Reasoning behind the Act of Striking a Spent Match

by Hernan Fontanet

In 1976, at 2:00 one winter morning, paramilitary forces broke into a house in a quiet upscale neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Inside, sleeping, were two nineteen-year-old girls and a twenty-year-old boy. This was the house of the esteemed Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, but he was not home. Frustrated, the soldiers kidnapped the three young people—Gelman’s daughter, son, and seven-months-pregnant daughter-in-law. They disappeared into the night. In 1990, Gelman found out that his son had been executed and his remains buried in a barrel filled with sand and cement. Ten years later he was able to locate his granddaughter, who had been born in a back-door hospital and given to a pro-government family.

For Juan Gelman, one of the most celebrated Latin American poets of the twentieth century, this was one of many grim events. Born in 1930, his was a life of narrow escapes. As an Ashkenazi Jew, poet, guerrilla fighter, freethinker, and prolific journalist, he escaped three death sentences decreed by groups on both the right and the left in Argentina. He was a victim of state terrorism in that country, and still he made his voice heard.

For his poetry, Gelman was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2007, the most prestigious award in Spanish literature. Because nothing could suppress his voice, he expressed the dreams of an entire generation.

This biography explores both his writing and the physical, intellectual, and political environment in South America during Gelman’s life, a life that was punctuated by near misses, imprisonments, and the disappearance and torture of family members. Through it all we hear the ringing voice of a singular poet.

220 pages, Paperback

Published September 25, 2019

Reviews

[Trebor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve always had an interest in Juan Gelman (1930-2014), one of Argentina’s finest poets, who is not well-known enough outside Argentina though he is a recipient of the Cervantes Prize (often referred to as the Spanish-language Nobel). That’s why Hernán Fontanet’s book is such a welcome and excellent introduction to the work and life of this fine and important world poet of the 20th century. Having survived the harrowing Argentine dictatorship and Dirty of War of the ‘70s and early ‘80s – but not without unimaginably tragic consequences (Gelman’s 20-year-old son and daughter-in-law were kidnapped and murdered by the government, and his grandchild was adopted out to a Uruguayan policeman) – he spent much of his life in exile in Europe, Nicaragua and finally Mexico. Gelman’s story is disturbingly representative of the experiences of thousands, if not millions, of refugees in the 20th and 21st centuries, which makes it of particular interest, especially since his is such a powerful, rare and articulate voice. He was an exile doubly, even triply, and ultimately exponentially through his political activism, his journalism and poetry, his ethnicity, language, history, the loss of his child, and for a period, even his own literary voice. He was essentially born an exile as a first generation Argentine-born Jew from a Ukrainian family, his Bolshevik father driven from Russia by Tsarist forces. And so his work and life, almost fatefully, became a profound meditation on language and exile (echoes of Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Nobel Laureate who spent much of his life in California) which makes the book more important still, considering our harrowing times and worldwide refugee crisis coupled with the widespread rise in fascism and political oppression. That’s how this book proves itself truly universal in that its subject matter goes far beyond even its primary subject, Gelman, and would be an excellent addition to any academic course on all manner of 20th subjects, from the Cold War, fascism and anti-Semitism to Latin American guerilla movements and the almost nonstop series of refugee crises of the past two centuries. At under 200 pages, this is one of the most concise and succinct explications of the 20th century epoch, which is an impressive accomplishment by Fontanet. The author’s literary criticism is superb and his love for Gelman’s poetry is evident as the book offers a close reading of much of the poet’s oeuvre. Gelman’s language is powerful and original. In a poem called “Niños: Corea 1952”: “Little brothers…How it hurts/to learn to count by bombers/with the sky as blackboards!” He reworks or reconfigures words - “dictatorshipped, solitudness, sufferive, youme, dieslife, sunshade and untalking, unhaving, unhearting.” At times, the power of his language overwhelms as in Fontanet’s discussion of Gelman’s book, Carta Abierta, when I had to put the book down as tears filled my eyes coming across terms like: “unsonned” and “unfathered,” “orphaned,” which, in fact, happens to the parent and the child.

