Lucina Schell on “Sangre” by Mercedes Roffé
The Argentine poet Mercedes Roffé is known for her ekphrastic poetry and her engagement with a wide range of different artistic traditions, from visual art to music and literature. Her 2016 book Diario ínfimo (Mere diary), excerpted in Constellation, is no exception, and notes guide readers to the associated artworks. As a “diary,” with entries dated from May to December, the book is also rooted in time, with some poems written in response to news events that the poet might have encountered that moved her. One such poem closes the selection in Constellation with five spare but deeply evocative lines.
25 de diciembre
SANGRE
extraño
¿no?
que un engaño
confirme
una verdad
December 25
BLOOD
odd
isn’t it?
that a fraud
would verify
a truth
Clues as to the origins of this poem can be found in the title “Blood” and the date (December 25, 2015, when the book was being written). It refers to a news story, highly publicized at the time in the Argentine and international media, of a sort of Christmas miracle: the identification of the 120th missing grandchild—in this case, the long-sought granddaughter of María “Chicha” Mariani, a founder of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the human rights organization dedicated to finding and restoring the identities of children stolen during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983). A thirty-nine-year-old woman presented herself at the Clara Anahi Foundation, which was named for Mariani’s missing granddaughter, with an independently procured DNA test that purported to prove she was Clara Anahi. She also visited Mariani at her home in an elaborate publicity stunt that was even celebrated by President Mauricio Macri on Twitter.
Clara Anahi had been abducted in 1976 at only three months old during a raid by the military junta on an encampment of Montoneros, a left-wing militant group. Her twenty-five-year-old mother, Diana Teruggi, was killed in the raid, along with most other residents; her father, Daniel Mariani, escaped but was hunted down and murdered eight months later. The search for her granddaughter led Chicha Mariani to found the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo with other women in similar circumstances.
According to standard procedure, the Clara Anahi case was referred to the CONADI (National Commission for the Right to Identity), which requested another test against the samples held at the BNDG (National Bank of Genetic Samples). The BNDG is the only Argentine body legally authorized to establish identity in such cases because it maintains samples from relatives of the disappeared and uses internationally recognized, scientifically proven techniques. The results from the BNDG proved that the woman, whose actual name was María Elena Wherli, had no genetic relation to Chicha Mariani, nor did she match with any of the other samples held at the bank.
The cruelty of this fraud is nearly incomprehensible.
A further investigation by the CONADI revealed that Wherli was already aware that she was not a genetic match to Mariani’s granddaughter. She had previously undergone the same rigorous procedure when she presented herself to the Córdoba branch of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo as Clara Anahi in November 2014. The case had been referred to the CONADI, a DNA test was done on March 13, 2015, and on June 25, 2015, Wherli received the official results: negative. So the fraud indeed confirmed a truth: that the protocols followed by the CONADI and the BNDG are incontrovertible. There is no doubt that hundreds of children were in fact appropriated from parents who were targets of state repression. The cruelty of this fraud is nearly incomprehensible. Chicha Mariani was 92 at the time the false Clara Anahi presented herself. She died two years later without ever having located her granddaughter.
Roffé does not use a lot of rhyme in her poetry, yet this brief poem hinges on the one at its center: extraño/engaño, strange/scam. In a poem with so few words, it was essential to maintain this rhyme, and I managed to do so with odd/fraud, which at least retains their sonic relationship. The sonic and visual closeness of the two words in Spanish suggests how easily something false might be mistaken for something true, especially when desperately hoped for, without rigorous verification procedures in place. It also suggests how a common understanding of the truth can be easily subverted in the absence of a collective memory process.
Roffé utilizes similar wordplay in the title of the book, Diario ínfimo; it plays on the phrase diario íntimo, or “secret diary,” and by changing only one letter, turns it into “tiny diary.” I have tried to replicate that by playing on “dear diary” with Mere Diary as the English title. The book title is ironic: While the poems cover a period of only seven months rather than a full year, characterized by short lines and spare language, the diary is deeply engaged with the time in which it was written and beyond, with other works of art, with the wider world, and with the human condition. It is an expansive and inviting work that opens the world to readers.
It is widely suspected that the fraud to which Chicha Mariani was subjected was committed in an attempt to undermine the work of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo by allies of the Macri administration, which sought to minimize the crimes of the military dictatorship and subvert the national process of memory, including by casting doubt on the number of people who were disappeared (estimated at 30,000). This effort to rewrite history and reverse the national process of justice and memory continues even more forcefully under the government of Javier Milei. The current vice president, Victoria Villarruel, built her career on defending military personnel accused of crimes against humanity, some her own family members. In June, the Milei administration revoked the CONADI’s authority to access state records to investigate the appropriation of children, and in August, it closed the UEI, the CONADI’s special unit for the investigation of the disappearance of children, potentially imperiling current and future investigations. The search for Clara Anahi and many other grandchildren is ongoing; the remains of her parents have also yet to be identified. Roffé’s poem remains tragically relevant.
For more information in English about the case of María Elena Wherli and the activism of Chicha Mariani, see:
“Argentina Activist Reunited with ‘Wrong Granddaughter,’” BBC News, December 27, 2015.
Roland Hughes, “Obituary: Chicha Mariani and the 42-year Search for Her Grandchild,” BBC News, August 24, 2018.
Lucina Schell is the founding editor of Reading in Translation. She translated a selection of poems from Mercedes Roffé’s Diario ínfimo for Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation.