Voyager: The Constellations of Memory by Nona Fernández (tr. Natasha Wimmer)
Reviewed by Phoebe T
The Constellations of Memory reckons with the empty spaces and imprecise flickers of deteriorating memory. Written in Chile in 2019, Fernandez’s work binds together her mother’s fading memories, her country’s reckoning with redacted memories, and the ancient glimmers of stars from a time and place light years away.
The English poet John Keats wrote of ‘negative capability’: the importance, in literature, of sitting in passivity mystery and uncertainty. At points, Fernandez’s work swims luxuriously in a pool of negative capability. She guides us through uncertain eddies of memory, erasure and imagination: photographs, censored speeches, brain scans, starlight. Elsewhere, disorientating without footnote or citation, Fernandez writes pages precising an aspect of history or theory, before undercutting herself, describing her own work as a 'mediocre, imprecise summary’ that can ‘hardly convey’ her meaning.
The most beautiful passages here, though, are those grounded in the precise realities of her own context: her involvement with the naming of a constellation in rememberance of the victims of President Augusto Pinochet’s death squad the ‘Caravan of Death’, for instance, or the speech her son writes for the thirtieth anniversary of the 1988 Chilean national plebiscite. This speech, which asks questions about Pinochet’s regime, and questions about contemporary Chile, is forcibly revised by his history teachers before he delivers it.
In her musing on this forcible revision, Fernandez’s comparison of starlight and memory come into clear focus. She compares black holes with censorship, redactions, ‘excluded names’ and ‘invisibilised groups’. It is, she writes, as if ‘some cosmic law were censoring the content of stars’. As if, like our own deteriorating memories, ‘black holes hide a message rendered invisible to our eyes.’
Voyager: The Constellations of Memory is published by Daunt Books, 23rd February 2023