Memories in between: Daughters from the Chilean diaspora in Sweden speak about their mothers

Abstract

While literature on memory and dictatorship in Latin America is extensive and narratives departing from the memories of children are evolving, the (gendered) intergenerational processes at the core of the experience of military terror, from the specific location of the diaspora, have so far been marginal in both research and in public debates. What is the language through which collective experiences of violence and political persecution are told to the next generation in diaspora contexts? What does it mean to articulate narratives from the dictatorship in Chile with memories emerging from the diaspora located in Sweden? This understanding is a vital point of departure in our study of young female adults whose parents came to Sweden after the Pinochet military takeover, a group that we here refer to as the daughters of the Chilean diaspora in Sweden.

I remember 11 September 1973 in Santiago, even though I was not born until 1976 in Bucharest, Romania. All my life I have remembered things I never actually experienced. I have memories of a dictatorship I never experienced, from torture that never targeted my own body, from people who were assassinated and ‘disappeared’ but whom I never met. This is how it is to belong to the generation of children in the diaspora, after Latin America’s military coups. We remember the songs and the singers, the films and the actors, books and writers who are not at all present in our everyday existence in Sweden (Vera-Zavala, 2020, authors’ translation).

And there were many times when Tatiana had tried to ask about her father, perhaps about where he had gone, or if he would ever return to Argentina; afterwards, as the years went by, whether he would come to Sweden; and when Tatiana’s mother’s face was covered with tears, then there were no more questions.

The desire to forget

The fear of forgetting

The desire to remember

(Romero Niknami, 2020 authors’ translation)

Introduction

While literature on memory and dictatorship in Latin America is extensive (Avelar, 1999; Gómez-Barris, 2008; Kaminsky, 1999; Lazzara and Unruh, 2009), and narratives springing from the memories of children are evolving (Faúndez Abarca and Goecke, 2016; Jara, 2016), the (gendered) intergenerational processes (Hirsch and Smith, 2002; Hoffman, 2004) at the core of the experience of military terror, from the specific location of the diaspora, have so far been marginal both in research and public debates.

As feminist researchers have stressed, a gender analysis of these processes is crucial, not least because accounts of the diaspora tend to privilege masculine memories, subjectivities and understandings (Apala, 2016; Essed et al., 2004). The role of women (and mothers) as (re)producers of identity and bearers of memories tends to vanish. Today, addressing the absence in memory studies of ‘second generation’ exiles (Arfuch, 2018; Levey, 2021) appears to be an urgent task to understand what perceptions of the past frame the construction of gendered subjectivities beyond national narratives of belonging. This understanding is a vital point of departure in our study of young female adults whose parents came to Sweden as political refugees after the Pinochet military takeover, a group that we here refer to as the ‘daughters of the Chilean diaspora in Sweden’.

In this article, we want to explore how experiences of violence and political persecution (Alexander, 2004; Booth, 2006; Edkins, 2003) are remembered and transmitted to the next generation in diasporic contexts (Agnew, 2005; Connerton, 1989). What happens when family legacies are political or, rather, when political memories turn into family memories in a situation of diaspora? How is the tension between the private and the public, between voice and silence, acted upon, when the diasporic home is at the core of the political?

The aim of the article was to explore intergenerational practices of memory emerging from the diaspora located in Sweden, from the standpoint of the shared experiences of the daughters of Chilean political refugees.

The Latin American diaspora in Sweden

Diaspora according to feminist scholar Avtar Brah (1996) names experiences of movement and displacement, and the social, cultural and political formations emerging out of this displacement. These experiences, feminist scholars argue, are highly gendered (Ahmed, 1999; Behrendt, 2013; Lewis, 2017) and also shaped by the contextual conditions in host countries.

Scholarship on the Latin American diaspora in Sweden is extensive. Sweden became the largest destination country outside Latin America for those forced to leave their countries during the military dictatorships of the late 1970s. While Chileans are in the majority, with more than 30,000 refugees, networks and organisations include Latin American refugees arriving from Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador and Bolivia. However, in these accounts, gender and intergenerational memory have been only a marginal topic. Studies provide important insights into the experiences of community building (Lindqvist, 1991), the diaspora’s role in national politics (Eastmond, 1997), as well as racialisation and deskilling (Andersson, 2011; Olsson, 2009) targeting the group and their descendants.

