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Diana Raznovich is one of Argentina’'s most audacious and humorous feminist playwrights and cartoonists. Since she began writing in 1967, she has decried the criminal politics, misogyny, and homophobia of Argentina''’s militarized system. As a Jewish, bisexual woman coming of age during the time of the Dirty War (1976-83), the challenges have
been considerable. Her career as a playwright stalled when repeated threats on her life by the Armed Forces pressured Raznovich into exile in 1975, shortly before the military coup that initiated the Dirty War. She did not realize at the time that her first husband was actively involved in the armed, anti-military resistance movement and had stored an armory of weapons in their apartment. He had gone underground, and she found out later, from her exile in Spain, that he had been assassinated by his own group in 1978.

The one-woman, one act play, Personal Belongings, dates from this period. Raznovich sat down to write it in 1975, her bags packed and apartment emptied, as she waited to set out, alone, for a place she did not know. Nothing prepares one for exile. Casalia Belprop, her character, searches for her personal belongings among unclaimed luggage in some unknown location: “When you go on a long trip without knowing whether you'’ll return, you take along so much ridiculous stuff. The things you really need you leave behind.” Elegant and filled with self importance ("“My admirers call me Diva”"), Casalia initially seems merely put off by the inconvenience of displacement. Did she bring her red crocodile luggage or red, white, or mauve set? Where is the attendant? Before long the growing sense of exile disorients her; she loses her sense of place, color, self. Casalia does not know if she’s coming or going. Has she arrived? Is she still in transit? Where? “Day or night? Before or after?” Trapped in the luggage room, with no visible exit, she experiences the pull between perpetual mobility and utter immobility. The room may be stuffed with abandoned luggage, designed for travel and destined for somewhere, but they (like her, the audience assumes) will never leave that room. The exiled person, by definition, is trapped in constant motion, caught in the very act of banishment. But the motion leads nowhere. If the person were to re-settle, put down roots, the exile would be over. “So much mobility,” Diana Raznovich says, “becomes a kind of prison.”[1] Personal Belongings marks the arena in which one’s personal story intersects with history and politics writ large. As Casalia frantically holds up the baggage claim tag, number 46, and scrounges around for her lost luggage, she stumbles upon entire histories bursting out of forgotten bags. Human bones spill out of boxes marked 46, signalling other histories of lost loves and disappearances. The original Mona Lisa pops out of a trunk marked 46, evidence of the sacralization of art goods that sustain notions of national belonging and identity: “All Europe rests on this painting. At night they sleep in peace because the wife of Zenobio del Giocondo guarantees them an enduring past…” All these horrors and glories are hers (they all bear her number) and not hers. Her frenetic monologue illustrates the way she tries to explain herself to her imaginary interlocutor. She confesses to crimes (stealing the painting, bomb smuggling) in the effort to lure the attendant into dialogue. She defends herself from her own accusations: “What’s the point of stealing the Mona Lisa if my house has been occupied by the Army? And Victor’'s famous tarsus, won’t it be used as evidence against me?” The exiled person is simultaneously invisible and an object of suspicion, —not only in the eyes of those who forced her out, but in the eyes of all who consider taking her in. Denied all services, she internalizes the suspicion directed at her, becoming suspicious in her own eyes: “My umbrella is wet. The water proves I'’ve been somewhere else. A rainy place. With threatening clouds. I had to leave in a hurry. They got me out in time.” Personal and political history become entangled. Casalia’'s story of exile, told through her personal search for her individual belongings, becomes the story of country in “a so-called war” in which presidents can order their citizens killed by firing squads and in which people “disappear” permanently. “It’s not the person that moves,” says Raznovich, “it’s the whole history of the continent, all the stories lodged within those bags.”

Personal Belongings was prohibited in Argentina and has never been performed there—although the ban has long since been lifted. Since it was first staged in 1996 in the International Theatre Festival in Sidney, Australia, it has undergone several re-writes and multiple variations in terms of staging. The practice of re-writing and updating texts is not unusual for Latin American dramatists whose lives are deeply entwined with their socio-political environment.[2] After her political exile in 1975, Raznovich has experienced two more “exiles” to Spain, —an economic one in 1989 (a period of crippling hyperinflation) and another in 2001, this time for personal reasons--—“an exilio sentimental,” she calls it, “like those of the tangos.” Sometimes, the text changes to reflect these different experiences of exiles. Directors have also chosen to highlight different facets of the work--—the humorous, the poetic, the existential, as well as the political that accentuate the oppressiveness of Casalia'’s entrapment by adding loud-speakers, surveillance cameras, and other distancing effects. Audiences have seen the entire performance on video monitors, as if they were in charge of surveying the room. Raznovich finds the distancing appropriate and forceful and thinks the work is most effective when Casalia is viewed from afar, in a box, alone and fearful. The proximity of the audience diminishes the sense of abandonment that Raznovich feels is essential to the piece, though she refrained from adding stage-directions so that directors can interpret the predicament as best they see fit.

