This is not my first time reading this piece and I am still in awe the second time around. First, the way Campobello is encapsulating these narratives (assuming they are longer than presented) and summarizing it into somewhere between 1-2 pages is something I haven’t really encountered aside from this work of hers. I guess it would also make sense to say that given that it is her narrating from her youth, keeping it short and sweet would be coherent enough for a child to read and understand fairly quickly. Despite her youth being in a chaotic warfare environment, she never seemed to reveal harm, or sadness, or being afraid of her surroundings as well.
Campobello also tells so much in such short essays – to how the characters look like, what their hobbies were, how they would act if someone did them wrong, to how they died. In this book of hers, the way she would narrate the death of a character seemed so mundane and normalized, like she knew it was coming already. Given that war was happening around her, she probably got used to it as well. While that was happening around her, she still portrayed the innocence of a child.
Thinking of this book as a book about war, fighting, and revolting is a fact, however, Campobello writes about it so lightly that it almost feels like the opposite. I would say, basing on my own preference, that I highly enjoyed this more than Mama Blanca’s Memoirs as it felt more raw, more real, and more engaging. Though they both had aspects of childhood and conflict sprinkled throughout, it was both used in very different ways. If I had a diary growing up, it would definitely not amount to this one.
While I have read quite a handful of stories and narratives about the revolution, I’ve never encountered any that portrayed war in this light. Others are usually specific, very timebound. In 1836, Team A defeated Team in the Battle of the Spaceships, but Campobello took us on a journey through a different lens.
My question for this week would be: As Jon mentioned in his lecture, there is a discrepancy in Campobello’s reported date of birth, some being a decade or so apart (which puts quite a big gap). Do you think it would have mattered if she wrote it when she was younger or older given how her memory would be affected by her age as well?
“keeping it short and sweet would be coherent enough for a child to read and understand fairly quickly”
Also doesn’t this have something to do with the logic of memory? You remember bits and pieces, moments of intensity but not necessarily what led up to them or what came after?
I think its interesting that this is your second time reading Cartucho, especially given the nature of the stories and how they, (to me at least) resemble bed stories, which are usually told many times. I’m not sure what to make of Campobello’s debated birth date, however, I generally believe that adolescence usually garners more anger, whereas childhood has a more innocent, whimsical nature. I think Campobello may be an exception, if she was a teenager during this time. I read a bit more about her as I thought the book was really interesting and I wondered what author context she could bring. Apparently, she was very eccentric! But, I also think that Campobello ‘inherited’ a lot these stories from her mother, so it bring back around that idea of ‘bedtime stories’.