5. The Malvinas journey: harsh landscapes, rough writing, raw footage

Julieta Vitullo

There is little room for first-person writing in the realm of doctoral dissertations in American academia. As if subjective experience obstructed the flow of intellectual reflections, the two sides of the brain of an academic are not supposed to mix. The same is true in scientific discourse, but in the world of science, it is all about the experiment. Even in the driest and most objective language of a scientist, even if the passive voice disguises the presence of an agent, the ‘I’ is integral to the text: I performed this experiment and came up with this. Studies in the humanities, despite the name and the object they examine, tend to erase any traces of the subject who writes. Reading and writing are solitary and silent acts. When cultural and literary critics refer to a personal experience that led them to come across a certain book or to approach a corpus of works, they do so timidly and almost apologetically, in a footnote, a foreword or an epilogue.

I was not the exception when in 2006 I went to the Falkland Islands (or Malvinas, for us Argentines) with the intention of writing a travel journal that would give closure to my doctoral research. Justifying a request for money was only the beginning of the problem. Field studies are not uncommon in the humanities, but the request was slightly unorthodox: was there room for a first-person narrative in a piece of scholarly research? Why did I need to travel to the Islands if all I was studying were the imaginary representations of them, the fictional narratives produced around the Malvinas–Falklands War of 1982? From then on, I found myself in a sort of limbo, one foot in the library, the other on the Islands. The timeline was the five years spanning the 25th and 30th anniversaries of the war, that is, between the conclusion in 2007 of my doctoral dissertation, later published as the book Islas imaginadas: La guerra de Malvinas en la literatura y el cine argentinos [Imaginary Islands: The Malvinas War in Argentine Fiction and Film] (2012), and the release of La forma exacta de las islas [The Exact Shape of the Islands] in 2012, a documentary that I co-wrote with the directors of the film, Edgardo Dieleke and Daniel Casabé.

This chapter looks at what the journey has been like for me, a researcher into the cultural discourses produced around the war who became the protagonist in one of those discourses. I discuss what the process of making the film was like and how my previous connection to the topic evolved into something else as a result of new experiences and new paths of expression. Without going into details that readers can find out by watching the film, I explain how I positioned myself in regards to the analysis of the relationship between collective and individual trauma after having suffered a loss that was inextricably linked to my experiences in the Malvinas. I also look at how certain representations of the landscape displace the idea of sovereign territory in the narratives of Malvinas and, at the same time, become a vehicle for representing individual and personal trauma.

The limits of genre

The documentary film The Exact Shape of the Islands came out of the experiences of two trips I took to the Islands in 2006 and 2010. The first time, as I explained in the research statement I wrote to justify the need for travel funds, I went because I wanted to see with my own eyes that place overshadowed by loss which I had read so much about, a place that had been written about mostly from the imagination. My plan was to be a flâneur in the barren land and, in the idle time I would have, to write an epilogue for my thesis, a first-person text conceived as either a chronicle, a journal or a travelogue. Once I was there, the plan for my trip changed because I met Carlos Enriori and Dacio Agretti, two Argentine ex-combatants who were returning to the Islands for the first time after 25 years. I took the excursions I had planned, but did not just look at things and keep a journal: I watched Carlos and Dacio and, through the camera lens, I watched what they were watching. The eight hours of rough material I recorded became a sort of voyeuristic insight into their experience. That and the notes I took when I was alone made up a portion of what I brought back from the Malvinas.

Upon my return from the Islands, I used my notes and recollections to write an ‘Epilogue’ that I described as ‘a journey of the researcher towards her object of study’.¹ I explained that the ‘Epilogue’ represented a shift or displacement from the fictional to the physical: I confronted the space that had been built from imagination with a personal and somewhat intimate chronicle written from the actual space of the Islands. I used the first person to describe my wanderings around Stanley and what locals refer to as ‘the camp’ (the countryside). The initial idea of the trip, I said, was to:

The result reflected in the ‘Epilogue’, as I continued to describe it, was ‘a journey to the origin’, one in which those unknown islands revealed themselves as a space of nostalgia and longing for something that was missing (Vitullo, 2007a, p. 12).

