A review by cubaitlubin
Still Life with Bones by Alexa Hagerty

challenging emotional informative reflective

5.0

IN THEIR BLOODY wake, the dictatorships of Argentina and Guatemala left a task at once impossible and urgent: finding the disappeared. The dictators burned the logs that recorded the names of their victims and shredded the maps that marked their graves. They hid their archives and kept their silence.

Yet forensic teams started looking for the missing. They came armed with teaspoons and plastic buckets. Courageous, they showed up. They started in their youth and have spent their lives searching.

Such a respectful and reflective interweaving of violent Latin American histories, the neverending act of exhuming these mass graves, and how we care for the dead. I learned a lot but was also struck by the poetry and emotion of the writing. 

If you can’t understand the bones as people who are missed and loved, with a mother and father standing by the edge of the grave waiting, you can’t do this work. If you can’t understand the bones as evidence to be analyzed and examined, you can’t do this work. You must touch bones and be touched by them. You must be able to drink your tea with the dead.

Year after year, groups of students puzzle over her skeleton, sorting out human and canine bones. Her body is pieced together over and over. Her profile is completed time and again. Each time her body is articulated, her story is told. Bones and story together, we catch a glimpse of her full humanity. This is not a funeral rite, but it is a ritual. This is not a proper burial, but it is a way to honor the dead. This isn’t justice, but it is a form of testimony.