Raznovich'’s life and career have been profoundly effected by exile. Like many dramatists from Latin America who went into exile (Gambaro, Boal, Dorfman, to name a few), she found it difficult to continue writing for the stage while away from her native country. Audiences abroad are different, the issues, humor, even linguistic expressions
are different. While novelists thrived abroad, dramatists often felt a particular urgency to return to their countries and their audiences. Even when foreign audiences react positively to a production, as in the successful run of Dorfman’'s Death and the Maiden in London and New York, they often miss the point. The Dorfman play, written after the
Truth Commission in Chile tried to deal with the aftermath of the torture and disappearance of civilians at the hands of Augusto Pinochet’'s armed forces, poses vital questions for societies who have suffered criminal politics. How can members of society continue to co-exist with the very people who tormented them? But works that may have been written as an indictment of criminal politics can play like a who-done-it for audiences that lack the background necessary to understand the socio-political situation and the critique.

Raznovich returned to Argentina in 1981 to participate in the “Teatro Abierto” (Open Theatre) festival. Teatro abierto is one of the most important theatre events in the world because it shows the power of theatre in times of brutal respression. This ‘open’ festival brought together 150 blacklisted dramatists, directors, actors and technicians
to stage a cycle of twenty-one one-act plays that would be performed every week—three a night for seven nights. The cycle demonstrated that Argentina’s artists had not succumbed to the dictatorship’s silencing tactics. The long lines of people waiting to see the performances night after night, month after month, showed that the public was also ready to defy the culture of fear and silence. The military reacted violently, burning down the Picadero Theatre on the night that Raznovich’s play Disconcerted was presented (Arancibia and Mirkin, 21). Teatro abierto moved to another locale and continued to stage its productions in the face of growing governmental opposition and growing popular support.

Teatro abierto showed that much had changed in Argentina in the fifteen years since Gambaro wrote The Camp (included in this volume). Gambaro’s prescient depiction of concentration camps and disappearances had come to pass. Raznovich’s one-woman Disconcerted features a pianist who no longer knows how to coax music to come out of the piano, recalling Gambaro’s Emma’s attempts to give a concert in The Camp. For Raznovich, the problem now had less to do with the
fascistic violence of the Armed Force, which by 1981 was brutally clear, but with the social effects of years of silencing and playing along with criminal politics. Gambaro’s contribution to Teatro abierto in 1981, Saying Yes, focused on much the same theme. When, both dramatists wondered, would people learn to say ‘no!’ Teatro abierto, as an event, proclaimed a resounding No!

Since the fall of the dictatorship in 1983, Raznovich’s work both as a cartoonist and in the theatre has been marked by fierce humor and her love of disruption. The military dictatorship might have gone, but many of the oppressive systems remained in place—especially around issues of gender and sexuality. Plays such as Inner Gardens (Jardin de otoño,1983), MaTrix, Inc. (Casa Matriz,1991), Rear Entry (De atras para adelante,1995), From the Waist Down (De la cintura para abajo, 1999) and her Manifesto 2000 of Feminine Humor, use humor to explore the violence of social expectations and norms. Inner Gardens explores the intimate relationship of two middle aged women who live together
as roommates, their love for each other channeled into their love of a sopa-opera star who they decide to kidnap. In MaTrix, Inc, the 30 year old Gloria hires a Substitute Mother, a professional who performs a spectrum of different mothers—from the ever popular “suffering mother” to the cold hearted business woman who jets around the world and ignores her daughter. Each mother provokes profound reactions in Gloria, eliciting a different “daughter.” In a society in which everything can be bought and sold, Raznovich shows the social production of emotions and desires with all the performative strings showing. In Rear Entry, a transsexual son banished from his homophobic father’s home comes back as a beautiful and successful daughter to cure him back from his death bed. From The Waist Down suggests that yesterday’s torturers are today’s sex therapists and entrepeneurs. The sexologist a couple hires to activate their sexually dormant marriage transforms their bedroom into a temple of sadomasochism. They instantly become a national and international phenomena, hounded by foreign journalists titilated by Argentina’s torturous past and by
national journalists defending their national patrimony. The illusion of sex mediated through porn magazines becomes more satisfying—financially if not emotionally— than an intimate relationship could hope to be. There are different kinds of violence, Raznovich reminds us, different kinds of repression.