I brought back more than just the initial thoughts for my ‘Epilogue’ and eight hours of raw footage but, in terms of my research, I was not sure what I was supposed to do with what I had gathered. I articulated some partial thoughts that did not do justice to the rest of my work, my role as a witness to the testimonies that the two ex-combatants offered, my experience as a traveller on the Islands or my own personal story. The personal ramifications of my life experience on the Islands were too intimate to fit into even a first-person narrative.

An article based on that initial version of the ‘Epilogue’ was published in the cultural magazine Ñ for a special edition on the 25th anniversary of the war.² The fact that the editor cut the first paragraph of the submitted text, in which I made specific mention to those ramifications, is evidence of the problematic status of the first-person within certain channels of circulation, even non-scholarly ones. That text, which the editor described as a travel account and entitled ‘La nostalgia del falso terruño’ [Nostalgia for a False Homeland], was a chronicle with autobiographical undertones. What could have had an interesting impact was not the specific personal information that was provided in the text, but the fact that such information was being introduced along with other pieces in the special edition of a weekly magazine, an edition that dealt with the public, rather than the private, dimensions of the war. ‘La nostalgia del falso terruño’ was the chronicle of a researcher who travelled to those islands to study the fictions produced around the war. The medium in which the text was published was a special edition on the Malvinas which included a dozen articles in different genres, from interviews to reviews, and dealt with many subjects, including politics, aesthetics, history, cinematography and literature. My text presented a personal twist which introduced a link between the private and the public in the context of a key chapter in Argentina’s historical narrative, bringing an uncomfortably intimate component into the discussion of a national, eminently public and often solemn commemoration. The drastic cutting of the first paragraph erased that connection but, incidentally, the mention of the personal that came in later in the text was left unclear and disconnected. That paragraph, which did make it to my dissertation, read:

A modified version of that opening paragraph made its appearance as a voice-over in The Exact Shape of the Islands. In that case, the paragraph was modified not because the lines between genres had to be kept straight, as in the edited version published in Ñ, but for plot purposes, to avoid giving away the full story at the beginning of the film:

By the time I had to give closure to my dissertation and defend it, life had gone on and some of the things I had said in the initial version of the ‘Epilogue’ and in the Ñ chronicle were no longer valid. If there had existed a gap between the actual space of the Islands and the image associated with the fictional and non-fictional accounts I had read, there was now a second gap between the Islands of that trip and the personal landscape that was starting to be reshaped in my head as memories populated with new and unexpected meanings.

In the end, it was the documentary format and the intervention of a third-person narration which enabled reflection on the ways in which that landscape had been reshaped once and again through the pages of books, right before my eyes, through the lens of my camera and from the memory exercises that took place in between trips. If the need to go had driven the ‘Epilogue’, the urge to return would eventually lead me back to the Islands and become a thread in the narrative fabric of the documentary. That urge, which had also been a theme of the fictional accounts and testimonies I had studied, was later present in the raw footage I collected by filming Carlos and Dacio and would finally be a part of my own story within the film.

The status of the first person, the autobiographical, the limits of genre, the relationship between the private and the public are, precisely, some of issues with which The Exact Shape of the Islands deals. The gaps mentioned above adopt a different form in the film: they are layers which the film juxtaposes by using the materials I captured in 2006; those recorded in 2010; third-person voice-overs from the film directors; different entries from my diaries recorded by an actress; quotations from 19th-century accounts by Charles Darwin; or more recent insights from Rodolfo Fogwill and Carlos Gamerro.

Still, within the context of my academic research, a first-person reflection about my experiences on the Islands in 2006 remained partially undercut by the very fact that the Islands had become not just a place to witness and record the testimonies of others but a stage in my own personal story of loss. The time that elapsed between the first trip and the publication of Islas imaginadas did not provide enough distance for the present reflection to come into being. Only after completing the film, watching it several times, showing it at different festivals and going through the exercise of reflecting on the last six years³ of this Malvinas journey does it seem possible to express what I have had such a hard time writing down and what directors Dieleke and Casabé struggled for a whole week of shooting on the Islands to have me say in front of the camera, only to hear me say it on the very last day: that during my first trip to the Islands I conceived a baby, Eliseo, who died shortly after he was born.

