Huellas nómadas: Un poema en el bolsillo de Héctor Abad Faciolince

Abstract

In 2006 the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince (1958) achieves an astonishing interna-tional success with El olvido que seremos, a delicate literary tribute to his father killed in 1987 by paramilitary hitmen. Crossing cultures and borders, the book links a family tragedy to the country's political violence, but leaving an open ending while the transitional justice does not give access to the truth. In 2015 Daniela Abad, the daughter of the writer, and Miguel Salazar shoot the documentary Carta a una sombra, partially based on this book. Now the filmic post-memory of a crime against humanity reaches an uncountable and globalized audience, while the writer continues to carry out his personal way of reparation. Travelling between two con-tinents, he finds out the authenticity of the poem by J. L. Borges that his father took with him when he died. In 2009 Héctor Abad Faciolince publishes the result —“Un poema en el bolsillo”— first in the magazine Letras Libres, then in Traiciones de la memoria, a book illustrated with a lot of documents. The verbal-visual combinations of this memory in motion carry new chronotopes, analysed with the Visual Studies approach. In particular, a surviving image of trauma stands out as a proof that every metamorphosis delays the grief process.