Curly Velasquez: Imagine you're a kid doing the usual kid things: building forts, making mud purs, drawing this for some reason [the S]. 

But even in the bubble of childhood, you feel it. The secrets, the silence, the fear, there's a dark shadow around you. You can't see it whole shape or tell what's casting it.

It's only later that you understand while you were learning your ABCs, your country was falling apart. 

That's the experience for kids growing up during a war or dictatorship. 

Now, flash forward a few decades and those children have grown up and are carrying around an adult's understanding of what happened with a kids memory of it. 

How do they make sense of the two? How do they honour the memory of terrible events that they don't fully remember? 

Hi, I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature. 

[Theme music]

The 1970s and 80s were turbulent times in Latin America. And I don't just mean the fashion, I mean politically. 

Governments and rebel groups played tug-of-war for power, often funded in part by international parties with their own interests. And these shake-ups came with brutal violence and human rights abuses from all sides.

By 1977, only a handful of nations in Latin America hadn't gotten the dictator makeover — which is hideous, by the way, never in style. 

This means that a whole generation of kids grew up in the shadow of dictators. And some of those kids went on to be writers, producing a wave of what's called postmemorial literature, texts that reflect on the memory of collective trauma. 

In Latin America, this genre has come to be known as literatura de los hijos — literature of the children. And often, it blurs the lines between fact and fiction. 

Take Alejandro Zambra. He wasn't even born yet when his home country of Chile fell to a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. By the time Zambra was a year old, the regime had arrested and tortured around 130,000 people. 

Early on, the government detained and murdered Pinochet's political opponents in the national soccer stadium. Within a few years, kids were eating ice cream cones in that same stadium. 

So, in a way, state violence was all Zambra knew growing up, but he didn't really know it. Not with the silence and fear surrounding it.

Zambra's 2011 novel, Formas de volver a casa — ways of Going Home — deals with the struggle of knowing and not knowing.

Half of it's told from the perspective of a nameless 9-year-old in 1985 at the height of Pinochet's power. The other half from the perspective of a nameless novelist in 2010 who's writing the story of that 9-year-old.

Like Zambra, the novelist grew up under Pinochet's regime and has burning questions from his past. His search is haunted not just by what he doesn't know, but by what's been disappeared from collective memory. 

It's not a stretch to say that the novelist character is a standin for Zambra, a novel about a novelist who represents the real novelist. 

Kind of drippy, right?

This framing makes Ways of Going Home an example of metafiction, a self-aware literary style that emphasises its own creation. 

And by using this style this style, Zambra shows us that writing fiction is a way of reconstructing the past. 

But there's a catch. While the boy in the story eventually learns some big important truths, the novelist never gets answers.

And that uncertainty is kind of the point. Zambra's English translator has a bone to pick with the traditional novel and what she calls ots sure declarative voice. "That novel belongs to our parents," the novelist character says. 

As for his generation, experimental work that exposes its own fictionality ironically feels more truthful, which makes sense, right?

When a false version of the truth has been imposed on you, you might find black and white certainty to be less honest than the messiness of not knowing, not knowing if you can trust your own memories, not knowing if you can trust the official record, and not knowing what really happened to people you knew. 

And when something like this has happened to you, can you write about anything else? Let's get the Curly Notes on an author who asks that very question. 

[Curly Notes]

3 months before Félix Bruzzone was born in 1976, Argentina's military police detained his dad. Not long after, they took his mom too.

His parents were among tens of thousands of people who were kidnapped and disappeared by the military dictatorship of Jorge Videla, who's been nicknamed the Hitler of the Pampa. 

All told, Videla's regime murdered or disappeared tens of thousands of Argentinians in an attempt to crush opposition and spread terror. 

Not only that, but many of the regime's victims included pregnant women who were forced to give birth in secret detention centres. Their babies taken away and illegally adopted, sometimes by the same people who had detained or killed their parents 

In his fiction, Rousona creates characters who are the children of the disappeared. 

Like in the short story, Otras fotos de mamá — Other Photos of Mom. The protagonist is trying to understand his dead mother by talking to her ex-boyfriend. 

And in his novel Los topos — The Moles — the narrator is the son of disappeared parents. But in this story, he doesn't take the typical journey to uncover the past. Instead, he goes on a surreal quest that that has nothing or everything to do with his parents. 

As the scholar Jordana Blejmar puts it, "[Bruzzone] challenges the idea that all children of disappeared parents are destined to go to the same places and ask the same questions."

