The Ghosts of Argentina

The Argentinian author Mariana Enríquez attended this year’s Festivaletteratura to present her new collection of short stories, Un lugar soleado para gente sombría. The atmosphere is lively in Piazza Castello, with Enriquez balancing humour and warmth, drawing the crowd into her literary world with the help of Chiara Valerio.

Enriquez is prompted to recall her childhood during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, when thousands of people were made to “disappear”. Unlike conventional murder, these killings left no bodies behind. The absence of a corpse created an unbearable uncertainty, as loved ones remained trapped between grief and hope, being denied the possibility of mourning fully.

For Enriquez, to be in a state of disappearance is worse than being killed, because it denies not only life but also death. This condition gave rise to a unique kind of haunting, populated by the ghosts of those who vanished. In traditional folklore, ghosts hang around symbols of declining power: churches, castles, cemeteries. Yet the ghost brings forth an invasion, Enriquez claims, and so the gothic can no longer be tied only to authority. From a symbol of power to one of memory, the ghost now haunts everyday life.

Far from eschewing its social context, however, the fictional production of Mariana Enriquez does tackle structural inequality and class. Hers are stories of repression and silence, where poverty and everyday violence form part of the narrative world. She notes that while she doesn't write with a political agenda, she cannot escape being political in her work; inequality and social fractures are unavoidable realities.

Ghosts are also a vehicle to interrogate patriarchal frameworks, especially those centred around the female body. Enriquez refers to a character from one of her stories, Julie, a woman who has sex with ghosts. In occult traditions, spectral sexuality is often described in terms of possession, as a violation that comes close to demonic possession. Why, she asks, must every encounter with the spiritual equate with "being taken"? Why cannot there be another kind of contact, one not defined by violence?

Contemporary obsessions with skin, beauty treatments, and pharmaceutical interventions like Ozempic also concern the Argentinian writer. She asks why certain bodies, why body fat itself, risk disappearing under social pressure. Menopause, too, becomes a metamorphosis, a return to adolescence but in a harsher form. For Enriquez, the body is unstable, a terrain of transformation and alienation.

Enriquez, thus, unearths the gothic themes of everyday life, as they resonate through memory, in the pursuit of liberation, while bound to a fragile, ever-changing body. The ghost is not a mere horror figure, it's a an intimation. Of history, violence, and the permanence of what refuses to be forgotten.