“ Ps. I’ll find you .” The discourse of postmemory in letters to executed and disappeared grandparents in Chile

What is it about?

In 2020, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile started the digital project Epistolario de la memoria, which aggregates letters addressed to victims of the civic-military dictatorship (1973–1990). The first epistolary consisted of 34 letters from grandchildren to their disappeared or executed grandparents, which constitutes the corpus of this article. The letters were analysed to examine the grandchildren’s aims, commonalities, and postmemory discourse. The results show that for these young people, the victims are a constant and desired presence in their everyday life. Grandparents are memorialised in sobremesas (family conversations), through photographs and artefacts, as well as through embodied forms of memory such as names passed to descendants and inheritance of personality traits. In their letters, these grandchildren highlight their inherited memories, manifest their commitment to memorialisation and justice, express the pain of absence, and reflect on the presence of the past in the present. This study informs the field of Trauma and Memory Studies and Discourse Studies.

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Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash