A Perpetual Trace of Violence: Gendered Narratives of Revolution and War

Abstract

A general of a revolutionary army invades a woman's home and attacks her in front of her children. Years later, the woman's daughter who witnessed the event, still wishes to kill the man, yearning for a gun that would fire a hundred shots. After being confronted with the pain of a mother who lost her child in a bombing, an enraged woman slaps a soldier's face. She cries out: Eso es. Nos haceis hijos para luego matarlos (That's it. You give us babies only to kill them; Leon 150).1 Nothing in these two brief paragraphs is all too unusual in any given representation of revolutionary struggles in the early twentieth century. There is however, one particular aspect that marks these scenes from Nellie Campobello's Cartucho. Tales from the Struggles in Northern Mexico and Maria Teresa Leon's short story Luz para los duraznos y las muchachas or Light for the Peaches and the Girls as women's narratives of revolution. Even though these texts stem from radically different historical, social and cultural contexts the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War respectively they share a deferment of violence that is both strategic and compulsive. Marked by a perpetual of violence, Campobello's novel and Leon's short story speak to the incommensurability between a traumatic event and its representation. Naturally, the use of the term trace consciously invokes the work of Jacques Derrida. A trace, writes Gayatri Spivak commenting on