Gotcha Last: Context and Analysis of “The Little School” by Alicia Partnoy

A literary tour de force, Alicia Partnoy’s memoir The Small College is far more than a memoir. It is an act of public and permanent revenge against not just the folks who imprisoned, tortured, and humiliated her but against all the perpetrators of the Dirty War in Argentina. Though the book cannot create justice in a standard way, in which the guilty men and women are charged, attempted, convicted, sentenced, and justly imprisoned for their crimes, its publication ensures that the victims have not been forgotten. It also immortalizes the rampant injustice and brutality of the Dirty War. This essay will give a brief historical context for Partnoy’s book and describe the literary tactics by which Partnoy captures and shares as much detail as she can.

During the Dirty War, the governments of a number of Latin American nations, like Argentina, faced an ongoing insurgent threat from Marxist and equivalent radical guerrillas who engaged in terrorist activities. “Urban guerrillas lived and fought in huge cities, exactly where they could menace the government, strike at army headquarters, or kidnap and ransom an industrialist to finance their operations.”[i] The goal was not to inflict common mayhem or terror against the Argentine population at massive, but the attacks had been in no way confined to military targets. The People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), an insurgent group devoted to the violent overthrow of the Argentine government in favor of a new Marxist government, took credit for the robbery of 166 banks and kidnapped more than 185 men and women, holding them for ransom to raise money.[ii]

To suppress an increasingly violent rebellion, the Argentine government and military began to systematically root out the terrorists and individuals connected to them, carrying out what ever it took to stop them and sometimes utilizing the insurgents’ personal strategies of kidnapping, torture, and murder against them. In the procedure, they went as well far. It wasn’t lengthy just before the number of folks arrested, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the government and military surpassed the quantity taken by the ERP by an order of the magnitude. Over 30,000 men and women, including at least 400 youngsters who have been either kidnapped with their parents or born in captivity, had been “disappeared” to secret detention and torture facilities such as the one described by Alicia Partnoy.[iii] A lot of by no means returned.

The Tiny College is a partially “fictionalized” account in which Partnoy describes her experience in captivity. There are many aspects of the book that are clearly not an try to accurately and dispassionately describe what happened. She describes herself in the third individual, producing emotional distance between herself and what was taking place to her. She presents poetic descriptions of issues that occurred in the course of her captivity. She contains one particular of her poems about a rerouted stream, which was taken by her captors to be an allegorical reference to a guerrilla leader of some sort. She also modifications information about some of her fellow captives who survived, in order to make sure their own safety. She acknowledges the fact many times, and her acknowledgement gives her a fantastic deal of space to expand on some specifics, recreate others, and conveniently ignore whatever she wishes to ignore, such as the identity of her fellow survivors.

The Small School has clear protagonists and antagonists. Alicia Partnoy establishes at the outset that she and the other captives are the protagonists. She describes herself as a student who engaged in volunteer social work, assisting others with literacy programs and other initiatives to boost the lives of the poor. She had a somewhat left-of-center perspective due in part to her operate with the poor and their fond memories of Peron-era alterations that benefited labor unions. Later, right after the coup in 1976, she “clandestinely reproduced and distributed data on the financial predicament, the workers’ strikes, and the repression.”[iv] She portrays herself, her husband, and other neighborhood activists as good, hardworking folks with no links to Montoneros or ERP.

The arrest of “good” individuals, below any circumstances, casts their captors by definition into an antagonist function. In Partnoy’s novel the distinction is really black-and-white. Not one particular of the prisoners Partnoy describes has any questionable ties that might muddy the really dramatic distinction amongst the unjustly persecuted prisoners and their captors. In reality, although Partnoy and her husband have been not involved with terrorist activities, it is plausible that at least some of their associates may well have been. The truth Partnoy presents all the prisoners as innocent victims could potentially be portion of the “fictionalization” or blurring of truth she describes.

The contrast amongst the protagonists and the antagonists may have been heightened artificially by Partnoy’s lack of emphasis on any criminal activity some of her prisoners might have committed, however she does not want to exaggerate her description of her captors’ behavior to show systematic human rights abuses. She describes her warrantless arrest, her imprisonment for much more than two years without any criminal charge or opportunity to defend herself, and the way she was treated for the duration of her imprisonment. She was forced to wear a blindfold consistently, deprived of meals for eighteen hours a day, deprived of workout, and frequently beaten. She describes a scene of sexual humiliation where she was forced to stand naked, and she describes how one particular of her fellow prisoners, nicknamed Benja, was hung upside down and beaten. None of these activities, which were regularly meant for “fun” according to their jailers, was connected to the search for details about Montoneros or ERP. Even if they had been, they are concrete examples of routine human rights violations.

