Between memory and forgetting
I met Carlos Soto-Román in Santiago this January not long after Ugly Duckling Presse’s publication of the English translation of his book 11. Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973. The work lives in the space between memory and forgetting, between the conceptual and the material, between presence and absence.
The translation of 11 into English is timely as we see the emergence and growth of authoritarian movements in the United States and throughout the world. Building upon prior works that established Soto-Román’s interests in state violence, collective memory, and trauma, 11 offers us a window into a past that continues to live in the present.
Soto-Román is the author of Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (2013), Bluff (2018), Common Sense (2019), and Nature of Objects (2019), and is the first translator of Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust into Spanish.
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Leanne Tory-Murphy: You originally published 11 in Spanish in 2017, nearly thirty years after the official end of the dictatorship. It won the municipal poetry prize in Santiago the following year. Given that your work is very much interested in memory, and what I might call “unmemory,” what motivated your interest in this material? What is the nature of your own memory or inherited memory in regard to the dictatorship?
Carlos Soto-Román: I was born in 1977 so I didn’t witness the coup myself. I was a child during the dictatorship but still have a lot of memories. My parents were not militant people, they were not involved in politics whatsoever, they were middle-class professionals. There was this line of thought that you wouldn’t get involved in politics because bad things could happen. If you get yourself into trouble and you’re not from a wealthy family, nobody is going to be able to help you.
I studied at the Jesuit school a few blocks from La Moneda [the presidential palace], so I witnessed many demonstrations and violence early on in my life. I got to know what tear gas was and how it feels from a very young age. There was a technical institute a few blocks from my school, they were very politicized and always organizing things, so the police, in trying to get those students, would throw tear gas canisters into my school.
I tend to say I was part of one of the few families that the dictatorship passed by. I didn’t have any close relatives that were incarcerated or tortured or disappeared. But it was in the air, in daily situations. I got to learn very early what the dictatorship was, that Pinochet was a bad guy. You could feel it — there was a tension in the streets always.
Tory-Murphy: Something unusual about your background is that you are a pharmacist by profession, and that your work on 11 emerged from a period when you were studying for a master’s in bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Can you talk about how you came to this material during your time in the United States and what motivated you to work with it?
Soto-Román: The years I lived in the U.S. included the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the coup. It surprised me to be living in the States, in a country that was complicit and, in fact, instrumental in the coup.
So, I did a survey of Chilean poetry written about the coup. I noticed that a lot of the poems that were written in the ‘70s and ‘80s were first person poems. The “I” was very strong. They were also lyrical poems. It occurred to me that I was in no position to speak about the coup forty years later from an “I” perspective, so I started looking for different strategies to approach the subject, while also being located far away from the situation.
During that time, conceptual writing was in fashion in poetry circles in the U.S. It was curious to me, because it was not a novelty in Latin America. In Chile you have Juan Luis Martínez, Guillermo Deisler; in Mexico, Ulises Carrión; and in Argentina, Edgardo Antonio Vigo. So it was not something new, but it still got my attention. Thanks to that, I got to read certain authors who helped me approach this topic, like Charles Reznikoff, who wrote Holocaust and Testimony. I thought there’s something here, there’s a way to convey this thing. There is a concern with memory and forgetting.
After forty years, it seemed to me that a lot of people, politicians, and people from the public sphere that were in the right wing, though they were not saying it publicly anymore, had been strong supporters of the Pinochet regime and were still active in politics. I mean, wow, it’s been forty years and these people are still participating in the public debate, so I thought there is something to be done here.
I wanted, in some way, to bring back the horror. Not in terms of cruelty or ghoulishness, but to make a strong case that what had happened — in particular the impunity that the architects and supporters of the regime have been able to enjoy — is horrible. I had to be powerful in the poetry, even if it came off as tough or insensitive. I was trying to appeal to a different consciousness. The things that happened were horrible and we are complicit in letting these people continue to be a part of the public conversation. That’s what motivated me to write about the Chilean 9/11 from far away, from the States.
Tory-Murphy: 11 draws from various archives, documents, voices, and registers, and also uses various poetic approaches, including redaction, erasure, appropriation, concrete poetry, graphics, and lists. I would also note that absence, as articulated through white space, is equally felt to the material presence of the language in the work — can you talk about how you formally conceived of 11 as both a textual and visual work?
Soto-Román: It’s a combination of different strategies. Something important to mention is the topic of language. I lived in the States for five years, and when I arrived there, I thought I knew English well, but within a few days I realized that wasn’t true. I began the process of learning again a language I already knew.
One of the strategies I developed was using appropriated language, resorting to different materials that were created or written by others. So, the first text that I wrote/composed in English was a collage text. This was my starting point. I had found my line of work.