The object, the subject, the witness

Researching the literature and films produced after the war in 1982 between Great Britain and Argentina over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands has required different kinds of journeys and discoveries. The first is common to what most researchers must undergo when they initially come up with an object of study. Something in the sphere of personal memories, personal experiences, place of origin, a picture kept or seen, a book stored on a shelf, a word spoken to us leads us to that object.

In my case, I was about to turn six when the war happened in 1982 and I was in first grade. I remember the chants against Margaret Thatcher that our teacher forced us to sing; I remember tears from my mother when the ARA General Belgrano Cruiser was sunk by the British Royal Navy. More than anything, I remember the feeling of fear and shameful pride every time I sang the national anthem and the ‘Malvinas March’. That the feeling of pride was tainted by shame speaks to the fact that the Malvinas represent a sort of ‘blind spot’ in Argentine history: as I explained in Islas imaginadas, the war is an alienated event extirpated from the time frame implied in the term ‘dictatorship’ but also estranged from ‘democracy’; it was supported by the majority of Argentine society while the regime that was launching it was about to collapse; its victims do not have a corpus of legitimised narratives and testimonials like the one which the disappeared and the survivors of the concentration camps have in the Nunca más, the Report of the Argentine National Commission of the Disappeared; finally, it is a war that for almost two decades was more or less neglected by academics. At my age, my shame derived from the fact that my parents had told me that I had to chant against the military, not against the British. They were the ‘bad guys’, so instead of jumping while chanting ‘If you don’t jump you’re English’, I needed to jump and shout, ‘If you don’t jump you’re from the military’.

The memories that gave rise to the selection of the Malvinas as a research topic, shared almost identically by too many Argentines, worked their way through in three different ways throughout this intellectual journey. First, they inspired me to choose a topic for my doctoral dissertation. The personal connection was deep enough on an emotional level to motivate passion, interest and enough devotion to spend the next few years dealing with the topic at hand. This goes to reinforce the point that pretending that, formally, research can be devoid of subjective interventions is an illusion, one that can only lead to an unproductive split.

This recognition explains not just the fact that because of my own personal experience I could relate to the emotional roots of the national cause for the Malvinas with its patriotic fervour and symbols, but also that nationalism, emotional in nature, permeates the idiosyncrasy of entire generations. As I discussed in my book, the idea of the ‘just cause’ was hegemonic within the testimonial, political, historical and journalistic discourses that followed Argentina’s defeat in the war and was rooted in a territorial type of nationalism. Whether those accounts were expressed in triumphal registers or mourning undertones, they all subscribed to the idea that the war had its origins in a just cause. According to the triumphal version, the war of 1982 could be told as an epic story, a people’s heroic deed. The testimonies of the soldiers, the letters written by their relatives, their friends or just the common citizen, the official speeches, the media – all of these manifestations illustrated that triumphal version. Imposed by the defeat, the second version, with its mourning undertones, did not differ much from the triumphal one. Even though it tried to question the celebratory nature of the first account, it participated in the same logic of the National Narrative. The elementary national discourse upon which both versions were based was not necessarily ideological. It was, rather, founded on a type of ‘diffuse’ nationalism, one that, according to Benedict Anderson’s well-known idea, is a ‘hegemonic cultural construct’. It is important to emphasise that without the national narrative and the epic discourses, there would not be texts from authors such as Rodolfo Fogwill, Carlos Gamerro, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Rodrigo Fresán or Martín Kohan. Ranging from allegory to parody, those texts dismantle the national narrative of heroism, epic and lament, leaving behind only their fragments. Without the nationalistic and territorial discourses, without the literature that was built upon them, The Exact Shape of the Islands would not exist either.

Second, those memories came up as material for interpretation within the fictions I was studying. It is precisely the patriotic feeling, the mix of nervousness, pride and shame associated with it, that is at stake for some of the characters in the testimonies and fictions of the war. Testimonial accounts by ex-combatants reference the rapture triggered by the sounds of those patriotic songs. Fictional narratives use the patriotic matrix as an opportunity to mock and undo the national discourse.