While the young adults – whom we conceptualise as daughters of the diaspora – belong to similar generations in both Chile and Sweden, their life journeys are radically different. These two groups share related socialisation patterns through family mandates of not only remembering but also acting upon this remembering, in terms of social justice. But exile also refers to de-territorialised practices of remembering. Thus, there are relevant particularities in the experiences of fracture that exile and diaspora embody.

Another difference is the lack of acknowledgement in public debates in Chile of the existence of the diaspora that makes Chilean citizenship a rather empty subject position for those located in diasporic contexts. Reparation measures to former political prisoners have been more symbolic than real; In addition, the citizenship status of those Chilean living abroad is severely restricted.

The narratives we explore in this article illuminate the experiences of being daughters of migrant mothers: that is, of mothers making a life in a new country, often in precarious working conditions and as the target of stigmatising official Swedish discourses on migrant women in general and migrant mothers in particular (de los Reyes and Mulinari, 2023; Erel and Reynolds, 2019).

The children of the diaspora grew up suffering a process of negative racialisation (Behtoui et al., 2019) and witnessing racism acted upon the lives of their families (Lundström, 2021; Neergaard, 2009). In a context of structural racism, they also grew up creating new identities at the crossroads between a country of origin that denied their existence (through a marginalisation of what became the diaspora) and a country of residence that categorised them as not belonging to the nation.

In addressing narratives emerging between national spaces and memories permeated by different social contexts, this article intends to contribute to illuminate a gendered spatial dimension within the fields of diaspora and memory studies.

Theoretical frames

As Carruthers (2002) reminds us, the national community often ‘retains a monopoly over the right to define’ whose and what memories are valued, or who is conceptualised as a knower (p. 429). Thus, we can assume that the generation which grew up in the diaspora also faced harsh judgements due to their location outside the nation and suffered serious harm through diverse forms of epistemic injustice regulating the right to remember (Dotson, 2014; Ramsay, 2007).

This is particularly relevant for understanding in what ways new diasporic generations are the recipients of the memories of their parents in social spaces where the idea of belonging is constructed outside national frontiers and framed within varying forms of symbolic nationalism (Pallares, 2005).

Silence as a response to collective trauma has been analysed by a number of scholars (Aguilera, 2015; Cornejo et al., 2020; Danieli, 2007; Pasupathi and McLean, 2010). Becker and Diaz (1998) discuss the ambivalent position of the children of victims of the Chilean dictatorship, suggesting that while most of them experienced persecution themselves, often in their own perception, their parents are the only victims. In a study of biographical narratives of members of two postdictatorial generations in Argentina and Chile, Frei (2020) identifies five mechanisms that create silences among generations: fear of talking, collective template of reconciliation, a lack of repertoires of justification, the control of symbolic boundaries and patterns of conflict management.

Contrary to earlier literature on trauma that understands silence as denial and repression, ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants, anthropologist Carol Kidron (2009) argues, depict the home as embedding the non-pathologic presence of the Holocaust past within and through diverse silences. These silences shape and sustain the familial ‘lived memory’, mediating tacit knowledge within the private. The ethnography of silent memory, Kidron asserts, may also provide a tentative model of non-traumatic individual and familial memory work in everyday life. Inspired by queer scholarship, Julia Riordan-Goncalves (2018) argues that silence in the Spanish experience of Franco dictatorship must be read through its different meanings: enduring suffering; conveying strength; and safeguarding memory.

In recent decades, scholarship on memory has explored silence/s, challenging unilinear understandings of silence as always, a form of denial or forgetting. In Beyond Memory: Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance, Dessingué and Winter (2019) analyse the productive role of silence, shifting the focus from silence as the impossibility of naming to the ways in which voices about these silences are acted upon in art as a means of healing. Central to their argument are the efforts to transcend the binary opposition between remembering and forgetting (see also Jara, 2016).