And the pieces that I combined made a really good fit and raised different issues. And I noticed how interesting it was that the “I” was turning from one perspective to another, how the different voices were combined even though they came from different places, the narrative was clear in terms of direction. I found something there, I found a way of writing and overcoming my difficulty with the language.
What I’m telling you has a lot to do with how 11 was configured, the writing strategy, because in order to survive I had to develop this skill of using parts from different sources even though it’s a very old strategy — the avant–garde used it, the surrealists used it in different ways, the conceptual poets were championing this as well, and I think in a very organic and intuitive way I “discovered” this strategy and I used it, aiming towards my personal goals.
Because I was far away from Chile, I began searching the digital archives — that’s how I got access to forms, to personal documents, to passports, to pictures, and the language there really caught my eye. I took that language and tried to recreate an image with words. 11 has a photographic memory, or the intention to recreate a photographic memory. Every time I saw a document, I would let the document tell me how to proceed with it. I didn’t have a plan beforehand; it was very guided by intuition.
And yes, 11 has a strong element of visual and concrete poetry. I work with a lot of images, but, at some point, I decided I didn’t want photographs in the book. The image of the helicopter in the book is a document, it’s taken from a manual. So, it looks like a skeleton of the parts. Then there are the formulas, I included them because I’m a chemist and have a strong tie to that language, and the erasures of the CIA documents, that are really powerful, and those documents are a written text that’s been erased so there is a strong visual component.
The spacing is also very important in this book. Using the spacing as a way of telling something I thought was very striking, telling by not telling was suitable to the theme of the dictatorship where we’re dealing with all this secrecy, official censorship, and silence due to fear. I thought it was an important way to convey that. Also, the disappeared people — the blank spaces across the whole book represent those who are no longer with us. This is the aura of the book: to challenge memory and to stimulate memory, to put the pieces together, to give clues, and to see what happens in their memories. It is both personal and collective, as memory is, it’s built that way.
Tory-Murphy: I think, too, it acts as a gesture not toward silence itself, but towards a collective awareness of silence. To say that the dictatorship did not speak or did not offer detailed information about its activities until much later, but there is a very strong awareness of the absence of that knowledge. So, when I think of the term “unmemory,” it’s that it’s not exactly forgetting, but that there's nothing there to remember, so it’s an engagement with the known unknown.
Soto-Román: Yes, compared to other dictatorships, they had a lot of documents, but they also destroyed a lot of them. There are traces, and if you look for them, you will find something, but not the whole thing. They knew it was a liability, which is why they didn’t record most of the things they did. And if they did, they often destroyed them. So, it's an archeological kind of work, digging for pieces that if you put them next to other pieces, you’ll get a sense of the whole but it’s not a complete skeleton.
Tory-Murphy: Some bones and a lot of dust!
Soto-Román: That’s right, and maybe the dust also gives an idea of how things were, creates an atmosphere of the context. That’s what I was interested in.
Tory-Murphy: This book was published in English by a team of eight translators, which made it a more collective endeavor. As a translator yourself, and as someone who has written work in English, what was it like for you to work with this group of translators? What questions or concerns emerged in the process?
Soto-Román: This book is not my book. It’s a book of many people, many voices are included here. In order to recreate that sense of collectivity as much as possible, working with different translators was a good thing to do.
Most of the nicknames in Spanish are funny, which, in a way, is horrifying because we are talking about perpetrators, about torturers. And even places like La Venda Sexy, which was a torture site, a site of extermination, it has a weird, funky name. So, it's like, what is this? Developing certain kinds of black humor, confronted with the most terrible tragedy. So, we did that and came up with really funny names in English, it felt right. It’s weird because it’s funny and also terrible, so it has the same connotation. To be able to recreate these characters that have these random and funny and ridiculous names, were the worst of the worst, were really cruel people. So, that’s a nice example of some of the exchanges we had with the translators.
Tory-Murphy: You make this interesting choice at the end to come to a close with a vignette about the disappearance of a Mapuche teenager in 2005, who was being detained by the police. It’s very unsettling to read, in part because perhaps we want archive to be archive, and memory to be memory. For me, it raised the question of what the “post” in “post-dictatorship” means because this historical record suddenly becomes a record of a contemporary moment that can’t be as easily categorized, put away, or mythologized — it actually continues to live and have an afterlife. So, I was curious to hear you reflect on the unsettling of the present in this work.
The English translation was Thomas Rothe’s project; he came to me with the idea. Since this book has a variety of registers and voices, we thought maybe we could recreate that by using a team of translators. The book is full of creases, stitches, it’s meant to be that way. If we had only used a single translator, I don’t know if it would have been the same.