Third, and most importantly, those memories ended up turning into points within the plot of The Exact Shape of the Islands. In one instance in the film, the return of one of the ex-combatants to the Islands 25 years later, someone else voices part of my story. Carlos refers to me in the third person while he talks to his friend Dacio, looks at the camera that I am holding and addresses me, partially to verify some of the facts: I was six when the war happened; I had carried that inside me since that time; then the moment came for me to decide on a research topic and I chose the narratives surrounding the Malvinas. In another instance, the actress who speaks for me reads from one of the entries in the diary I wrote during my first trip to the Islands in December of 2006: my mother was getting me ready to go to school and we heard on the radio the news about the sinking of the light cruiser Belgrano.

Those individual memories, in which the public and the private overlap, traverse the entirety of this Malvinas journey from the initial research stages to the completion of the documentary. However, what enabled me to become a subject in one of the narratives which now belonged to the same type of object I had chosen for my research – that is, the corpus of narratives I had been set to write about seven years previously – was bearing witness to somebody else’s personal memories.

At first, that role as witness was fortuitous. In the initial version of my ‘Epilogue’ I explained that I had met Carlos and Dacio in the street and recognised them as Argentine by the mate they were drinking as they walked by me. This and other anecdotes regarding our interactions, and the story around how they managed to travel to the Islands 25 years after the war, took up an important part of that 15-page chronicle. Interestingly enough, I made no mention of the fact that I had filmed them, that a good number of our interactions had happened through the camera lens, or that many of my impressions of the Islands came out of the dialogues I had had with them. In that narrative, I am neither a witness nor a participant: I am something in between, an excited and curious observer who interjects and gets involved and shows a relative lack of self-awareness. The life events associated with that trip were too intimate and overwhelming to make their way into the narrative of a doctoral dissertation. Still, bits and pieces made it in, intrusively but timidly.

When the time came for me to rewrite the ‘Epilogue’ to include it in my book, I decided to leave out completely the encounter with the two ex-combatants because that part of the Malvinas journey exceeded the limits of an ‘Epilogue’ and had now become The Exact Shape of the Islands. As if the person who travelled to the Malvinas in 2006 had been there completely on her own and had finally had time to think, the first-person voice in this final version is reflective and collected, in sharp contrast with the verbose and tangential tendencies of the voice in the initial version.

As soon as I had returned from my first trip to the Islands, I watched the eight mini-DV tapes I had recorded. As I moved through the tapes, I could see a shift in my role behind the camera: from a fortuitous event, my encounter with the ex-combatants was becoming increasingly purposeful. In the first tape, the camera is always pointing at Carlos and Dacio and trying to capture everything they say, with little or no attention to the space around them. I had no idea at first whether the opportunity to film them was going to come up again, so I had to get as much material as I could. Certain segments of this first tape happen almost in real time, with very few cuts. The two friends are tracing back the steps they had taken 25 years earlier when they had arrived at the old Stanley airport and walked eight kilometres to the town. They are walking in the opposite direction, we all are and this reverse movement is also a movement towards the past. The landscape only matters insofar as it can be checked against what Carlos and Dacio can remember of it and can ascertain the passing of time. What we see is not what I see. It is not even what they see when they are being filmed. Instead, what we see is their way of experiencing the difference between what they see now and what they remember from having been there 25 years previously. Of course, when one watches some of these initial scenes at the beginning of The Exact Shape of the Islands the narrative frame switches and the audience experience a different kind of shift in time and perspective.

As time goes by and the connection between me as witness and them as my subjects develops, things start moving in different directions. On the one hand, one can see that I started to stage things, asking them to introduce themselves, requesting that they walk in certain places, or inviting them to address specific questions. On the other hand, as the relationship deepens, it is easier to catch them ‘off guard’, that is, to get spontaneous thoughts and reactions that do not fit the parameters of what they are used to saying. As they are both active militants in organisations of ex-combatants, their ideas about the war and its aftermath are clear and articulate. Dacio’s discourse is seamless, reasoned and eloquent; as the hours go by, it becomes clear that his sayings are supported by two decades of elaborating and formulating the same thoughts repeatedly. Carlos’s discourse is less absolute, more hesitant, more spontaneous, more complex and flawed and yet, more forthright. In neither case do I need to ask them to talk. However, any illusion of the documentarian as mere observer is unsustainable: their presence changes the nature of my trip and mine affects theirs. At some point, they start giving me feedback on the movie that I am making, a film that does not exist and never will. Not as such.