Even when a terrible thing has happened to lots of people, the way it's remembered and experienced is still individual to each person. 

And literature can give us a way of understanding that by feeling what it's like to live a life that isn't ours.

That's especially important for elevating women's perspectives whose stories tend to be undertold in narratives of war. 

Let's take a look at Claudia Hernández's 2017 novel, Roza, tumba, quema, translated as Slash and Burn. It was inspired by the Salvadorian civil war, something that personally affected Hernández, and my family too.

 It was a 12-year conflict between El Salvador's authoritarian government and rebel groups that banded together in resistance.

They called themselves El Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberación Nocional — The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. And within the movement, women took on roles as both organisers and fighters. 

Meanwhile, international powers treated the whole thing like a game of 3D chess. 

Cuba and the Soviet Union bankrolled the FMLN while the US sent billions of dollars to government militias.

By the time as peace deal was reached in 1992, tens of thousands of Salvadorans had been killed and hundreds of thousands had fled the country, including my own family. 

Now, in Slash and Burn, El Salvador isn't actually named. In fact, no one is. There's a very hush hush vibe surrounding everyone's identity, but the novel focuses on an unnamed heroine who's going through it. 

First, she's a young girl dodging the rebels. 

Then, she's pregnant and fighting alongside them. 

Then, her baby is sold to fund the rebellion. 

Disappearance here becomes intimate. Even the bond between mother and child isn't safe.

And the threat of sexual violence follows the woman throughout her life. Not just her, but everyone name sister, daughter, or mother.

We're left with the sense that all women live with this threat. 

The novel continues into the war's aftermath, where our narrator is the mother of four daughters.

Her memories overlap with their childhoods in unexpected moments, like when she realises her daughter's bright pink backpack would have made her an easy target as a rebel. 

These echoes show us that on some ways, the past lives on in the present.

Another novel that unpacks women's experiences is La sangre de la aurora — Blood of the Dawn by Peruvian author Claudia Salazar Jiménez. 

This one shares the perspectives of three very different female characters, a photojournalist named Melanie, an indigenous farmer named Modesta, and a social worker named Marcela. 

This novel is set at the height of El tiempo del miedo — the time of fear — in 1980s Peru.

On one side of the conflict, there was the Peruvian military known for torturing and killing their own citizens. 

On the other, there was Sandero Luminoso, Shining Path, a militant group hellbent on revolution and willing to murder civilians to get there. 

Caught between the two were everyday people just trying to survive. The novel is composed in fragments that weave through the three women's lives. 

Modesta's story is written in the second person, inviting us to identify with her as her village is terrorised by the Shining Path. 

Meanwhile, we watch as Marcela is swayed to the Path's cause, renaming herself Comrade Martha. 

And then there's Melanie, who's trying to shake her government escort and document the truth of what's happening. Since she's the one carrying the camera, we might take her to be the witness and memory keeper. 

But she reminds us that she represents just one lens and it has limits. "These are photos that push you to look outside the frame, that gesture at all that hasn't been captured... How much is outside the frame? What stories will get away?"

And that's the struggle of memory, right? You can't hold on to everything and you can't always see the full picture. Everything outside of the frame is what's been disappeared by censorship, by fear, and by time. And the camera, like the novel, becomes a way to point at what's gone.

Ultimately, the three women's paths meet on the mountains, but they also meet in violence. Even though they have different levels of involvement in the conflict, they all suffer the same brutal fate. 

In an interview, Salazar Jiménez said that, "Writing about violence is not an easy process to endure, it has to be done. We cannot relegate these stories to silence."

And that means a lot to me as a reader and as a Latin American. It's heavy to revisit these histories, but it also feels important because it's a part of me. 

In the shadow of dictatorships, conflict, and war, many Latin American authors wrestle not just with the memory of trauma, but with the challenge of memory itself. 

How do you remember when the truth is obscured by fear or silence or lies? When some questions don't have answers? And how do you put those memories into words?

Writing and reading can be healing, a way of reconstructing history, naming what's been disappeared, and finding answers for how to live in the here and now. 

Next time, we'll keep addressing ghosts of the past by talking about horror and Latin American literature. Go hug the people you love, live your best life, and I'll see you next time. 

Thanks for watching Crash Course Latin American Literature, which was filmed at the Carlos Hernandez studio in Indianapolis, and was made with all the help of all these kind people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.

Oh, and if you're interested in learning about some of the topics covered in this episode, we pulled together a playlist you can dig into.