Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Abstract

Reviewed by: Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator by Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle Renata Lucena Dalmaso (bio) Americánas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle Routledge, 2021, ix + 236 pp. ISBN 9780367893477, $170 hardcover; ISBN 9781032335919, $48.95 paperback. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle's Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator investigates life narratives by women who have attempted to counter discourses about womanhood and personhood in Latin American dictatorships. Throughout its five chapters, the author explores different dictatorial contexts in the Americas and how women have employed innovative techniques of self-representation to establish themselves as subjects against authoritarian regimes or in the aftermath of regimes that spanned most of the twentieth century. Each chapter presents the historical context of a specific country and its corresponding dictatorship, along with works by writers who sought to overwrite the constraints of writing the self in such repressive situations. The efforts of these writers in finding novel ways to approach life writing—be it through poetry, aliases, or autofiction—subvert what Ortiz-Vilarelle refers to as the impossible character of autobiography under autocratic governments. The book's main question is how these authors have been able to write the self in the midst of censorship and the actual danger of challenging expectations of womanhood in repressive contexts. However, the book does not only include those who opposed dictatorial regimes. It also explores how the wives, children, siblings, and grandchildren of dictators have attempted to overwrite history through their own perspectives. These works offer ambivalent memories of the dictatorships, ones often imbued with nostalgia for the rulers they represent. The impossibility of writing can be seen both in the works that write against authoritarianism as well as those narratives that attempt to deny, downplay, or even defend these regimes. Faced with such impossibility, Ortiz-Vilarelle argues that the "diversity of voices and experiences represented here demonstrates how autocratic methods of control can actually give way to autobiographical methods of self-construction and establish shared, global-practice autobiographical work for Américanas both in their countries and in exile" (5). The first chapter, "I Remember Trujillo/Trujillo en Mis Memorias: Denial, Shame, Martyrdom, and Nostalgia in Dominican Women's Memoir," explores the impossibilities in life writing by women dealing with Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Specifically, it focuses on the publications [End Page 107] marking the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. Four works that examine the "Era of Trujillo" are analyzed: one of artful abnegation by his granddaughter Aída Trujillo (2008); one of shame and psychological trauma by his troubled daughter, Flor de Oro Trujillo (2009); one of testimony and martyrdom by Dédé Mirabal, sister of the three murdered heroines involved in an assassination attempt against Trujillo (2009); and one of privileged nostalgia by his favored daughter Angelita Trujillo (2010). (18) Each memoir proceeds from a different perspective of memory in relation to the Era of Trujillo, competing for the authority of remembering the dictator, the closeness to his many public and private personas, and the impact of his years in power. The second chapter, "Dueña y Señora de Su Canto: Autobiographical Depictions of the New Nicaraguan Woman," focuses on Nicaragua, which was controlled by the Somoza Dynasty from 1936 to 1979, a period combining the dictatorships of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, his older son, Luis Somoza Debayle, and his younger son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Fighting against the dynasty was the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) movement, in which women played a strong role. Drawing from the Sandinista movement and its poetry programs, Ortiz-Vilarelle analyzes six authors published between the 1960s and 1990s—Vidaluz Meneses, Daisy Zamora, Gioconda Belli, Yolanda Blanco, Michele Nails, and Rosario Murillo—who attempted to reconcile their womanhood with the Somoza years through autobiographical writing. Their autobiographical poetics overwrite the restrictions forced on the female subject by both the Somoza family and the Sandinista regimes that followed. In the third chapter, "'Distinguished Ladies' and the Doctrine of Chilean Womanhood: The 'Anti-manuals' of Diamela Eltit, Isabel Allende, and Marjorie Agosín," Ortiz-Vilarelle explores the three authors' works for "echoes" of...