Figure 5.1. Dacio Agretti and Carlos Enriori at a beach near Stanley, 2006. Photo by Julieta Vitullo.

Territory, space, landscape

The first time around, the baggage I had brought to the Islands was made up of the childhood memories discussed above and of all my readings and my research. Even though the focus of my work was on the fictions that managed to elude the nationalistic mandates, once I was on the Islands there was no distance, no parody, no humour, no literary device that could be interposed between me and the landscape in front of me: a barren, desolate land; the hills where the battles had taken place and war objects had been left behind as in an improvised outdoor museum; a small town overflowing with war monuments and memorials; the Argentine cemetery with half its tombstones labelled ‘Soldado argentino sólo conocido por Dios’ [Argentine soldier known only to God]. As I explained in the first version of my ‘Epilogue’, war cemeteries attempt to emphasise the homogeneity of the war experience by laying out a uniform landscape that equalises all soldiers as brothers-in-arms. The Argentine cemetery at Darwin takes that to extremes by accentuating the anonymity of so many of the graves, emphasising the abandonment suffered by the citizens by a state that neglects them and deserts them. As I also explained, only fiction could be an effective diversion from such sadness, a ‘refuge’. I could distract myself from the scene in front of me by thinking that the days to come would bring me to the places where the fictional characters I had studied had set foot. This pointed at a contradiction that I would only be able to understand later: if before my trip fiction had been the most valid form of discourse to articulate the real – that is, the war – fiction was now a diversion or a refuge from that reality.

Two particular tombstones in Darwin stood out for me now: those belonging to Private Ramón Orlando Palavecino and Lieutenant Luis Carlos Martella. Private Palavecino had been hit by the expansive wave of a bomb dropped close by while he was coming down the mountain to gather some projectiles. He had died in Carlos’s arms. The second man, described by Carlos as a coward who abused his authority and did nothing but pray as the bombs dropped, died during the Battle of Two Sisters, fought from 11 to 12 June 1982, two days before the Argentine surrender. Both names were in the glossary that I handed to directors Dieleke and Casabé as we entered the first stage of our five-year film project. After having read the history of the war while I was doing my research, these stories Carlos told me made the war less anonymous and more personal. I was now participating in the search for these meaningful landmarks and bearing witness to stories I had only read about within the context of a testimonial genre about which I had had many reservations. Those testimonies I had read before were questionable because they bought into the national narrative and were framed within the idea of the just cause. A well-known example of one of these narratives, which I analyse in my book, is the film Iluminados por el fuego [Illuminated by Fire], as comfortable and politically correct as a film about the war can be. The testimonies I was now witnessing switched my perspective, at least for the duration of my trip. After all, there was something to be said about the epic matrix that the fictional narratives mocked and dismantled. I knew perfectly well how much abuse the conscripted soldiers had suffered at the hands of their superiors. But the undertones were not pitiful anymore. I was now being drawn into the epic tones of a story in which the conscripted soldiers, loyal and brave, were at odds with cowardly and abusive officers. More than this, I was letting myself be seduced by it. Even more: what was at play was a life drive coming to odds with a death drive.

As I was starting to discover and would later elaborate further, by meeting the two ex-combatants I had found a new set of characters. I could witness and record their present adventures, hear their past stories and give a specific direction to wanderings that would have otherwise been pathless. The appeal for me was in the individuality of the experiences I had in front of me, in the fact that they were real and that, despite my previous distance and scepticism towards anything that had an epic flavour to it, they were an example of bravery, courage and camaraderie. My trip turned into an adventure and my movements became deliberate. I was participating in their search for the traces of what had been there 25 years before. I was looking for their trenches, searching for a place to plant a cross that would signal the death of Private Palavecino. There is perhaps one and only one moment of reflection in the material which made it into The Exact Shape of the Islands. Carlos found the place where his friend had died and turned it into a memorial. He has told me the story of his friend’s death and poured out 25 years of painful memories in front of the camera. I stop to film him and, for the first time, I move the camera away from the character to pan through the landscape. The slow and silent panning is interrupted by Carlos’s request that we find our way back to town. In the film, what follows is a pivotal moment for the development of the plot and the characters.

