Speaking back to silence
Responding to Una Muerte y Un Nacimiento//A Death and A Birth by Mourad Kourbaji
By Deborah Chu - 23/06/23
These sorts of conversations happen everywhere. Usually later in the evening, after dinner has been cleared away, and it’s just your mother and you left at the kitchen table. Or during a long car journey with your father, the both of you staring straight ahead.
Those strange liminal hours are when we are most susceptible to the past’s return. When someone you love and trust is most liable to explode a part of your history, leaving you reeling. It doesn’t matter that it happened years or decades ago – perhaps even before you were born. You’re in this, whether you want to be or not.
In Mourad Kourbaji’s Una Muerte y Un Nacimiento//A Death and A Birth, the detonation is, unfortunately, literal. “The trigger of everything was the bomb,” declares Kourbaji’s aunt, Maria.
And then: “Did you know there was a bomb?”
I don’t need to hear his response: of course he had not known. And now everything is different. That’s how it works – the long afterlife of trauma, the blood that keeps splashing back.
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In 1974, under the auspices of the US-backed Operation Condor, Argentine state forces began killing and ‘disappearing’ anyone thought to harbour left-wing sympathies. Two years later, a military coup instated General Jorge Rafael Videla as Argentina’s head of state. The junta remained in power until 1983, a period of protracted state terrorism known as the Dirty War, during which approximately 30,000 people were murdered by their own government.
Mampa, Kourbaji’s grandfather, fled to Spain in August of 1976, five months after Videla’s coup. His wife Pepa and their four children, Maria, Pablo, Sebas and Candelaria, followed in October. Mampa’s association with Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, a Uruguayan politician known as ‘El Toba’, placed the family in danger. El Toba himself had been murdered in May, his tortured body stuffed into a Ford Torino.
In Una Muerte y Un Nacimiento, Kourbaji asks his family to recount their memories of their departure. Their testimonies, which play out over family photographs and newspaper clippings from the era, are alternately halting and sorrowful, excitable and indignant. They all seem to agree on El Toba’s death as the start of their self-exile – that is, except for Maria. For Kourbaji’s aunt, their exile began with the bombing of their next-door neighbour: a Jewish family with three children. Maria’s family had been sleeping when the bomb went off. They had watched as their neighbours were dragged from their home, never to be seen again.
Maria’s re-telling of her memories are set against a series of photographs: a shot of their apartment block in Buenos Aires, a parked sedan, a man being hauled out onto the street by soldiers. Elements of these images flicker in and out of view, until a halo of darkness emerges around the man’s flailing limbs. Until the ambient horror of the street is reduced to the rear window of the car, whisking someone away into the shadowy realm of the disappeared.
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This shifting, elusive storytelling is one of the reasons why Una Muerte y Un Nacimiento feels so familiar. The siblings’ stories don’t match up. Static images warp beneath the pressure of recollection. Thus the film acutely mirrors the way memory can sometimes feel, especially when it must house something that is too overwhelming to be fully understood.
In the film’s closing minutes, Sebas reflects: “In reality, the memory is fragile. Or, in the face of something that could be very painful, memory serves as a way to forget, as a way to not suffer.” Trauma can strand us in the space between remembering and forgetting – the way even a suppressed memory makes itself viscerally felt. The film’s gouged pictures and jittery animation make it clear that the survivors of the Dirty War live with that tension in even more extensive ways. The thousands of people who remain ‘disappeared’ – whose loved ones are still seeking closure, decades later – collapse further distinctions between presence and absence, life and death, enemy and homeland.
Caught in this endless limbo, where should the story begin, and how does it end? How do you articulate what’s been done to you? For some, the simple answer is: you don’t. You move on with your life the best you can, for as long as you can.
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Do these recollections liberate the teller, or retraumatise them? Does it help the next generation better understand their place in the world? As I watch the film, I’m greedy for answers. But the film does not offer any up, of course: there is no single charted path out of the snarl that is intergenerational trauma.
The difference between mine and Kourbaji’s experience is that he sought out these conversations. By the end, his personal reasons for wanting to commit these stories to record is clear. And in view of that revelation, it does not matter how the story is told. What is in darkness deserves to be brought to light, even decades later; even imperfectly or partially. Perhaps then can we make better choices as to where we go from here. But also, sometimes it’s enough just to say: we were here. Our lives mattered. You matter to me.
You can watch Una Muerte y Un Nacimiento//A Death and A Birth at Fringe of Colour Films 2023 here.
Deborah Chu is a freelance arts journalist based in Edinburgh. Formerly an editor at The List magazine, she is the recipient of the Fringe Society's 2019 Allen Wright Award and the Scottish Book Trust's 2021 New Writers Award.
Twitter: @deboraaahchu
