In the year 2000, as part of a three-month Fulbright grant to Uruguay, I conducted a seminar at the University of the Republic in the capital city of Montevideo. The subject of the seminar, and of my research proposal, was the genre of personal writing known, particularly in Latin America, as the testimonio. In Uruguay, for the dictatorship of 1973-1984, government records have not been open to public investigation, making testimonios, or personal accounts, the dominant source of information. The seminar involved critical readings of such personal narratives to consider the extent to which testimonios might lead to an historical account of those years.
Uruguay’s University of the Republic is scattered in buildings throughout the capital city of Montevideo; there is, properly speaking, no “campus,” other than a courtyard between the Law School and the library—two white marble buildings on 18 de Julio, the main commercial street. The seminar, initially sponsored by a Fulbright grant in 2000, was held in the history department’s Centro de Estudios Interdiciplinarios Latinoamericanos (CEIL) of the Humanities college. We met in the CEIL’s high ceilinged room, with desks and cabinets, and tables pushed together at one end for a meeting space. A metal staircase leads to a mezzanine, where there were more desks, computers, and shelves for newspapers and research materials. If chairs ran out, latecomers sat on the stairs with an aerial view of proceedings.
In its initial year, 2000, the seminar lasted several months longer than the Fulbright grant, was continued in 2001, and is planned again for August to December 2002. Public schooling in Uruguay is, in general, teacher-dominated and examination-focused (exemplifying Freire’s “banking concept of education”), whereas I am in the habit of hoping a course will eliminate the need for me as “teacher” as much and as soon as possible; I try to encourage students to learn how to learn on their own and from each other, as well as from professionals. Thus considerable effort in the seminar has gone to persuading participants—men and women in their forties and fifties, a few younger people, and in 2000 no registered university students—that they could, and should, enter into discussion and into the shaping of the seminar’s academic content. The strongest adjustment for me, has been taking into account the political context of the academic setting, in a country under democratic rule but still nervous about its military, and among persons, the majority of whom had spent the dictatorship years in prison or in exile and still did not feel entirely at liberty to speak about their recent past. Indeed, “the recent past” is a dominating political issue in Uruguay, which the seminar was proposing to confront.
In the year 2000, Uruguay’s president José Batlle formed a Peace Commission to look into the whereabouts of persons who had “disappeared” and presumably died from torture or execution during the military regime. The Commission also was charged with locating disappeared children, who may have been adopted but were not yet connected with their birth families, and were possibly unaware they had another family. Infants born to women political prisoners in Argentina, including to Uruguayans, were routinely given to military families, or families who supported the military. The mothers were then killed after giving birth, and their children brought up to despise the “seditious” activities of the generation before them, without being told what had become of their own birth parents. In Uruguay, with possibly a few exceptions discovered recently, the children of imprisoned parents were assigned to grandparents or to other relatives, and the mothers kept in prison rather than killed. An amnesty law passed in Uruguay in 1984 at the transition from military to civilian government forbids investigation and prosecution of military personnel for human rights abuses, but it also mandates investigating “disappeared” cases, yet no administration before Batlle’s had made serious efforts in that direction. The armed forces continue to deny that anyone disappeared (“husbands and children routinely run away”), or that burial sites exist on their bases, and even though (as of 2002) the Peace Commission has had little effect in finding living survivors or unmarked graves, the mere fact of the Commission’s existence has brought the word “disappeared” into public discourse, and thus generally draws interest to activities like our seminar.
The path from testimonio to history is a rutted one. Public records of those years remain under military control and are closed to the public—there are no “open records” laws in Uruguay. But neither have the regime’s opponents—Socialists, Communists, MLN-Tupamaros (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional), and resistance sympathizers from numerous other political groups including the traditional parties—been forthcoming about their activities before they were kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and exiled. At the restoration of democratic government in 1985, a general amnesty commuted the sentences the military courts had assigned to political prisoners to time served; but there were no open civil trials that would have distinguished between legal and illegal activities for which people had been prosecuted. Opposition leaders, including MLN activists, have published books describing various “actions,” but seldom cite members’ names, unless the person died in the effort. “History,” in the sense of verifiable accounts of who did what to whom, when, and how, is left incomplete from both sides. Thus I hoped in the seminar to explore what, under present political and social conditions, an historical-literary process might uncover. To what extent is a history of the recent past in Uruguay possible at all?