The concept of postmemory as developed by feminist literary scholar Marianne Hirsch (1997; Hirsch and Smith, 2002) grasps the experiences of children of survivors that became part of history, as fiction writer America Vera Zabala describes in the introductory quote: not through being there, but through haunting memories mediated through images, objects and stories passed down within the family. Hirsh, she herself, the child of Jewish parents who survived World War II by hiding in Romania, reads postmemory as a structure of transmission and as a way of thinking. The focus is on the ambivalent position of the generation that follows a period of collective trauma (Behrendt, 2013). She emphasises the cultural production of postmemory generations that provide spaces and forms towards the process of mourning and healing.

The notion of postmemory grasps the tension between those who experience collective suffering and those children who emphatically identify with this suffering and incorporate it within their own selves. In Those Who Come After, Stephen Frosh (2019) reads postmemory concerned with the development of practices of understanding, acknowledgement and responsibility that are both ethical and emancipatory. Daniela Jara (2016) analyses how new generations resident in Chile inhabit their family political landscapes, suggesting that the ‘second generation’ redefines the concept of victimhood into a broader process of recognition and resilience.

Serpente (2014a) uses the concept of diasporic postmemory to analyse the narratives of second-generation Chileans and Argentineans living in the United Kingdom whose parents were political exiles or economic migrants fleeing the Chilean (1973–1990) and Argentinean (1976–1983) dictatorships. In her own words,

Analysing second-generation postmemories in a diasporic framework questions the territorialisation of memory in two ways: the first is to challenge this location of memory within a very closed human rights discourse that privileges the direct victims of state terrorism; the second is to investigate whether memory functions only within set national boundaries, which fails to take into account the diasporic experiences of those individuals that migrated and forged their own narratives in relation to a traumatic past. (Serpente, 2014b: 35)

Serpente identifies two fields of memory scholarship as entangling with each other: the politics of memory in the Southern Cone and the field of the ‘diaspora space’ created by the arrival of the first generation of Chilean and Argentinean political exiles and their kin. She deems the narratives as situated in diasporic in-between spaces, through translocational positionalities. The author provides a reworking of the concept of postmemory towards an inclusion of the subjectivities evolving in diasporic spaces, as well as an extension of the doing of memory that moves beyond direct family ties towards collective forms of doing of memory (Bietti, 2010) in diaspora spaces.

Central to our study is the narrative articulation between postmemory as a transmission and a demand of and postmemorial work as practices of gendered memory that shifts from trauma repetition and the risk of victimhood towards processes of healing and recovery.

Methodological contentions

Methodological considerations (Amelina and Barglowski, 2018; Sinha and Back, 2013) are particularly relevant in the analysis of narratives dealing with the experiences of a political diaspora permeated by social hierarchies and diverse forms of status. How are the power relations of gender negotiated within the ‘we’? Who may speak as a ‘we’? How is this ‘we’ (re)created at the intersections of race, class, racialisation, gender and sexuality? How can we avoid the essentialisation of specific subject positions?

We conceptualise listening as a social and political knowledge practice, listening responsible (Spivak, 1994), with care, empathy and respect (Back, 2007; Basel, 2017; Nash, 2016). Doing research in spaces of diaspora and sharing ourselves experiences of political exile, we have been highly sensitive to analytical reflexivity (Chase et al., 2020).

The narratives we will set forth are those of the daughters – adults aged between 30 and 45 years, some of them now mothers themselves – of the Chilean diaspora. In this article, we will focus on eight in-depth interviews with young adult women, all of them daughters of political refugees who came to Sweden at different times during the Pinochet dictatorship.

The in-depth interviews are combined with the narratives of six participants who share a position as ‘daughters of the Chilean Diaspora’ in two focus groups that took place in different cities of Sweden. The focus groups were inspired by a feminist methodological tradition exploring creative participatory methods (Harrison and Ogden, 2021).

Our interviewed language moved fluently between Swedish and Spanish, depending on the subject during the in-depth interviews. Swedish was the language of the focus groups, even though Spanish was present as a shared reference in the narratives.

Our research subjects often positioned themselves as Chilean–Swedish, and sometimes as ‘blatte’ or ‘svartskalle’ challenging the racial Swedish regime that, despite their being born in Sweden, classifies them as not belonging to the nation. Their location in the Swedish diaspora is key to an understanding of the specificity of the intergenerational transmission of gendered memories that has taken place.

