at the same time, offer an opportunity to examine ourselves as a society.
The trilogy Morandini points to is the one he inaugurated with From Guilt to Forgiveness (2012), where he explores the personal and social experience of democracy and reconciliation, and which he returned to in Silences (2022), regarding family amputation and the use of social memory. Now, after those two books, Morandini finally publishes Say Goodbye , an essay that is especially timely and noteworthy in the current context.
In her words, in this new book, she set out to speak "about the unburied dead, those no one saw die, from the disappeared of the dictatorship to those killed by Covid, whom perhaps no one saw die; from those killed by the bombs of guerrilla terror to the young people left scattered across the desolate lands of the Malvinas; from those lying beneath the rubble of the AMIA to the sailors of the ARA San Juan; the unburied dead, the mourners without historical consolation." All of this, which, ultimately, is so uncomfortable and at the same time so symbolic, a reflection of a chronic opacity we carry as a people; the difficulty of recognizing things by name and surname. One might say that, unlike the closure our interviewee achieves in her book, we Argentines are, as a people, stubbornly stuck in a maniacal denial.
“Unveiled dead, lives to be novelized,” we read in Decir adiós , which returns to the figure of “not veiling” and “novelizing” history, introducing into the perception of the past that sort of individual and at the same time silently collective therapeutic experience that literature is, per se. The author mentions, in this regard, Martín Caparrós and Tomás Eloy Martínez .
–If burial is reuniting the bereaved, giving a name, a cause, a body to death, would disappearance be the ultimate unburied event? The impossibility of closing one chapter and opening another?
–I think so. But in this case, although of course the reflection is influenced by what happened in my family, I capture in the book what I've been reflecting on for a long time, and not so much in relation to personal matters, but rather in relation to what's happening in our country. We're almost half a century into the dictatorship, four decades into the Trial of the Juntas. We have people born and educated in freedom, and the question that troubles me is: are we going to continue killing each other in perpetuity? Today we hear such aggressive political discourse, so focused on denying the other, so focused on annihilating the other. That wasn't the case in the first decade of democracy. That's why the question about the unburied goes even beyond the individual: has the country closed its accounts with the past?
– What was that closure like for you personally?
I only recently made my brothers' case public in the 1990s, after a sinister figure in the security forces wrote a gruesome article about my mother, accusing her of being a guerrilla for searching for her children. And I decided to speak out: I did so on Mariano Grondona's show, where I said that having missing relatives wasn't a crime but a tragedy. As Brazilians say, that day I "washed my soul."
– And how has your journalistic profession played a role in all of this?
Journalism gave me a tool to distance myself from the rest of the world, in every sense. In exile, I was fortunate enough to have a job as a correspondent for a Spanish news agency in Portugal, and I followed with great curiosity how these two peninsular countries were democratizing. I arrived some time after the "Carnation Revolution," an example of democratic education, because Portugal had the longest dictatorship on the continent. All of this gave me readings, experiences, and knowledge about the transition processes. I gradually became a kind of "transitologist" before returning to Argentina, covering the Trial of the Juntas, and then witnessing the transition in my own country. I studied extensively what other peoples had done with their tragic past; also, and especially, the Germans. And experience always shows that violence has been tamed through democracy.
– What did you feel then as a “transitologist” regarding the transition in your own country?
–Once again, journalism played a role: I was so curious to see what had happened among the people that I decided to write a story for Cambio 16 , the Spanish magazine, about Mafalda's 25th birthday. The idea was to ask people from different walks of life—professionals, intellectuals, but also random people I'd stopped on the street—how they imagined Mafalda at that age. Some told me “feminist,” others “a widow of modernity, wearing glasses,” or “dressed in black”… But the surprising thing was Quino's own response, which I had left for last: “Mafalda wouldn't have made it to 25. Today she'd be a missing person,” he told me. That's when I learned that everything in Argentina, even the most innocent story, was permeated by the past.
When people do not discern between good and evil, they are easy prey for authoritarian systems that cancel thinking.
– Recently, the ruling party circulated a campaign photo in which the President and his officials held a sign with the text "Kirchnerism Never Again," using the font originally used for the slogan and featured on the cover of the National Commission for the Advancement of Public Prosecution (CONADEP) report. What do you think about that?
–It's another desecration. “Where there is pain, there is sacred ground,” said Oscar Wilde. Never Again belongs to everyone, as prosecutor Strassera said. For the people, it's a democratic mantra. A ritual shared in silence. I will never understand why pain is used as an ideological resource. In an article about that same photo, I pointed out that it was yet another trivialization of evil, Hannah Arendt's not always well-understood concept. And as she says, when people can't discern between good and evil, they fall prey to authoritarian systems of obedience that suppress thought and pave the way for tyrannies. That sign is another desecration, like when Ernesto Sabato's prologue was modified in a public document that was precisely the Never Again report.
What strikes me as “republican nerd” is that our constitution literally states “The Argentine Nation adopts the republican and federal representative form of government.”
– It's also notable that a political force defines itself above all by opposition; that its central message is to point out what it opposes.
