Elephant Memory for Political Violence

The aim of this article is to contribute to an understanding of how literature for children may contribute to the construction of memory. It deals with the ways in which what happened during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina may be retold to young children, starting from the premise that literature for children is an ideological, aesthetic and social universe that makes use of two tools: creative language and the construction of symbolic representations. History allows us to reconstruct the past, but working with the circulation of stories and with the elaboration of this past is a task of memory, which allows us to go back in time and bring to the present the articulation between what we receive, what we transform and what we create, in order to advance towards the future. This article proposes to examine a series of Argentinean texts of literature for children where the central figure is an elephant, with the intention of explaining the occurrence of metaphors of political violence in the seventies and of references to the past made in the eighties and the nineties. Our aim is to show that these texts may be understood as ways of intervening in the present, considering the reader as an active subject in the process of constructing the narratives of memory.