Nevertheless, generally speaking, a look at the raw material from that trip shows that there was little room for reflection during that week. Contrary to the solitary and introspective activity I had imagined when I had pictured myself strolling around without a clear direction, observing, reflecting and transferring my thoughts into a journal, I could only relate to that space by moving through it, going from landmark to landmark, from memory to memory, following the footprints of a previous journey. When I returned to the Islands four years later with the clear purpose of finishing the film whose seeds had been planted on the first trip, I brought a different kind of baggage with me. This time it was all about my own personal experiences four years previously. This time I was searching for my own footprints and memories. Once again, the Malvinas were a space to be walked around in search of an older footprint.

Again, the journey was conceived as a search. However, now I was not the one who controlled the way in which the search was conducted and recorded. As The Exact Shape of the Islands proposes in one of the opening scenes, I may decide whenever I am ready to talk and be the one who sets the stage and the tone of my reflections in front of the camera, but the film can also manipulate that, interrupting, intervening and controlling. That entire week of shooting was characterised by a productive tension between what the directors wanted me to say and what I was ready or willing to share, their request to visit certain places and my refusal to go there again, the questions they wanted to ask and the ones I wanted to answer. That they were close friends who had been present for the four years this journey had taken complicated things even more but was, in the end, what made it all possible. How else could two male directors have approached a story that is deeply feminine and have done justice to it if the relationship had not been grounded in trust? The tension continued as we watched the raw footage of that second trip and worked on a timeline and a series of voice-overs. I refused to accept the scene in which one of the directors interrupts a thought I am starting to articulate in my very first appearance in front of the camera, six minutes into the documentary. However, the scene was left as it was, the first example of a device often utilised in the film in which the directors intervene into my speech, contributing to the creation of a puzzle of contradicting and complementing voices.

Simon Schama reminds us that national identity ‘would lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland’ (Schama, 1996, p. 15). The general impression according to the Argentine nationalist imaginary has always been that the Malvinas represent a sort of missing homeland. However, the Malvinas are a territory alienated from most people’s experience which, due to the oft-repeated but erroneous slogan ‘The Malvinas are Argentine’, has been ingrained in the collective national conscience generation after generation. The pro-war discourse that circulated largely through most of Argentine society during the weeks of the conflict did nothing but echo a formalised textbook account that, decade after decade, had promoted the idea of the unredeemed territory. The popularly accepted ideas perpetuated by this literature were not based on a formal survey of this land, but on journals by 18th- and 19th-century travellers such as Louise-Antoine de Bougainville and Charles Darwin whose journeys contributed to the mystique of the Malvinas–Falklands landscape. If, prior to 1982, the Falklands constituted a mythical space that any Argentine schooled under successive authoritarian or military regimes had to be ready to defend with his own blood, after the war the Islands gained materiality. Whatever remnant of immateriality remained in the image of this landscape, nation and nature were now merged through the blood spilled onto the soil of the Islands.

Those perspectives, the mythical and the material, exist under a nostalgic imperative, one by which I felt captured upon my first arrival on the Islands. According to Svetlana Boym (2001), the great wars and the great nationalisms of the 20th century bear a nostalgic longing for a never-owned homeland. During that first trip to the Islands, there was no way to escape that feeling of nostalgic longing. Clearly, the Islands were not pure nature: they were a landscape, that is, an artefact constructed by humans and loaded with meanings that did not have a natural correlation to it.

In these islands, overbearing forms of harshness and barrenness co-exist with exuberant forms of life. The king penguins that I found on my two trips to the Malvinas had a way of overemphasising that contrast. Forever subject to national claims, the Falkland Islands force us to pose a question. This question, under the perfectly calculated forms of the exploitation of natural resources that has always been at the core of capitalism, should certainly apply to every piece of land on Earth: who should be in charge?