While the sample covers diversity in terms of class background, civil status and educational paths, the members of the group we studied share a powerful identification both of being the daughters of political refugees’ mothers and of being the daughters of migrant mothers. Six of the eight women we spoke to were mothers themselves and it appeared that some of the topics discussed had become more important to them when they themselves had children.

Children’s forced migration: Searching for voice

Central to an understanding of the politics of gendered memory in the context of the diaspora is how families were systematically destroyed by dictatorships. As Arnold (2011) suggests, reunions after migration, while creating joy, are also the source of serious anxieties in a context where some children and parents must relearn to know each other. Not only did children lose their loved ones, but due to political persecution, they were separated from those whom they loved the most, as Juliana explains:

My mother – because of her political commitment [militancy], she was always somewhere else, travelling, when I was a child, I called my grandma ‘Mama’ and my mother ‘Mami’ for many years.

In their study of serial migration, Phoenix and Seu (2013) assert that most of the understanding of daughtering and mothering takes as a point of departure that the subjectivities of mothers and daughters are negotiated in everyday contexts of physical proximity. In the narrative, Juliana identifies her strongest attachment as being with her grandmother, an attachment that is violently interrupted by her parents’ decision (and need) to save themselves by leaving the country, taking Juliana with them. As Avtar Brah (1996) reminds us, diasporic processes are connected to experiences of sudden and violent dislocation from what is considered a home. These experiences are related in our interviews as a situation beyond control, where their parents, and particularly their mothers, played a central role.

Patricia, a 43-year-old cultural worker, remembers her first encounter with Sweden as if she was arriving to a different planet:

And then from one day to another they ‘took me here’. This is my feeling. This is what I felt . . . It was as if she took me to a place called Sweden. It was as if she stationed me here. It was something extremely powerful: as if somebody took my body and put it somewhere else. I have reworked it but it is there because of these things of memories. I remember how I felt, like arriving on the moon or some other planet. Really strange.

She was 11 years old when her parents were forced to leave Chile in the aftermath of the military coup. She articulates her memories from a bodily sense of vulnerability and solitude. The parents are remembered as a powerful force that took her body and located her in another place, a place she felt was unfamiliar and beyond her frame of reference. In her memories, her parents took her to the moon. Even though the word ‘parents’ is implicit in the first part of the quote (‘they took me here’), there is a shift towards the singular ‘she’ in the rest of the quote. The mother appears as the affective doer of her pain, while the figure of the father vanishes in her memories.

For Alejandra, who followed her parents in her early teens during the 1980s, the experience of exile is expressed in the abandonment of her political activism and the impossibility of telling her own friends what she was going through:

I was told we were leaving two weeks before the trip, and I was also [emphasis on the word ‘also’] a political activist. And I could not tell anyone that I was leaving. Maybe I have . . . despite . . . I understand . . . why we had to leave, the terrible things that happened. why they took me here. Even if, as an adult I know that it was the best thing, she [her mother] could do for me in that moment, there exists a conflict there – that is what I think, that I have to work with it. Try to mentalise and try to see how she viewed me at that time, from her own perspective, from her own point of view.

Both Patricia and Alejandra are empathic with their parents’ decision. Alejandra is careful to stress the dangers of their political involvement and the urgency of leaving the country. However, the sense of being uprooted, and their mothers’ responsibility for this dislocation, emerge also in the narratives. While Patricia, who had been an infant at the time, recalls a bodily sense of rootlessness, Alejandra mourns the loss of her political identity (‘I was also an activist’) as well as the break with friends and comrades.

Alejandra tries today to understand the way the escaping from Chile was framed. Acknowledging the rationality of her mother’s decision to leave the country does not necessarily mean being able to articulate the pain that her mother caused by her decision, a move in the narrative between a rational understanding of her mother’s decision and Alejandra’s feelings of not being listened to when the decision was taken. The narrative expresses the efforts she makes to shift her position from the angry child in the memory, to being able to see her ‘real mother’ in a woman-to-woman conversation. While Alejandra knows (and understands) that her mother was forced to take decisions under conditions where the practice of silence and even lying was crucial for protecting the children’s lives, it seems that (from the position of the child) the pain of the uprootedness is directed more towards blaming her mother than the military dictatorship.