Gelman was a journalist as well and I was struck by this observation: “While poetry reveals the secrets of words and of existence, journalism brings what is hidden to the public, the secrets of power.” I’ve read a lot about what happened in Argentina, but this book really took it out of the mind and into the body, and while difficult to process, I am very grateful to Fontanet for giving me a much deeper understanding of not only that period, but of man’s inhumanity to man as well as the amazing strength of human endurance that Gelman is such a fine example of. A man who kept growing right up to the day he passed, evolving and changing – from a militant activist involved with the Montoneros, the main opposition insurgency to the dictatorship, to a man who saw that violence could not be the answer; from a poet writing about himself and his perceptions, to a fully developed and great artist who wrote about the exile of others and expanded his vision to include not just tango lyrics, but actual transcripts from interrogations during the Dirty War and a deep exploration and integration of the great spiritual poetic traditions of the past through the likes of St. John of God, St. Teresa de Ávila, Persian and Hindu poets, and Sephardic poets who wrote from the perspective of the kabbala. There is truly something for any serious reader, poet or student of history and social justice in the work and life of Juan Gelman. Fontanet has given us an extraordinary book.

[Jack Syron · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and very detailed account on the life of Juan Gelman, a hero of Latin America and dare I say, a much needed advisor for our current struggles with society and life. Latin American poetry, out of most poetry I've read, is the type of poetry that has a very translucent history and spiritual awakening weaving around it's poets and prose. Gelman's poetry mostly focusing on the spiritual and indentity aspect of our lives is a keen study on itself and much different than the likes of Neruda and Parra. The only complaint I have with the book is that the narrative is scattered; it is better to have a premonition of this book like a college course instead of a typical memoir.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was sent to me by the author to review based on my review of one of Juan Gelman's poetry books, Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems. I found Gelman's poetry very powerful and could feel what a rich, deep history he was writing from with great clarity in the face of great pain. This book informed me of that history, of both his Ukrainian Jewish parents' migration to Argentina, and his own life as a revolutionary during the era of Peron, factionalized militarism and US backed dictatorship that claimed the lives of many of his compatriots and family. I was entranced with this story as much as with Gelman's poetry.
It was charming to learn that Gelman's first foray into revolutionary politics included poetry. It was heart-breaking to read the advice his father gave him from the perspective of one who gave up on revolution and left his home country behind. There's an ache in the exile theme, but what Gelman did with his stateless, itinerant life became as important a political statement as his revolutionary endeavors, and those, in turn, became poetic through his writing. Gelman explored every facet of his identity, traced every bloodline through the geography of language, in the end, writing poetry in Sephardic and Castilian Spanish. Always the theme was present of his losses, the ghosts of friends of his youth, horror stories of kidnap and torture--known, and imagined in the vacuum of not knowing--and his persistent search for the grand-daughter taken from her mother days after her birth and adopted out to political elites, as was the practice.
This continues a theme in my reading that is arising serendipitously. I recently read The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán and In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. The first explores the generational inheritors of the Chilean dictatorship under Pinochet, and the second, a fictionalized account of a real-life family victimized by Trujillo's brutality in the Dominican Republic, and later glorified as heroes of the resistance. The theme is history as a determinant of one's life, and the various constraints, resistance and wounds sustained by those who assert their freedom and dignity in opposition to those who would claim or suppress it, and the reverberations through generations. The combination of heroism and domesticity offers a different view of politics and war than what we here in the US, in the West in general, usually encounter. It's a history that is poeticized and a poetry less metaphorical and "universal," instead, very specific. Gelman names names.
Long, long ago my first attempted major was Literature and it's been awhile since I've read this level of literary critique. Hernan Fontanet explores Gelman's extraordinary lineage and life both thematically and biographically, psychologically, politically and hermeneutically. Many times, I took a break from reading Fontanet's book to do further research on historical context. I would recommend The Reasoning behind the Act of Striking a Spent Match for anyone interested in South American history, Soviet/Ukrainian history, Jewish Diaspora, exile, language in general and the Spanish language in particular--and, of course, poetry and writing.
Fontanet's writing is often poetic. He dutifully footnotes, and quotes from other authors critiquing Gelman's poetry, and biographers of Gelman's life. There are also quotes from interviews and contemporary newspapers. The Appendix where Gelman's associations and awards are listed is worth reading. Upon his death, he was acknowledged by many, as an Argentinian, in Mexico where he spent the last decades of his life, and internationally. The immediacy of his life becomes apparent--Gelman died in 2014. He's on YouTube reading his poetry in Spanish https://youtu.be/9tXSSQD07HM