We communicated by email. We distributed parts of the book to certain people to have them translated. I would review the translations and make comments. Thomas would do the same. We worked with translators on the individual parts, and then we put it all together and released it to the whole team so they could read it and make comments and suggestions. And we were able to get really wonderful contributions that way.
Most of the nicknames in Spanish are funny, which, in a way, is horrifying because we are talking about perpetrators, about torturers. And even places like La Venda Sexy, which was a torture site, a site of extermination, it has a weird, funky name. So, it's like, what is this? Developing certain kinds of black humor, confronted with the most terrible tragedy. So, we did that and came up with really funny names in English, it felt right. It’s weird because it’s funny and also terrible, so it has the same connotation. To be able to recreate these characters that have these random and funny and ridiculous names, were the worst of the worst, were really cruel people. So, that’s a nice example of some of the exchanges we had with the translators.
Tory-Murphy: You make this interesting choice at the end to come to a close with a vignette about the disappearance of a Mapuche teenager in 2005, who was being detained by the police. It’s very unsettling to read, in part because perhaps we want archive to be archive, and memory to be memory. For me, it raised the question of what the “post” in “post-dictatorship” means because this historical record suddenly becomes a record of a contemporary moment that can’t be as easily categorized, put away, or mythologized — it actually continues to live and have an afterlife. So, I was curious to hear you reflect on the unsettling of the present in this work.
Soto-Román: We tend to call the post-dictatorship the period after we regained democracy and it was such an important moment to us, to defeat Pinochet through the ballot. Even during the process, a lot of people didn’t believe in what was taking place. They thought it was rigged, that if Pinochet was defeated through the vote that he wouldn’t cede, that he would continue, that he would stage another coup. The environment was not democratic at all. In 1988, Pinochet, forced by foreign pressure, was compelled to call for elections, and, of course, due to years of social movement pressure and other campaigning, he lost. The transition was kind of like an arrangement. Pinochet was still the head of the military, and when they finally resigned, he was appointed as senator and he died in complete impunity.
You could feel that democracy was weak; it was thin, it could be torn apart at any moment if things didn’t go as Pinochet and the right wing wanted. And, of course, investigations on the violations happened, but at a very slow pace. It was difficult to bring people to trial, it was difficult to incarcerate people. During those years they created this prison called Punta Peuco, which is like a jail but is an exclusive facility that is located inside an army regiment and is basically a 5-star hotel for perpetrators. Those are some of the agreements that took place because Pinochet was in charge and these things are still haunting us.
The book opens with the first disappeared who were the members of the president’s guard who were taken the very same day as the coup from La Moneda palace and then disappeared, up until this Mapuche kid, José Huenante, who disappeared that night in Puerto Montt, which is a brutal case because the cops who took him are identified. At the time, the case was treated as the first disappeared in democracy. That’s why that poem is called “The Last Was Also the First,” because, in a way, that closed a period of time but also inaugurated a new one.
You could feel that democracy was weak; it was thin, it could be torn apart at any moment if things didn’t go as Pinochet and the right wing wanted. And, of course, investigations on the violations happened, but at a very slow pace. It was difficult to bring people to trial, it was difficult to incarcerate people. During those years they created this prison called Punta Peuco, which is like a jail but is an exclusive facility that is located inside an army regiment and is basically a 5-star hotel for perpetrators. Those are some of the agreements that took place because Pinochet was in charge and these things are still haunting us.
The book opens with the first disappeared who were the members of the president’s guard who were taken the very same day as the coup from La Moneda palace and then disappeared, up until this Mapuche kid, José Huenante, who disappeared that night in Puerto Montt, which is a brutal case because the cops who took him are identified. At the time, the case was treated as the first disappeared in democracy. That’s why that poem is called “The Last Was Also the First,” because, in a way, that closed a period of time but also inaugurated a new one.
Tory-Murphy: I think that this is perhaps a good, if grim, place to move towards the present, and also towards the end of our conversation. What projects are you embarking on next?
Soto-Román: I have two manuscripts in the works — one on the recent Chilean social uprising, and another on “respiration” from both a public health and socio-economic perspective. I’m also about to begin the translation of C.D. Wright’s One Big Self into Spanish, and, very much related to 11 and other past work, am starting the research process for an essay on documentary poetics titled “Poetics of the Unspeakable.”
When I say the “unspeakable,” I’m referring to the trauma caused by the violence of dictatorial regimes and all their repressive apparatuses, which we have spent some time talking about. I’m interested in documentary poetry as a way of rescuing these subaltern narratives, of giving voice to the victims and allowing their stories to be told.
The possibility of documentary poetry has long fascinated me in my creative work, and I am curious to explore it in the essay form. There are so many hopes and doubts that arise, but perhaps they can be boiled down to the simple but powerful question: can poetry help heal the wounds of the past?