More of an obstacle to the seminar than the scarcity of reliable sources is the emotional atmosphere the subject envelops. Currently, the word testimonio denotes reports from those who suffered the consequences of state terrorism, yet few from either side if they can help it, want to delve into events during what were known as “the leaden years” of military rule (“los años de plomo”). Members of the military are tight-lipped by official order. Nevertheless, in Argentina and Chile a number of officers have been divulging the occurrence of such activities as dumping prisoners alive out of airplanes into the sea, and thus have considerably energized the “truth and justice” movements in Uruguay as well as in their own countries. The Uruguayan military admits that by the time soldiers walked through the Parliament buildings on June 26, 1972, and took over the government, everyone in the armed guerrilla movement had already been arrested, exiled, or killed, yet arrests and imprisonment of “subversives” continued for another decade. Uruguay’s military pride themselves for the low number of deaths during military rule, about 200, in comparison to 30,000 estimated in Argentina, and 3,000 in Chile, but a higher proportion of citizens were imprisoned in Uruguay than in any other country in Latin America. Even persons who acquiesced to repressive policies, but probably had little if any direct participation, don’t want to bring the matter up. (Occasionally someone will ask me about the seminar, but when I begin to explain, conversation stops.) Testimonios sound like bad news.
Although it cannot be said the military “won” their struggle against what they termed subversion, those who opposed them famously lost. Among people marked for resisting the military regime, seminar members among them, conversation circles around shame for the cause that was defeated, and dread that children think their parents are life-long failures. In the 1960s in Uruguay as in many countries, young people, and some not so young, were convinced that revolution was possible, that poverty could be erased and Che’s “new man” be born—ideals that collapsed in torture and prison. And “for what?” the more discouraged ask. An entire generation lost its youth, many lost their chance at a university education, at decent jobs, and succumbed to poor health. Years after release, a seemingly disproportionately high number are dying of cancer, like the Tupamaro leader Raúl Sendic and recently María Condenanza, whose testimonial account of her four years in the women’s prison was a seminar text. Former President Julio María Sanguinetti scolds “nostalgics” for looking to the past with “eyes in the back of their necks,” and yet for all the seminar is dedicated to reconstructing the country’s recent past, it is not easy for its participants to talk about it either.
My own opening seminar day in the year 2000 was hardly promising. I introduced myself, and my interests in personal writings, by reading a fifteen-minute essay, then distributed a course description, bibliography, and suggestions for projects. Response was total silence. So we took a break, smokers gathering in the hallway. Once back in the classroom talk did begin, and hardly stopped for the next twenty weeks. We did, in a manner of speaking, “cover” the books on the reading list, but their primary use was launching talk among participants. Amid anecdotes of life in prison and away from home, there emerged a fierce imperative to break the eleven-year silence. Even though this was fifteen years after the end of military rule, almost nobody among those who had resisted had begun talking even yet, several insisted—not to fellow inmates or exiles, not to friends, and least of all to families and their own children. A father and son attended a few nights in 2000. The son had spent his childhood visiting his parents in the one prison for men, the other for women, and had had a year in Michigan as a high school exchange student. Now the father appeared to realize he somewhat resented his child’s privileged year abroad, and the son still felt he’d been abandoned—the two quite possibly telling their story to the group in order to tell it to each other. In English a speaker is given “the floor”; in Spanish you “toma la palabra,” or take hold of the word—the word certainly establishing itself as a force in this seminar.
The former exiles and political prisoners who participated in 2000 and 2001 had professional or semi-professional occupations; the younger people had grown up during the dictatorship. There were several counselors and psychotherapists, some elementary and secondary school teachers, an editor or two, a graphic artist, several university students and three Fulbright student grantees from New York and California. There was hardly anyone who did not have a good deal more actual experience of the subject of testimonios than I.
Safety, I’ve realized, was crucial in sustaining the seminar, or people feeling that they were free to talk, at least freer than in most other public contexts. As I’ve mentioned, there were no civil trials during or after the dictatorship where those who had been prosecuted and imprisoned could confront and defend themselves against their accusers. The majority had broken no laws of Uruguay’s still democratically elected government at the time of their arrest (that is before June 1973). Nevertheless, illegal acts were committed—robberies of banks and grocery stores, assaults on police departments to capture arms, the manufacture of false passports and identity papers, and kidnappings and some killings. So, people’s fears are not entirely at rest, and writers continue to be careful not to assign names when recounting “actions.”
