Alicia Partnoy Biography

Argentine author. The 1970s was one of the most violent decades in the political and social history of Latin America. It was dominated by military authoritarianism in the countries of South America. Ironically, it was also a vital period that inspired creative expression in order to defy fear and humanize the daily life of ordinary people with the arts.

Alicia Partnoy's life has been strongly affected by the military dictatorship that began in Argentina in 1976. Partnoy was born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants in 1955, the year in which Juan Perón came to power. She went to school in Bahía Blanca, about one hundred kilometers outside of Buenos Aires. In important ways, her experience as a child in an immigrant family affected her relationship with society and helped to define her artistic work.

In her introduction to The Little School, Partnoy states that the arrival of Perón was a central theme of her poetry and her political ideology. For many students, Perón's government was a rebirth of the call to justice, especially because he empowered the working class. These details are contained in the very personal introduction that Partnoy wrote for the book. The transformation and creation of her social conscience is closely linked to the political and social changes that began with Perón's government and ended with the military junta, when Partnoy suffered incarceration for two and a half years. During the latter part of her imprisonment, she was transferred to a prison closer to Buenos Aires and was labeled a political prisoner. Further information about her time in prison can be found in the testimony she gave to the Argentine Commission for the Investigation of Disappearances. The document, entitled “Nunca Más,” became a bestseller when it was published in 1984. Upon her release, Partnoy went into exile in the United States, where she rejoined her husband and daughter and started a new life. She is a member of the faculty of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Partnoy belongs to the generation of the “disappeared”: those who were detained, tortured, and executed by the authoritarian governments of almost every Latin American country. Her case is exceptional in two respects: she survived, and she has told her story of horror.

It is a very difficult task to turn politics into art—to move beyond a mere testimonial account and create a body of literature that goes beyond personal experience. Partnoy has succeeded in this, and her literature has extraordinary strength and depth. There are few writers who have recreated with such imagination, beauty, and ingenuity the experience of being held prisoner, the pain of being unable to communicate, the need to remain human and have the courage to write. Her works entice the reader into a dialogue between the personal and the historical, and transform horror into political action. At the same time, Partnoy's literature has a touching warmth and humanity.

Partnoy has written two books and edited a third: The Little School, a collection of vignettes about her prison experience; You Can't Drown the Fire, an anthology of literature by women in exile; and her most recent work, a collection of poetry, The Revenge of the Apple. These three texts have situated Partnoy among the best-known writers of Latin America as well as within the subgenre of testimonial writings. In her most recent unpublished works, Partnoy's poems are dedicated to the women of Ciudad Juárez, which creates an important link between the disappearances in South American and the Latino and Latina community in North America.

The Little School, which recounts Partnoy's experiences in prison, alternates between the inhuman and the human, providing descriptions of her jailers' demonic conduct and the comical behavior among the prisoners. These stories have multiple dimensions and are eloquently written. The images they convey remain in the reader's memory because the tone creates a sense of innocence and vulnerability. In the midst of being abused, Partnoy finds her own space where she holds onto her imagination and the powerful desire to maintain her identity. In the story “The Names,” for example, the preservation of identity through the repetition of her name is the only hope that sustains her in the face of dehumanizing treatment in prison.

In the poems collected in The Revenge of the Apple, Partnoy explores in simple language several of the themes developed in her first book. The language of her poems expresses the pain of being captive, her exile, the death of her brother, and the constant reflection on the possibility of creation through memories.

Partnoy, like a number of other Latino and Latina writers in the United States, uses Spanish as her literary language. She relies on a translator to convey her work in English, although she has ventured to translate some of her poems.

Partnoy crosses the language barrier to tell her story and link the tragedy of Argentina with that of the women of other countries. She also shares the tradition of a work based on the desire to liberate the individual through conscience and social justice. Within that framework, she can be categorized with other poets such as Gloria Andalzúa and Cherríe Moraga, and with novelists such as Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies. Her social and historical discourse lies within a literature that aims to transcend the limits of political adversity. Hers is a transforming literature filled with renewal and faith.

Partnoy writes in order to resist and to reveal the silence of forgetting. She writes to continue conversations with all of those who could not go on. She writes to rescue and enlighten. Her anthology You Can't Drown the Fire is an important attempt to compile the literature of women in exile throughout Latin America. Partnoy adds her own voice to theirs, and in this anthology she collects the best of herself: writing that is immersed in her commitment to be strong and to help transform society through social justice.

Partnoy has an important place among the Latin American artists who participate in the revision of Latino and Latina culture in the United States. Her Jewish background, which is also alluded to in her poems, places her with Ruth Behar, Nora Strejilevich, and Alicia Kozameh in the nascent Latino-Jewish literature of the United States.

Bibliography and More Information about Alicia Partnoy

• Argentina: Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas. The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1986.
• Partnoy, Alice. The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival. 2nd ed., translated by Alicia Partnoy with Lois Athey and Sandra Braustein. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998.
• Partnoy, Alice, ed. You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Cleis Press, 1988.

See also Exilio; Jewish Latinos and Latinas; and South Americans.

Marjorie Agosín

Translated from the Spanish by Monica Bruno