Tres narrativas sobre los guardianes de los archivos de la violencia. Abad Faciolince, Burgos Cantor y Gabriel Vásquez

Abstract

This article analyzes the interaction between literature and contemporary archives of serious violations to Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law. To this end, we connect how current transitional justice measures in Colombia define archive with Jacques Derrida’s concepts around the archive in Archive Fever. In particular, we focus on the double definition that relates archive to an origin, and to a place of residence where an institution organizes the archive according to its notion of order. We focus on how three contemporary narratives (“Un poema en el bolsillo” by Héctor Abad Faciolince -2009-, La ceiba de la memoria by Roberto Burgos Cantor -2007- y La forma de las ruinas by Juan Gabriel Vásquez - 2015) incorporate in the fabric of their story reflexions about words, images, and sounds safeguarded in embodiments of the archives of violence in Colombia. This essay studies how these narratives use written, visual, and phonic traces to define different visions of those guarding the archive, and how these different visions contend with each other.