–It's been said that the Milei phenomenon is an outgrowth of what's been happening; I believe that two decades of Kirchnerism have conceptually emptied democracy by establishing this notion: "I can do what I want because I was voted for." That's what Milei is repeating. That's why now, when one watches the debates in Congress, instead of refuting ideas with ideas, we hear legislators say, for example: "You don't have the authority to complain because you didn't do it before." The right thing is the right thing: if Kirchnerism has moved on, it's welcome to talk about democracy and rules. Peronism is part of the history of this country. I expect them to return to democracy and decency. But "Never again" to Kirchnerism when millions have voted for them, no. I feel the same way about "Macri, trash, you are the dictatorship." When I heard that for the first time, I thought: but these kids have no idea what a dictatorship is. Words have been stripped of their deepest meaning. The Italian democratic theorist Giovani Sartori [1924–2017] said that obfuscation is a consequence of confusion. There's confusion about the division of powers. I'm struck by the "republican nerd," when our Constitution literally states, "The Argentine Nation adopts the republican and federal representative form of government." The difficult thing is to build from a republican perspective: grabbing a chainsaw and destroying everything is very easy. The republic is the division of powers. When you want to abolish Congress, you want to abolish democracy.
– While I'm critical of Peronism, it's a topic that interests you and you address it, even from a literary perspective, through authors like Martín Caparrós and Tomás Eloy Martínez.
–I was deeply impressed by Caparrós's No Velas a Tu Muertos (You Don't Keep Watch Over Your Dead) . From the title itself, because if you don't keep watch over your dead, you end up writing a novel, having to invent an ending about something we haven't seen, something we don't know about. As for Tomás Eloy, when I read Lugar común, la muerte (Common Place, Death), I discovered the power of memory that the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had. There, he discovers that "a man can die indefinitely." But I also believe that novels and films can be much more effective than history itself. Fiction, which is one's reason, ultimately speaks for others.
– You could say that this also happens when writers write chronicles from a personal perspective.
–When I covered the Trial of the Juntas, journalists weren't allowed in with a tape recorder. Many people don't know this. The entire audiovisual material was recorded and sent to Sweden for safekeeping, so there would be no doubt about it later. While the sessions were taking place, only images were released. We had to piece together that macabre puzzle by taking notes. But the only person who, having attended the trial only once, was able to write what we couldn't manage to do in six months, was Borges. He did so in a memorable article entitled "July 22," which I highly recommend reading.
– About fifteen years after the Trial you wrote From Guilt to Forgiveness, which opens the trilogy closed with Saying Goodbye, but which was not published until much later.
–Yes, I wrote it in 2001, but at first no publisher wanted to publish it. When it came out, human rights organizations killed me. I was naive to believe that this book would contribute to the debate. I like to write, and what you want is to share your ideas. But instead, they accused me of trying to promote the closure of trials. Nonsense, and right when the trial for the disappearance of my brothers at the ESMA was being held. I never came forward to respond because I don't accept tribunals of conscience, but that reaction was very unfair. Then came Silences , the result of reading the books of survivors, as a way of getting closer to what my brothers had experienced in captivity.
– Given your status as a journalist and everything we’ve talked about up to this point, the question is almost obligatory: Did you see the film Argentina, 1985 ?
–Yes, and I thought it was wonderful that so many people went to see it, that they knew there was a trial, that there was a prosecutor. And while the film has fictional aspects, it's essentially true. For example, it makes it clear that it wasn't the "wonderful youth" who went looking for testimonies, evidence, or archives; that was done by the Truth Commission, by Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, by Graciela Fernández Meijide...
– You pointed out that in the first decade of the restored democracy, there were certain basic agreements that are now seemingly blurred. What's happening now that makes the 1976-1983 period so ignored or mocked?
–There are many things. Social media has to do with it, but in our country, something has been wrong since before. There hasn't been a concern for education in and about democracy. The Kirchner couple, by making a deceptive appropriation of human rights—because the truth is they had never addressed the issue before—generated a backlash against the idea of moral superiority attributed to the victims of state terror. Being a victim doesn't put you above the law or make you a hero. Kirchnerism educated "grandchildren of the dictatorship," not "children of democracy"; that's why I criticize it for depriving society of the possibility of building a plural memory. There were convictions in the courts, and that's fine. But we didn't engage in a debate about the moral conditions of what happened to us, to understand that in truth there are not two demons but one: violence.
A fighter for human rights
Norma Morandini was born in Córdoba. She studied medicine, psychology, and journalism. In 1976, she moved to Buenos Aires. She worked as a journalist until, following the kidnapping of her younger siblings, Néstor and Cristina, she went into exile.
He lived in Portugal and Spain, where he worked at Cambio 16. He covered the Trial of the Juntas for the newspaper O Globo.
He became involved in the defense of human rights as a member of Poder Ciudadano y Periodistas.
She was a representative for Córdoba from 2005 to 2009 and a senator until 2015. She directed the Senate's Human Rights Observatory.
She is the author of numerous books. She has just published Say Goodbye (Libros del Zorzal).
He is a member of the National Academy of Journalism.
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