Fluid became part of the lexicon during the rule of the fascist, General Jorge Rafael Videla. This was especially true in the prisons to which human beings were disappeared. Fluid here: the need to piss, to shit; the water denied; in torture, the water applied; seminal fluids, too, followed by broken waters.
But there was also fluid on the outside, on the faces of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. These, tumescent with resignation and indignation, swelled once again – when to swell further must have seemed impossible – to become Abuelas – the grandmothers.
More fluid: through the roaring pain of the South Atlantic; first into which the drugged, naked bodies of human beings were tossed, then across which Argentina launched a bid to salvage its filthy regime; and, again, down which Thatcher tried the same exact thing... and succeeded.
And across both hemispheres, those signing the writs, those issuing the orders, those, in short, who forced this history onto the living, managed to live outside of it, exempt.
Written on Tuesday, 24 August 2010