The unfortunate words of the Argentine commander-in-chief who, on 2 April 1982, greeted the nation with the news that the Malvinas had been recovered – ‘The Malvinas are a feeling. We do not care about the oil or the strategic position of the Islands’ – resonate today in the current state of affairs between Argentina and Great Britain. Of course, everyone cares about the oil. But the potential consequences of an ecological disaster caused by oil exploitation would render all questions of national claims rather useless.

The wide variety of the narratives about the Malvinas–Falklands War offers an interesting example of how the tragedies of history can return repeatedly through cultural artefacts. Often the causes and consequences of war have a way of being forgotten. In the case of the war that gave rise to my research, fiction provides us with plenty of reminders, interrupting the narrative of the media and the social to become knowledge, a specific knowledge about the war, with its own characters and rules.

Figure 5.2. The warrah wolf in a postcard sent from Stanley, 2010. Photo by Matthew Smith.

In his Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Darwin documented his two visits to the Falklands in 1833 and 1834. Among other lessons learnt in what he described as these ‘miserable islands’ he found a species of fox-like wolf called the warrah, the only native land mammal of the Islands, and later remarked: ‘As far as I am aware, there is no other instance in any part of the world of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing so large an aboriginal quadruped peculiar to itself ’ (Darwin, 2011, p. 194). Darwin predicted that this gentle animal would not survive human settlement. In effect, the species became extinct in 1876, when the last warrah was killed on West Falkland. Perhaps the image of the gentle warrah looking at us from a remote place and time is more productive, as a nostalgic turn, than the one which incites us, in loud nationalistic tones, to long for a home that we never owned.

It took me two trips and some life-changing experiences to distance my own perception of this place from that nostalgic outlook and find in that image of the warrah a productive metaphor for trauma, for loss, for longing, for warning against the exploitation of nature by humans. My individual experiences, the weight of the personal memories associated with that place, paved the way for a new topographic outlook. The nostalgic turns of these islands started to show a more personal face, different from those ruling the dilemmas of nationalism.

Are all the inhabitants of these islands not marooned, after all? ‘Dreaming of islands’, Gilles Deleuze says in his article ‘The deserted island’, ‘whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter – is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone – or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 10). The scene of me looking at the sea on a sunny day on the beach outside Stanley was in fact based on one of my many dreams about the Islands. I had dreamt about the Malvinas before and in between trips. I still dream about the Malvinas. The exact shape of each dream is different and indefinable, but the underlying story is always the same: these islands continue to be an enigmatic place in which to start anew.

A local man of Dutch origin who had left his country 20 years previously and went on board ship as a cook, only to fall in love with a Falkland Islander and never to return to Holland, told me during my second trip, ‘I’m a castaway’. One of the voice-overs introduced towards the end of the film is an entry from my 2009 journal in which I describe one of my recurrent dreams: ‘Sometimes I’m in a shipwreck and I get to the coast by raft. Once, the sailing boat I was in sank in a whirlpool and I never made it. And the dream ended there’.

Had I not been turned into a castaway as well for all those years, marooned between my home and those islands, dreaming of sunny days in the Malvinas, white sands and a turquoise sea, sailing treacherous waters never to reach land?

Figure 5.4. Julieta at a beach near Stanley during the filming of La forma exacta de las islas in 2010. Photo by Leo Hermo.

References

Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books).

Darwin, C. (2011) [1839] Journal of Researches Into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle round the World under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R. N. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Deleuze, G. (2004) ‘The deserted island’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974) (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext), 9–14.

The Exact Shape of the Islands (2012) dir. by D. Casabé and E. Dieleke (Ajimolido Films).

Schama, S. (1996) Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage).

Vitullo, J. (2007a) ‘Ficciones de una guerra. La guerra de Malvinas en la literatura y el cine argentinos’, PhD dissertation, Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

— (2007b) ‘La nostalgia del falso terruño’, Ñ Revista de cultura, 183: 28–29.

— (2012) Islas imaginadas. La guerra de Malvinas en la literatura y el cine argentinos (Buenos Aires: Corregidor).

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1 Vitullo, 2007a, p. 12. Translations are the author’s own.

2 See Vitullo (2007b).

3 This piece was written in 2011.