Les indigents de la mémoire

Abstract

This article reflects on the importance of funeral rites and burials as signs of the presence of the dead in living memory. It aims at showing how this necessity of burying the dead guides the poetic production since the Iliad and, analysing two recent texts written by Bernardo Kucinsky and situated between fiction and testimony, how it fails in the painful context of the disappeared from the military dictatorship in Brazil. The problem eventually arises of how is usually neglected to bury ritually poor people, putting them in common graves while they could be easily identifiable, and without telling their families who are still looking for their “disappeared” parents.

Keywords

• disappeared
• burial
• military dictatorship
• Brazil
• Bernardo Kucinski