Mothers, militants and wives in Diamela Eltit’s Jamás el fuego nunca and Pía González’s Libreta de familia

Abstract

This article discusses the politics of memory associated with the anti-Pinochet movements and the role of women in such discourses in Diamela Eltit’s novel Jamás el fuego nunca (2007) and Pía González’s Libreta de familia (2008). In particular, this study will demonstrate how these novels challenge the image of women that collective discourses of the traumatic past produce and perpetuate in the public space. In order to do so, this article will discuss how both texts discard an aesthetic and narrative strategies typically associated with social realism to expose the construction of female militancy, the family and motherhood as experiences shaped by a sociomasculine logic. Ultimately, this study claims both novels by re-imagining the memory practices of women politically affiliated with urban guerrilla groups or dissident movements of Christian inspiration bear witness to the voices of individuals whose experiences have been ignored, marginalized or co-opted by official narratives in the aftermath of violence due to political agendas in post-dictatorship Chile