Throughout her career, she has turned to humor to challenge normative and repressive systems of behavior. “I wish people understood how subversive humor really is,” Raznovich says. Even though for her, as for many Argentineans, life has been no laughing matter, she maintains that “You can say a lot more with laughter than with tragedy.”


Notes

1. I have written about Diana Raznovich’s work extensively elsewhere,
especially in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism
in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ in Holy Terrors: Latin American Women
Perform, and in Defiant Acts: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich, Bilingual
Edition, co-edited with Victoria Martínez.
2. All translations from Raznovich’s plays are by Victoria Martínez,
unless otherwise noted. El Desconcierto was published as Disconcerted
in The Literary Review, Summer 1989, Vol. 32, number 4, pg 568-572.
3. It is interesting to note that muteness and public silence were
interpreted both as an act of complicity and an act of resistance
during the Dirty War. On the one hand, those who did not speak out
against government brutality enabled the criminal practices of
abduction, disappearance, and torture to continue. However, not
speaking was also seen as a heroic defiance against a system that
demanded conformity, just as it was seen as defiance against the
torturer who demanded “information” during the act of torture.
4. This is the term used by Miguel Angel Giella to describe Teatro
Abierto in his study/anthology (Giella, Miguel Angel. 1991. Teatro
Abierto, 1981: Teatro Argentino Bajo Vigilancia. Buenos Aires:
Corregidor.1991).
5. See also Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.
6. The eminent film maker Adolfo Aristarain, who directed Time for
Revenge, in 1981, admitted to doing the same. He included long and
unnecessary sexual scenes in the film, he explained in an interview
with Annette Insdorf, “‘so the censors took five days and questioned
things—not politics or ideology, but sex. All I had to do was cut a
few frames at the end of some scenes, like one of a strip-tease. It
doesn’t hurt the scenes—especially if you made them longer than they
should have been,’ he said with a knowing smile” (Aristarain, Adolfo.
Interview with Annette Insdorf. 1983. “Time for Revenge: A Discussion
with Adolfo Aristarain.” Cineaste: 16-17)
7. These plays appear in a bilingual edition, Defiant Acts: Four Plays
by Diana Raznovich and From the Waist Down and Manifesto 2000 appear
in Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform.


SELECTED REFERENCES
Adorno, Theodor. 1977. “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso.

Arancibia, Juana A. and Zulema Mirkin. 1992. “Introducción” to Teatro
Argentino durante el proceso (1976–1983), 181–95. Buenos Aires:
Instituto Literario y Cultural Hispánico.

Aristarain, Adolfo. Interview with Annette Insdorf. 1983. “Time for
Revenge: A Discussion with Adolfo Aristarain.” Cineaste: 16-17.

Austin, J.L. 1962. How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1990a. “Performative Acts and Gender Construction,” in
Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed.
Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

_____. 1990b. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.

_____. 1993. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge.

de Beauvoir, Simone. 1984.The Second Sex Harmondsworth: Penguin.

de Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice Doesn’t. Bloomingdale: Indiana U.P.

Fiske, John. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. London, New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage.

_____. 1980.The History of Sexuality, Vol 1 New York: Vintage.

Giella, Miguel Angel. 1991. Teatro Abierto, 1981: Teatro Argentino
Bajo Vigilancia. Buenos Aires: Corregidor.

Raznovich, Diana. 1994 (September). Interview with Diana Taylor,
Dartmouth College.

Rowe, William and Vivian Schelling. 1991. Memory and Modernity:
Popular Culture in Latin America. London: Verso.

Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and
Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War.’ Durham: Duke University Press.


[1] This quotation, and all others by Raznovich in this essay, are
from a personal interview with Diana Taylor, conducted in Buenos Aires
in July 2006.
[2] (see Buenaventura’s Documents from Hell, Mexican playwright Sabina
Berman—whose work has been translated by Adam Versenyi, and so on).

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