Never Forget

What the sidewalks of Buenos Aires told me in January

As you know (see: dragonfly), I began the year in Buenos Aires on a writing trip and family trip and flâneuse trip overlapping the inauguration. The timing wasn't intentional, but it didn't hurt. Watching the spectacle from a distance was surreal and enraging, but the anger somehow dissipated across the approximately 6,000 miles between me and D.C. and the heat of the Argentine summer. It was nice to disappear for a little while.

I’ve always felt the ability to let the realities of my home in the US slip away while visiting Argentina. It’s typically been pleasant, but something about being so far and the taxi drivers there using the current US president's name as the butt of a silly joke rather than calling him out for his behaviour was hard to hold. It reminded me of a truth about bullies and abusers. Few call them out for who they are in the moment, fear and cowardice and the burnout felt from the grind of life keep us from naming the terrifying Beelzebub for what it is.

But I know what it is.

I spent my days writing in the mornings and walking around in the afternoons, ducking into cafes to drink my favorite cortado en jarrito and write a few pages. On these long walks I'd note the handmade plaques strewn all over the city sidewalks, marking the names of the Desaparecidos, the tens of thousands (the figure is widely accepted to be at least 30,000) who were killed and disposed of after being seized by authorities during the Dirty War, Argentina's military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Each tile and stone memorial plate made of broken pieces of tile and glass, commemorates the location where the individual was last seen and the date when they are thought to have “been disappeared.” They’re like the white “ghost bikes” that mark the death of bicyclists, like my brother Oscar’s, commemorating the person and reminding all of the incident.

I have walked over these tiles on every visit I’ve made to the city since returning when I was 12 and always find myself wondering what it is for a city to hold reminders of this trauma in the midst of life. On this trip, as I thought of the threats made to the people and the values I hold so dear in the United States, this reminder was more present than before.

I spent several afternoons reading in air-conditioned bookstores and literary salons about this period of time, wanting to understand not only what happened, but why. I read scholarly reports on the role of media during the dictatorship and accounts of disappeared journalists who acquiesced to the government preemptively. I searched for patterns that might explain their silence and complicity. I found signs of familiar tactics of delegitimization, manipulation, and a news industry so worn down and worn away that they downplayed what was actually happening until the evidence was too much to turn away from and deny.

I still don't have an answer.

In some ways, my family left because of that war, but the reasoning for our departure is disputed and rarely discussed. I may never know the full truth about the why of our immigration. Best forgotten. The frought reasoning behind our departure echoes in today's contested narratives about what constitutes threat, what justifies exile.

I understand the desire to leave the past behind. I do. The same impulse that pushes nations to forget their darkest chapters flows through families, through individuals. We are told to move on, to look forward, to not dwell. We hide the truth of our origins, of our wounds, because the pain of remembering sometimes feels worse than the emptiness of forgetting. But I also know what it means to live in fear, to live in uncertainty, to be gaslit over and over again to the point when you can't even believe your own Cassandra cries. And yet, I know what I see today is broken, I know it is malevolent. I know a bully when I see one. I know a twisted narcissist when I hear one. I cannot forget and I do not want to forget.

As I read the news about scrubbing the of mention of DEI on websites, preemptive corporate attempts to kowtow to the authoritarian government, and my two-time alma mater's cowardice, I think about what it means to voluntarily disappear yourself. These institutions erasing their commitments—often not under direct threat but in anticipation of it—constitutes an assault in and of itself. Not bodies vanished in the night, but principles evaporated in the harsh light of political calculation. The self-censorship that precedes official censorship. The silence that comes before the official silencing, the disappearing.

Imagine what it would be like to be kidnapped, tortured and killed because of your personal and political beliefs. I watch the clip on social media of the graduate student at my alma mater, rounded up and sent away with little information on where he is going, told he is a propagandist, a terrorist, shipped to another state away from his family, stripped of his green card status. I think of his wife, 8 months pregnant, terrified and worried, and I can’t help but think of those plaques in B. A. and the short distance between what is happening today and what happened those years before, 6,000 miles away. I think of the people singled out and hated for their gender identity, ethnic identity, who they love, how they love. The past is never really past.

Those plaques along the busy pedestrian streets of Buenos Aires pulse with that remembering, their prismatic energy a cry for vigilance, even as scores of humans carry on with their lives, walking over them on their way to pick up the kids, to lunch, to drink un cafecito, to meet a lover, to confess sins, to interview for a job, again.

We each walk over our own versions of those plaques and struggle with how to balance that reverence and just survive. On the subway, I oscillate between two states: feeling overwhelmed by the weight I sense strangers are carrying, and feeling a certainty that my burden is heavier than anyone else's. Both reactions leave me stuck—disgusted by my self-pity, helpless to lighten others' loads. In this paralysis, I have to fight the urge to turn away, to numb myself, to forget.

The same questioning applies to our collective response to what is happening today—are we feeling too much or not enough? Should we numb ourselves to survive, or is the feeling itself the point, the path through? What do we do?

All of this (few of you will be surprised) stirs such grief. I hold my personal losses alongside these collective ones—a kaleidoscope revealing connections between authoritarianism there and authoritarians here. It serves as a reminder that all of our suffering is connected and grief is cyclical (because here we are again with another year of loss, and once you become aware of loss as a pattern, you recognize it will keep coming—not because loss is newly present in your life, but because it always was. Beware the moment you believe you have mastered grief.)

This is what the plaques whisper as pedestrians pass, what the disappearances of institutional courage reflect back at us, what the inaugurations of tyrants and money hoarding complicit cronies remind those who have seen it all before. True mastery is not in conquering this pain but in learning to carry it and metabolize it, to let its light refract through you, illuminating the connections between the personal and collective, mobilizing us to action, to fight, to live, and to remain clear on what we remember and why we are told to forget. To keep walking over the broken tiles of history, while not allowing yourself to break.