Many were arrested by the military because they had been named by someone who knew them. Torture was the military’s primary investigative method, and for all their victims’ heroic efforts not to talk, torture sometimes was bound to work. And in the case of a handful of turncoats, the military gained considerable information with little or no torture. Thus within prisons, inmates might well be living at close quarters with whoever was partly responsible for their being there, or whom they suspected of being responsible. Many in prison recognized how such divisiveness favored the military’s stated intentions to destroy their personalities, and made efforts to help re-incorporate prisoners who had talked, as another form of resistance. Thus, even within the seminar there may well be some who were not too sure about other participants, making “safety” a matter of not fearing physical or legal harm, and more than freedom from embarrassment.
But talkers need listeners, which was where I tried to contribute, by controlling traffic to one voice at a time—Uruguayans, to my ears, speak loud and fast and all at once. I also took on the role of court scribe, my notes I hoped lending certain authority and permanence to what was being said. For each meeting I distributed a sheet from the previous evening—summaries of presentations by visiting authors, participants’ responses, my own queries and comments—that now leave a record, or a “collective history” as my colleagues call it, much of which I might have forgotten otherwise. Early on, I copied some sentences from the speech Elena Bonner gave in Bremen, Germany, when she accepted the 2000 Hannah Arendt prize, and quotes Arendt. Bonner describes how a Soviet education had left her incapable of critical awareness: “I speak of myself because I am not an exception. Most people of my parents’ generation had a similar experience. We lived and grew up in an atmosphere of total terror, often not realizing it. There were 23 students in my class, and 11 had parents arrested. ‘Terror is the true essence of this form of government,’ Hanna Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism” The consequence of “total terror” was certainly the setting for our seminar, and Elena Bonner’s having acquired “critical awareness” in spite of rote schooling, echoed themes often voiced by seminar participants.
The seminar met on Monday nights, from 7:00 to 10:00, stopping at five minutes to ten, because the last bus going in my direction left at five after. Often a writer was invited to talk about her or his book, or subject of investigation. Thus in 2001, a round-table of CEIL historians turned informative, when Graciela Sapriza outlined three periods in the history of the genre of testimonio in Uruguay: first an “explosion” of publications immediately after the end of the dictatorship—heroic resistance sagas mostly written by men; then silence after the failure of a Referendum in 1989 to recall the amnesty law (although several books were published between 1989 and 1995, some likely begun earlier). A third period Sapriza dated from 1995, when a few military officers in Argentina admitted to torture and murder and their confessions stimulated a re-appearance of testimonios in Uruguay, including works by women, as well as by military personnel who had engaged in the repression. Carlos De Massi pointed out how the history of a nation tends to be written as though time were progressive, a pattern that makes it difficult to accommodate a dictatorship, which is necessarily retrogressive. A major change in present-day Uruguay, he noted, is that the “normal” social self-image begins with, or takes for granted, the dictatorship, whereas thirty years ago hardly anyone would have thought the loss of democracy possible. Marisa Ruiz, another CEIL member, has interviewed women who during the dictatorship met and talked among each other in ticket lines and on the bus on their way to visit sons and husbands at Libertad prison. In these informal encounters women supported each other, and kept alive memories of a democratic past. Ruiz has been active in Amnesty International, and finds that in Uruguay there is less of a tradition of non-violent resistance than in some other countries, and sees the women’s informal activities as precursors to SERPAJ (Servicio Paz y Justicia) and other post-dictatorship human rights organizations.
Also informative were specific personal accounts. We read the testimonio titled La espera (“The Wait”) by María Condenanza. In 2000, María had remarked to us that if she were to write again, it would be a different book. Her ideas had changed with time, and she would not be able to recapture the immediacy as she had when she wrote soon after leaving prison. Some who also had been in prison said the book captured so well the rhythm of every-day prison life, that they re-lived it while reading. In 2001, María was too ill to join us, and died of cancer the week we were discussing her book.
