| Samanta Schweblin |
Temporal lines: An interview with Pedro Mairal, Samanta Schweblin, Fabian Martinez
Fabian Martinez Siccardi (born Patagonia 1964) is an award-winning writer of fiction. Pedro Mairal (born Buenos Aires 1970) is the author of Savatierra (2008), translated into English as The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra. Samanta Schweblin (born Buenos Aires 1978) is the author of Distancia de rescate (2014), translated into English as Fever Dream. All three writers have visited Australia recently. The interview was conducted by John Coetzee.
J.M. Coetzee: Balzac famously wrote that behind every great fortune lies a crime. One might similarly claim that behind every successful colonial venture lies a crime, a crime of dispossession. Just as in the dynastic novels of the nineteenth century the heirs of great fortunes are haunted by the crimes on which their fortunes were founded, a successful colony like Australia seems to be haunted by a history that will not go away. The question of what to say or do about dispossession of Indigenous Australians is as alive in the Australian imagination as it has ever been.
Could the same be said about Argentina, which has a comparably bloody history behind it?
Fabian Martinez Siccardi: The bloody history and the dispossession of indigenous peoples in Argentina, which is not only an issue from the past but also a current one, given the conflicts occurring all over the country over land and other rights, does not seem to be at the centre of discussion in Argentina, not even among the politically progressive and socially sensitive sectors of society. And this is due, in my opinion, to a profound ignorance of history. The massacres, the concentration camps and all of the past and current abuses against indigenous peoples have never made it into the textbooks, and at the same time, the main media outlets are hermetically sealed against indigenous voices, which they normally accuse of being ‘terrorists’.