Summary
The main focus of my presentation will be the research journey that started with the literary study of not well-known articles published by Francesc Trabal in the journal Germanor during his exile in Chile (1940-1957) and how this investigation led me to question and explore the silenced story of civil war and exile within the realms of my family. Within the theme of testimonies of joy and sorrow from Catalan exile of this panel, I am proposing to establish parallelisms between the experience of exile of writer Francesc Trabal (1899-1975) in Chile and the figure of my great-uncle –who had fought in the Republican side against Franco and had to leave for France since he was a member of the P.O.U.M and the Unió de Rabassaires– as a paradigm of many other untold testimonies of exile. I will share my findings when I did research on F. Trabal in Chile, and my long-term family project research in archives both in Catalonia and France. The critical framework of my project follows Marianne Hirsch’s ideas on inherited memory and postmemory. I am especially interested in the transgenerational transmission within families of experiences of the Spanish civil war and exile. In her works about the memory of the holocaust, such as The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (2012), Hirsch reflects on the role that photographs have in our inherited memory even though it may take place indirectly.
Lourdes Manyé, Furman University, lourdes.manye@furman.edu