Voyager: Constellations of Memory, Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer, 2023, Graywolf Press
Contemporary Chilean prose is, by and large, spearheaded by Los Hijos: writers such as Nona Fernández, Lina Meruane, and Alejandro Zambra, to name but a few. The Los Hijos writers all grew up during Augusto Pinochet’s military junta, and all write texts with an emphasis on memory. The horrors of the Pinochet reign are difficult to confront, though to ignore or repress the truths surrounding the dictatorship is to allow them to recur, and not to learn from them.
Voyager: Constellations of Memory follows Nona Fernández chronicling her mother’s initially unexplained illness, and the bouts of memory loss that accompany it. Much like the space probes the story is named after, Fernández sets out to document and observe both her and her mother’s personal histories, as well as the gruesome realities of her childhood in Chile. Voyager is a meditation on memory, as well as an appeal to harness remembrance as a revolutionary tool.
The story opens with Fernández staring at her mother’s brain scan in a doctor’s office; “a group of neurons lights up… an imaginary chorus of stars twinkling softly in my mother’s brain… groups of stars constellate in the name of the fond memory lighting them up”. More often than not, comparisons between humankind and the wider cosmos evoke feelings of smallness and insignificance (see Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot photograph of the Earth—no bigger than a pixel, a mere point of light—for reference.) In Voyager though, Fernández recognises a starlit sky in her mother’s illuminated neurons; she is putting the miracle of brain chemistry on a level playing field with the universe at large.
Fernández puts our illuminated neurons on a pedestal with the stars on the sky because she finds in them the answer to a hotly contested metaphysical question: what constitutes personal identity? For Fernández, memory is as near as we get to a satisfactory answer; “our archive of memories is the closest thing we have to a record of our identity.” It is, she believes, the route to self-understanding, the absolute ground zero for determining who and what we are as people. Without memories, our identity would be like a night sky without stars; a void. Fernández fears for her mother’s bouts of memory loss, as if her sense of self is starting to unravel; “losing a memory is like losing a hand, an ear, one’s very own navel.”
There is some consolation to be taken in the fact that our memory is not exhausted by our firsthand psychic content; there are other means to fill in the blanks. For example, we know what our first words were, who we first walked for, sometimes we are reminded of things we said or did when we were too incapacitated to remember. Whether our brains aren’t sufficiently developed to retain conscious memories, or when our brain activity pauses—“when the main fuse blows and everything stops”—there are people to pick up the pieces and illuminate our personal history. The same applies to history at large; we “pass the baton” of memory by means of historical accounts, mythologies and all other means of storytelling, so as to keep the past within our grasp.
For Fernández, there is a near moral imperative attached to the preservation of memory; it is the only way to make sense of ourselves, as well as everyone who came before us. To quote from a 2020 interview, “nothing that ever took place has to forfeit for history… everything is worth the record… everything is useful once it’s part of the compilation.” That something has happens is sufficient grounds for its preservation, and no event, despite its content, should be torn out of our ontology and into unreality. In the tapestry of human history, everything is worth saving; we must preserve all that we can get our hands onto, all that we can keep alive by passing on the baton of memory.
Remembrance is a moral absolute, so it should come as no surprise that for Fernández the greatest possible injustice is to consciously omit facts from history, to rewrite them for one’s own benefit. A recurring setting in the book is the Atacama Desert. It is a cruel irony that the best place in the world for stargazing—literally, for looking into the past—was where 26 political prisoners were executed by the “Caravan of Death”—one of Pinochet’s death squads—and subsequently buried in unmarked graves. The trial for the case is still ongoing, despite Pinochet’s indictment in 2002. In the novel, Fernández joins a campaign—constellation de los caidos—to rename 26 stars after the victims. The latter parts of the story hone in on one of the casualties, Mario Argüelles, recounting details of his life and positing other worlds in which he still exists. The bodies were by and large never found, with just a few skulls and limbs dropped from bulldozers left behind. Despite the dictatorship’s best efforts at banishing these 26 victims from the face of the Earth, the constellation of the fallen means that “the same sky that one day watched them depart today remembers them forever.”
In Voyagers, memory is a means to answer the riddle of personal identity, as well as a political gesture; to let Pinochet’s atrocities fall out of the world is to become complicit in them. There are truths that are hard to confront, though facing them head on and fighting off efforts to forget is the only way to benefit from them.
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Categories: Chile, South America