Being Exiled Girls.

Childhoods, Memories, and Territories in Exiliaditas by Florencia Ordóñez and Los órdenes del amor by Lucila Penedo

Abstract

I am interested in addressing the modes of writing in which the daughters of exile produce and publish in a particular moment where memories manifest themselves in complex scenarios. I will analyse Florencia Ordóñez’s Exiliaditas (2019) and Lucila Penedo’s Los órdenes del amor (2022). When I refer to ‘modes’ I allude to ways in which literature circulates, giving an account of family, personal and intimate archives that become public. In the chosen works I emphasise how the past is revisited through mappings, letters, drawings and photographs produced by exiled childhoods, especially by daughters who had the need to order - in their narrative present - the experience of childhood exile. The ways of telling and narrating enable the territory of exile memory that involves a gender perspective in which the archives - which as daughters they generated - give rise to another great archive of childhoods in which exile was such a powerful presence that it became an unknown. Writing during childhoods as daughters and narrating with exile in absolute presence was the driving force that led to the forging of a future artistic production such as the one I present here. I observe the various modulations of childhoods in exile and also in the returns and non-returns as memories of a context resulting from state terrorism. The stories, the testimonies cross the barrier of the public and the private (Jelin, 2023) and allow us to engage the analysis that Drucaroff in Otros logos. Signs, discourses, politics (2015) carries out. At this point, literature and politics come together to talk about the exile experience in the midst of state terrorism and its consequences during the recovery of democracy. The methodological strategy I will use is to combine literary studies (Basile) with memory studies (Jelin) from a socio-critical perspective that punctuates contributions to the cultures that these daughters have developed from a gender perspective (Drucaroff, 2015).