A visit from Sara Méndez and Carlos Amorín, who wrote a book based on interviews with her, brought to us one of the most notorious cases in consequence of the military rule. In 1976 Sara had been kidnapped in Buenos Aires and her 20-day-old infant Simón taken from her. After torture in the infamous Orletti Motors in Buenos Aires, she was returned to Uruguay with 16 other Orletti prisoners in a staged “invasion,” by which the military wanted to persuade the US Congress to continue its Uruguayan defense funding. The ruse did not fool the International Relations Committee, but it did mean that these 17 were not dropped out of airplanes into the Río de la Plata as were other Orletti prisoners. Sarah’s relatives began looking for Simón as soon as they heard of her arrest, and the quest became Sara’s obsession when she left prison five years later. At the time of her coming to the seminar, she had learned through DNA testing that a child who for over twenty years she had been tracking and thinking was her son, proved not to be. The disappointment was crushing, and also showed the extent to which the military had been willing to go to increase her misery, as the family and then the boy when he was of age had all those years refused compatibility tests. But in March of 2002, thanks partly to a reporter’s interview with a torturer in Buenos Aires, the actual Simón was found, a truly astonishing event. (At their first meeting, Simón greeted his mother with a bouquet of flowers; as of several months later he had not been to Uruguay nor revealed his present name.) The Simón case underscores the temporality of the testimonio—how do you know when the story is “over”?
Mariana Zaffaroni has been another lost child “found,” but with more ambivalent results. Film maker Virginia Martínez titled her documentary, Por estos ojos, (“Through These Eyes”) after a news photo of Mariana, a veil in front of her face, on her way to the trial of the couple who had brought her up and been involved in Mariana’s kidnapping and the murder of her parents. Having captured, tried, and jailed the adoptive parents, the judge decreed Mariana should decide whether to join her parents’ relatives in Uruguay, or remain with a grandmother in the adoptive family in Argentina. Mariana chose Argentina and rejects her Uruguayan relations. “Why are you looking for me?” Virginia told us she said. “My father could have put a bullet through my head, and didn’t. He brought me up, gave me affection, and is in prison on my account.” If one objective of the dictatorships was to break up families, and alienate children from their parents, Mariana’s case seems to be evidence of some success.
A question that arose in our readings concerned elements of fiction in accounts that purported to be factual. Maria Condenanza’s otherwise actual account of her prison experience is interspersed with letters from a lover who by the end has switched allegiance to her best girlfriend. This happened during her prison stay, María said, but to someone else—María and her husband rejoined after their imprisonment. Carlos Amorín, in his account of Sara Méndez’ prison years, describes a telephone conversations between military officers that neither he nor Sara could possibly have overheard. The seminar discussed the inclusion of fictional details the evening Hugo Fontana talked about La piel del otro (“The Other’s Skin”), his book about a notorious double-agent in the MLN named Armodio Pérez, whose turning over names to the military hastened the demise of the entire guerrilla movement. Fontana said he wrote the book as a novel because although every detail was based on actuality, he had had to agree not to name his sources. Fiction was the only way to achieve “verisimilitude” of the dictatorship years, he thought, given that official records are not available, and that supporters of Armodio who were his sources, refused to be identified. Fictionalizing what is presented as eyewitness reporting remained problematic for some of us.
A third increasingly recurring theme was the effect political repression has had on language. Carlos Liscano, poet and novelist, in 2001, discussed how 13 years in Libertad prison had affected his use of language. Being deprived of common objects made it difficult for him, he said, to name objects or give names to characters; he had to rely on memory for what he lacked at hand. Liscano had recently published El furgón de los locos (“The Truck of Fools”), about the four months he spent being tortured, and how such treatment affected his sense of his own body. Under torture, the body is its own only language, as Ellen Scarry also argues in The Body in Pain.