To this day, Partnoy does not know who ordered her arrest. Nor does she know the perpetrators of the offenses she seasoned for the duration of her imprisonment. The brief glimpses she got by peeking by means of a gap in her blindfold, and the names and character information she was able to gather about the guards, have been not adequate to conclusively determine anybody. The query of precisely who utilised the cattle prod on Graciela, or on specifically which date Partnoy witnessed her husband’s torture, can not be precisely answered simply since Partnoy’s captors took such pains to maintain their identities secret. She involves, in the book’s Appendix, as considerably data as she can recall, attempting to paint as vivid a image as achievable of every single individual involved. The detail she supplies is not enough to justify an arrest or to receive a conviction. Most dates and instances are not precise due to the fact of the way one particular day blended into the next. To protect the identities of her fellow victims, Partnoy uses pseudonyms and nicknames. Yet possibly one particular of her jailers will come across Partnoy’s account and recognize the description of himself. Probably, also, his buddies, peers, and family members will study the description, wonder for a moment if it matches him, and enjoy him a little significantly less for it. But the retaliatory aspect of justice, exactly where retribution is visited upon the guilty, can not be served. Nevertheless yet another aspect of justice, in which society is protected from future abuses, is definitely available.

One of the items Partnoy’s book accomplishes, along with her testimony on human rights abuses, is a deliberate path of the public awareness toward the human rights abuses that occurred for the duration of the Dirty War. The Little School forces its reader to consider about torture, not just from a theoretical or pragmatic point of view but in terms of its consequences. She dedicates the book to her deceased brother, who was a single of the “Disappeared”, who reappeared like she did, but who later committed suicide. The victims of the torture, even though they survive, can not constantly move beyond their experiences. Indeed, Partnoy’s choice to continue living outside Argentina is due in element to her experiences whilst imprisoned. How, specifically, can a individual be expected to take the bus to work, or stroll down the street, or shop for groceries without questioning if this half-remembered voice or that dimly recalled footstep belonged to 1 of her captors who recognizes her?

The Tiny College honors Partnoy’s fellow prisoners in many ways. It validates the encounter of the other survivors by supplying proof that their experiences had been not imaginary or in any way deserved. It supplies required data to comfort the families of at least some of the victims. It publicly refutes the official proclamation, quoted at the start off of the book, that accusations of state sponsored kidnapping, torture, and murder are categorically false. But most of all, the book is an act of retaliation. Written in a poetic, “fictionalized” form, the events of the book cannot all be independently proven or corroborated, but they can also not be efficiently denied. Published as it was from outside the country, Partnoy’s book now belongs to the whole globe. Even if a related coup occurred in Argentina once again, the word is out and the globe is now watching cautiously. The political climate that allowed the Dirty War to pass unremarked and without having international response has changed. Not only is the Cold War more than, and the incentive to ignore human rights abuses by “friendly” appropriate-wing dictatorships diminished, but the USA no longer the only considerable socioeconomic power influencing events in South America.

The old proverb about revenge being a dish greatest served cold absolutely applies to the publication of The Small School. With her family safely out of attain outdoors the country, and with the identities of the other prisoners sufficiently obscured as to avoid retaliation against them, Partnoy’s book delivers its message in a way calculated to protect the victims from additional abuse. Also, the accusations are permanent. As an alternative of permitting the conversation to revolve about no matter whether the victims can prove something occurred, Partnoy challenges the now-defunct regime and the folks who supported it to prove that it did not.

[i] John Charles Chasteen. Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, 3rd Ed. (W. W. Norton & Co., 2011) p. 289.

[ii] Paul S. Lewis. Guerillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina. (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002) p. 52

[iii] Alicia Partnoy. The Small College: Tales of Disappearance and Survival. (Cleis Press, 1986, 1998) p.16.

[iv] Alicia Partnoy. The Tiny College: Tales of Disappearance and Survival. (Cleis Press, 1986, 1998) p. 13