Laura Alcoba’s Autofictional Memorials of Youth

This chapter discusses traumatic memory and the fight against forgetting in a context of highly intense childhood experience of the Videla military dictatorship (1976–1983) and exile to France aged ten. It focuses on four texts by Laura Alcoba that are centred on childhood and youth: Manèges (2007), Le Bleu des abeilles (2013), La Danse de l’araignée (2017), and Par la forêt (2022), with notes on Les Rives de la mer douce (2023), a phototext that made her œuvre strongly intermedial. The acquisition of a new language and the maintenance of the language of origin underpin the author’s translingual relationship with the Argentinian and French aspects of the self. This informs her approach to heterolingualism, where Spanish is used sparsely but weightily with symbolic reference to the traumatic past. Readers are crucial activators of these autofictional texts, where pain hides in plain sight. Alcoba leaves clues for readers within her texts, and resonances between the works weave an autobiographical web, including via her presence on social media. The acts of reading and writing are of great importance for the writer herself, in the fragmentary aesthetic of these highly personal texts, which attempt to overcome imposed silences in order to bear witness to the self and to others.