Autobiographical discourse and the responsibility of the "offspring" in a writing counterpoint: a view on Los rendidos, by José Carlos Agüero, and La distancia que nos separa, by Renato Cisneros

Abstract

The well-known Peruvian journalist Renato Cisneros is the son of the Peruvian Military Luis Federico "El Gaucho" Cisneros; the latter one was Minister of Internal Affairs during the dictatorship of Francisco Morales Bermúdez (1975–1980), and Minister of War during the second presidential term of Belaúnde (1980–1985), in one of the toughest times of the conflict of the Peruvian government with Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru; the poet José Carlos Agüero, on the other hand, is a human rights activist and the son of "Senderistas" who were trialed in an extrajudicial instance: in 1986 his father, José Manuel Agüero, and in 1992 his mother, Silvia Solórzano. Both Cisneros and Agüero have recently published texts in which they give account of the violence experienced in Perú during that time, from a very personal perspective. Again, both of them draw questions about the political activity of their parents and the legacy, the guilt and responsibilities inherited by them as their offspring. But while Renato Cisneros makes of his book, La distancia que nos separa (2016), an "autofiction novel", José Carlos Agüero presents his text, Los rendidos. Sobre el don de perdonar (2015), like a group of "short accounts, half in between thoughts and biographical notes of a time of violence". The difference in their emphasis is not only linked with politics and their thoughts on human rights, but is also revealed in the ways in which writing shapes their accounts, and in them, shapes their respective parents. In this article, I will analyze both narratives from the concept of "filiation narratives", as proposed by Dominique Viart (2009) for the narratives of offspring in European, post -Holocaust literature. We will see how this type of account operates in them, drifting from the autobiographical and the fictional (Roos, 2013); how each of them resolves the problem of political inheritance and memory; and how they both create a text about recent memory and, at the same time, a particular discourse on the purpose of writing.