Alicia Partnoy - The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival

Table of Contents

By turns lyrical, ebullient, charming, vigorous and ingenious in describing the minute ways human beings achieve survival of the spirit.

A collection of short stories, as delicate as cobwebs...as if issued from a spiritually quiet, often humorous, center of a violent storm...

The stories make an enormously powerful impact...Alicia Partnoy will be widely read...

Dennis Brutus

The Little School made the experience of the disappearedthe struggle and strength as well as the horrorcome alive in terms people can understand.

Margaret Randall

A strength and clarity of vision that makes us aware of the incredible resilience and enormous possibilities of the human spirit.

Strength and courage is well-portrayed...

The common thread of Partnoys tales is a message of love for humanity...

Partnoys triumph is to have discovered under her blindfold another pair of eyes, eyes that found a reason to survive in a world that did not deserve her. It is our privilege to look through those eyes for a short time, and to be reminded that we who claim freedom as our birthright must raise our voices, again and again, on behalf of those imprisoned in all the Little Schools around the world.

Partnoys spirit of resistance is also a spirit of creativity and hope...

Alicia Partnoy has kept the precious and courageous voices of this drama from slipping inevitably into an oblivion that they do not deserve...

In memory
of Daniel, my brother,
for whom life became
so absurd that he
decided to take his own.

Julia Alvarez

Each chapter of this book is introduced by a picture of a blindfolded woman, her hands barely lifting the flap of her kerchief. To prevent prisoners from communicating with and knowing each other, and more importantly, their captors, inmates are kept blindfolded at all times in the Little School which is a grim euphemism for the prison camp where the disappeared are tortured and await their fates. These gauze blindfolds are continually slipping, and the prisoners are required to summon the guard on duty to tighten them on pain of being beaten or worse if the blindfold is discovered to be loose.

Alicia Partnoy spent more than three months in the Little School before she was transferred to a state prison, where she stayed for more than two years. The readers of her fictionalized account can be thankful that she learned to peep, glimpse, see, and, because such seeing involves the imagination, to envision the veiled world around her. What is amazing, given the brutal and terrifying nature of that world, is that Partnoy could notice the details of its grace and durability. From the true heart of darkness come these tales, recorded in twenty epiphanies of sight and insight.

Captured and blindfolded, disappeared, Partnoys revenge on her captors is to see, in minute detail, the ignored little particulars that mark her place in the Little School. It is as if she were leaving a trail behind her, one the reader cannot help but follow. Vividly, we experience Partnoys world and that of her co-prisoners. We see the absurd plastic daisy on the slippers she is wearing when captured. We feel the importance of the false tooth she keeps in a little treasure chest of a matchbox, a tooth knocked out by a guard, which Partnoy periodically sneaks into her mouth in a ritual that reminds her that she is still whole. We watch as she rolls her ration of bread into twenty-five little balls rather than eating it, desperate to create something, anything, in an environment where everything is being destroyed. We stare with her at her own reflection in a bathroom mirror, lost in the first human eyes she has seen in years. This is her only unhooded moment in the book, when she is sent to the bathroom to shave her legsfor a beauty treatment, she quips grimlywhich can mean either her release or murder.

Finally, we endure the most anguishing moment of the book: her husbands torture. As he is being interrogated, he recites a popular nursery rhyme about a little frog no one could find, a lullaby he used to sing to his daughter whenever the child was afraid: Rib-bit rib-bit/Nobody knows where he hides/Nobodys seen him at home/but we hear him all the time.

The chapter also shows Partnoys skill as a poet and writer and her translators (Lois Athey and Sandra Braunstein) sensitivity to nuance and rhythm across languages. Movingly, Partnoy weaves in lines of this ironically apt nursery rhyme with stream-of-consciousness thoughts as the torturers demand to know, Where is he?he being a subversive to them, but to Partnoy and her husband, the little frog no one can find. It is lost on the captors, the message of the poem. No one can find the little frog, no one can kill the song of the human heart.

As these examples show, the book is compelling precisely because torture, political repression, and inhumanity are brought home to us in vivid, felt particulars that shatter our indifference. The ethical drone that puts even the most committed and politically aware to sleep is absent. Instead the impact of Partnoys message springs solely from the details of the story, in much the same way that the news of Imeldas eight hundred pairs of shoes brought home to many the corruption of the Marcos regime. This is how the best writingand the best political writingwork.

In fact, Partnoy might have made the chapters less brief, sustained each situation a little more, and developed the characters of the guards and prisoners who are brought in randomly throughout the book. Such development would have involved the reader even more in the world of the Little School. As it is, Partnoy is more generous to us than her captors were to her, letting us off before our hearts break. Perhaps she realizes that humankind cannot tolerate much reality, and she keeps us engaged for as long as she thinks we can bear it.

Perhaps, too, this is all that this brave and talented woman can bring herself to put down. The dedication to her brother Daniel, for whom life became so absurd that he decided to take his own, reminds us that this is a painful and intensely personal book. These are not short stories in the genre of fictionthey are not fanciful and crafted, erudite and inventivebut in the genre of survival tales. Partnoy is a Latin American Scheherazade bearing witness, telling her stories to keep herself alive.

The most overwhelming lesson of The Little School is that the poetry of seeing can sustain us. One cannot get the news from poems, William Carlos Williams once noted, but men die daily for lack of what is found there. Once, in fact, when new prisoners arrive, Partnoy took the opportunity of the guards leaving the room for a moment to recite snippets of her poems to the inmates to comfort them. Later, she feels bad that she has not used that time to give them needed information about the rules, the guards, and the ways to get around them both. But it is precisely such courage and imagination that can lift the human spirit above efforts to destroy it. One wishes only that more legislators voting on Central American aid, more