Happily Ever After? Guerrilla Fables and Fairy Tales of Disappearance

Abstract

This chapter looks at the re-writings of children’s fables and fairy tales to address childhood memories of the dictatorial period in Laura Alcoba’s novel La casa de los conejos (2008) and in María Giuffra’s series of paintings and drawings, Los niños del Proceso (2001–2005). By combining autobiography, imagination and references to fantastic tales, these works not only redefine the conventionalities of testimony and ego-literature/art but also politicize and historicize bedtime stories. Indeed, both Alcoba and Giuffra demonstrate how, after the dictatorship, it is almost impossible in Argentina to talk about lost children, hidden places, wicked stepparents, estranged siblings and the persecution of outlaws in imaginary lands without evoking the atrocities carried out during the dictatorship.