Language also was the focus in 2001 of a poster discussion by a group of psychotherapists that included Lía Maciel of the seminar. Created for a conference sponsored by SERPAJ in 1999, the poster was titled Las secuelas de la dictadura cívico-militar (“Wounds of the Civil-Military Dictatorship”). It was, or is, a three-dimensional, plywood and lumber frame construction, about five feet by four, with a four-inch inset space in the center, painted white, where a black high-backed wooden chair perches on the rim. The surface frame around this “room,” as some interpreted it, was marked into rectangles painted black, gray, and red with words and phrases, as impunity, impotence, individualism, authoritarianism, self-censorship, self-vigilance, deterioration of relationships, loss of liberty, complicity, lack of confidence toward others. Lía asked what the poster made us think of, and when conversation focused entirely on the black chair, she wondered why no one was mentioning the words surrounding the chair. “We’re used to the words, they’re old hat,” some said, while others were moved by them. I am still puzzled. I thought of George Orwell’s diatribe in “Politics and the English Language” against abstract terms—like “pacification” meaning killing everyone in sight—and wondered whether the words on the poster were not additional scars of fascist dominion. Had even psychotherapists lost the ability to see specific images, to think in concrete terms? An artist had designed and built the elegantly specific chair—ice-cream parlor style—but for the life of me I could not remember, even as I read them, a single one of the multi-syllabled censorious-sounding “words.” It may well be that abstract language resonates better in Spanish than for me in English; or I may have to hope that Carlos Liscano becomes Uruguay’s George Orwell.
Prior to the seminar, I had known, or read, of the testimonio as a literary type that carried political and ideological connotations in Latin American literature in a manner largely absent from North American autobiography or memoir. I also realized that the genres of biography and autobiography, so prevalent in literature in English since the Evangelical movements of the eighteenth century, were less known in the Spanish tradition. Moreover, in Uruguay it is considered bad form to speak about yourself—autobiography and memoir writing are not encouraged. The testimonios published in the late 1980s and early ‘90s were trying to address a collective view; a work might be written by an individual, or arise from dialogue with an interviewer, but its intention would be to represent the stance of a group, and be addressed primarily to that group, expressing ideas and attitudes the group could be expected to assent to. The testimonio does not really invite critical discussion. Some writers, I was realizing during the course of seminar readings and presentations, appeared careless about sources, or disregarded attribution altogether in favor of declaring their reportage a fiction. Precision in language did not appear highly valued by either some writers or most readers.
Testimonio is thus, I was appreciating, a complex and ambivalent form. A Testimonio may well both recount a group’s experiences (in prison, in torture, in exile), and also assert the writer’s place within the group. The writer defines a version of the group’s story, and hopes for acceptance of that version, so that two desires—to control the “story” and to earn approval—are likely to underlie a testimonio. Testimonio writing generally is more lenient regarding verifiable detail than is usual in biography or autobiography, for all that these can hardly claim absolute truths. Rigoberta Menchú’s description of her family’s sufferings during the military rule in Guatemala has provoked skeptical criticism among some scholars in the US for lack of accuracy, and sometimes sheer invention. But I found little response to such concerns in Uruguay, where readers accepted a testimonio’s dedication to presenting a case, even if that blurred boundaries between fiction and fact, on the grounds that neither is absolutely separate from invention.
Thus the “research” part of my grant proposal had to do with extending to Uruguay my interests of many years in private writings, having earlier examined letters and diaries of early settlers in North Dakota, especially of women during territorial years. I had lived in Uruguay between the ages of 5 and 11 when my father worked in the US embassy in Montevideo, and, having long been curious about what had become of the country, in 1989 went there on leave from teaching English at the University of North Dakota. I have been returning every year since during our northern summers and their winter—to a small house in the seaside town of Costa Azul, thirty miles and a two-hour bus ride from the capital of Montevideo. On the first trip, I began reading and translating testimonios by women, and from there evolved the topic for the seminar “Del testimonio a la historia—”From Testimony to History.” Crossing that terrain in Uruguay, is obviously more complicated than reading private writings of settlement women in North Dakota, national politics, personal histories, and the classroom all intertwining in the Uruguayan post-dictatorship academic setting.
In 2001 I urged participants to undertake a writing project—a “testimonio” of their own, an investigative report, an edition of someone else’s writing, a drawing or other work of art, and the like. In a participatory spirit, I tried my hand at a “history” of a Tupamaro raid on February 13, 1972, on a police station in a small town six or eight miles from where I live, an effort that makes me wonder all the more whether recent events in Uruguay are susceptible to history at all.
Two policemen had died in the assault, a third was wounded with three shots, and cables were cut in the telephone office. I talked with the wounded policeman, with a telephone operator, with a woman I knew who had watched it all from the bar across the street, and with two of the raiding Tupamaros who were attending the seminar. Varying versions I expected—current high school students claim there is the remains of a guerrilla hide-out and tunnel under an abandoned church, which Tupamaro informants deny. But details I would have thought easily ascertainable I could not ascertain: whether the Tupamaros left with an arsenal of guns as they assert, or no more than three rifles as newspapers reported. Checking on the wounded policeman’s rank, I was told at police headquarters in Montevideo that in 1972 he had been retired at the lowest rank; the man himself says he retired two years later and had gained five promotions since then. Small differences, perhaps, but not reassuring for paving a way between testimonio and something approaching verifiable “history.” One of the Tupamaras said she had gone into the telephone office with a gun, but tried to keep people calm; the telephone operator said an armed woman had tried to calm the crowd—an exemplar I touted as verifiable “fact,” or at least persuasive that the raid on Soca was not invented by rabid newspapers or by an hysterical populace who to this day tell me “the Tupamaros will be back.” Tupamaros in my midst say it is news to them that I report residents of Soca were more afraid of them than of the police.
Uruguayan students of all ages show considerable knowledge about national politics, especially regarding education, and a sophisticated understanding of political activism. In November 2000, when Parliament budget debates looked bad for education, students at several city public high schools, and at the university, staged strikes and occupied classroom buildings, including the Humanities College. Yet I don’t see tat this political savvy is matched by independence in academic settings. Going to school at all levels in Uruguay involves photocopying pages out of textbooks because students can’t afford to buy books, taking lecture notes, and passing exams. Books and newspapers are at luxury prices, but even so I see few people desiring to read—going to public libraries or sharing books. In the classroom, conversation or discussions among students and teachers is not the general rule, nor do courses seem to involve much critical or scholarly writing apart from tests. Grades depend on examinations, which a high number of students do not pass, and repeat the year. Seminar participants said late in 2000 they had been waiting for lectures on human rights around the world, not reading and analyzing books.
Thanks to the strikes in November 2000, the seminar lost its last two or three meetings. However, the Fulbright staff had invited us for a “last” class at their office, so, not considering an evening on their premises as strike-breaking, we joined for Coca Cola and sandwiches. To my surprise conversation turned to plans for the following year. In planning meetings of 2000 and 2001, the group was clear about wanting to continue what I had tried to start, only to do it better because now they understood they were able to talk among themselves about ideas, and books, and each others’ lives without circling endlessly, say, around prison anecdotes. Conversations were widening, personal stories were connecting to other information, to extending the veracity of historical accounts, to caring about language. Several illuminating essays surfaced before Christmas summer holidays in 2001 that will start us off in 2002. A woman who had grown up during the dictatorship and acted slightly rebellious in school (she refused to attend prize days even though she would have received a prize), wrote of her quandaries as to how to tell her children what those years were about. Another recounted her arrest and a torture in prison, which she said she had not been able to describe coherently before. There are essays on prison language, on prison art, on people’s dreams in prison and after.
With this group it has been especially difficult to sense how they are viewing the experience (an effort at “evaluations” fell flat)--except for the desire to continue whatever it is, and bring in more friends and acquaintances. My being a US citizen might have been an insuperable barrier. The political left throughout Latin America, and certainly in Uruguay, place much of the blame for the dictatorships in the 1970s and ‘80s, and their countries’ economic collapses afterwards, on the United States—at the same time as Uruguayans and others want to travel and study in the US, buy US goods, study English, surf the Internet, dote on movies, music, and television. When seminar planning began in late 2000, the group let me know they realized I was probably not a CIA agent. I expect obvious “outsider” status practically guaranteed I would not be a threat—no family connections in Uruguay, no political affiliations, no job, I knew no one and no one knew me—a woman without a history, and from North Dakota, a place no Uruguayan had heard of any more than most North Dakotans can find Uruguay on a map. Nevertheless, we seem to be navigating fairly steadily, I gingerly through shoals of complicated politics I only grasp fleetingly, and fellow seminar participants creating to my mind fresher ways of learning and of intellectual interchange than they may have experienced earlier.
In conservative times, teaching becomes all the more a subversive activity. The seminar’s proposing to mark a path from testimonio to history subverts the Uruguayan government’s official reluctance to account for the country’s recent past. And my own however unobtrusive efforts to engage participation and to refine critical readings of testimonios, may be subverting what I’ve thought were somewhat illiberal ideas about education, literature, and history, even, or perhaps, especially, among those still committed to social and political change, if not revolution.
© Radical Pedagogy