7 - A game of cutouts: Norah Lange's Cuadernos de infancia

Summary

I remember myself in the sun of childhood, steeped in death, in beautiful life.

Alejandra Pizarnik, Textos de sombra y últimos poemas

Picón Salas is not alone in turning quaint memories of his childhood into effective ideological constructs; nor is childhood the exclusive domain of conservative ideologists such as he. Looking back on her early years in Memorias de una cubanita que nació con el siglo, Renée Méndez Capote, in the spirit of the Cuban revolution, rescues figures from her childhood that have been routinely ignored by official historiography. In the same vein, and striving to form a similar, populist archive, the Chilean Manuel Rojas' Imágeries de infancia (1955), devoted to the author's first years, is a childhood picaresque doubling as a celebration of the working class. But at this point I wish to turn to another type of childhood evocation, not only to underscore, by contrast, the ideological manipulation to which childhood may be subjected, but to explore a different, more experimental and less frequent variant of the childhood tale in Spanish America. I speak of childhood recollections such as Eduardo Wilde's Aguas abajo, Norah Lange's Cuademos de infancia, Felisberto Hernández's Tierras de la memoria, texts whose primary purpose is less the conscious recomposition of childhood for history than the fragmentation of those supposedly idyllic years.