Laura, today a teacher, provides a similar narrative:

It is mixed feelings . . . for me . . . I do not remember my first two or three years in Sweden, not at all. No memories at all. I do not remember the airport, I do not remember when we arrived in Sweden, I do not remember the refugee camp. I tell stories that my brothers shared with me, and my mother was hospitalised for quite a long period when we came to Sweden. But I do not remember. And I was so angry because I asked and I got no answers. My parents never gave answers, answers to why we came to Sweden. That made me very angry. I was angry because I felt outside society and I was angry because I thought we could have had a better life if we stayed in Chile. That my parents did not understand the Swedish system, I was ashamed; my mother – so embarrassing, shameful, when she went to parents’ meetings at school . . . I was so angry. And that she was not present. I felt she was not present. And I feel so guilty now that I understand what the dictatorship does to people, guilty about my ownfeelings.

Laura continuously repeats the word ‘not’ in her account of her first time in Sweden. The lack of memories from those first years is reinforced in her narrative by a long list of negatives. No memories, not remembering. Not. However, Laura also shifts from the stance of not remembering to actually recalling the feeling of asking questions but receiving no answers. Feelings of anger converge with shame when seeing her parents as incapable of understanding ‘the system’, stressing her frustration over her parent’s position as racialised others in Sweden. She begins by blaming her parents but moves towards a ‘she’ that personifies her embarrassment about her mother at school meetings, and concludes by regretting an absent mother. Laura is not unique in moving from the word ‘parents’ to ‘mother’. The absence of the fathers in their memories of the everyday poses salient questions about the role of men (and fathers) in exile and diaspora.

The voices of the young women in our sample illuminate the fundamental need to reconceptualise memories of the dictatorship in Latin America through the memories of children not as passive victims ‘following’ family members into exile, but as central actors with individual agencies, and collective experiences of pain and suffering, but also of hope and resilience emerging in diasporic spaces.

Children’s forced migration: Acting upon pain

Recurrent feelings of loss are present in the narratives of Maria and Luciana, who both understand (and represent) themselves as living ‘normal lives’, or as being like ‘anyone else’, while at the same time returning to topics of separation, breakdown and displacement. Maria came to Sweden when she was 16 years old, and the separation from her family is now reflected in a feeling of anxiety when she leaves her own children in the kindergarten:

I could not say what I felt. But I was so afraid that somebody could harm my children . . . I stayed around, could not leave them. And it is very probable that it was related to what happened to me; this overprotection of my children is a little bit pathological too.

Luciana recalls a visit to her mother, whereby returning to her own home (she lives 2 hours away) is shaped by negative emotions of fear and feelings of loss:

It is always like that when I have to leave [where her mother lives]. She waves me goodbye, and there we are, the two of us, crying as if . . . {laughs} and I am only on my way to Stockholm.

In our material, events of separation and individuation seem to act upon the scars, rewriting feelings of loss and grief that have not yet been processed. Both quotes look for a voice that acknowledges the irrationality of the practices but also accepts these behaviours as a central part of the self. Hjern et al. (1991) argue in their study of 50 refugee children from Chile living in Sweden that symptoms of trauma in refugee children are often recognised only in the family sphere. This illustrates not only the importance of the family in facing painful memories of past events but also the lack of institutional spaces of reparation from traumatic experiences.

The narratives we have collected suggest that the binary opposition between situations of crisis versus those of normality does not involve a linear process leading to either forgetting or reparation. On the contrary, the temporalities of exile and diaspora are experienced by the children (today young adults) in a recurrent and disruptive fashion where the memories of the past are latent and appear in unexpected situations.

Private silences/public political narratives

While interviewing Rita, we noticed how the emotional frame of her narrative changed when she recalled a particular incident in a day-care centre. Before recounting it, Rita had spoken in very positive terms about her childhood, a childhood that she argues was different from the Swedish way, not least because there were: ‘Always many people at dinner, always lively political discussions, many “tias” and “tios” [aunties and uncles] and we the children around’, as she describes it.

Rita is engaged (as are many of the young women we encountered) in diverse social justice projects. It seems that she is not challenging her mother’s worldviews, but is naming something else, something she shares with the researcher in a lowered voice:

I remember an event [an incident] in the day-care centre; I was five and I was playing with a little boy. And we had a fight. His father worked in Securitas [a private security firm] and I told him that his father was a murderer – that was what I had understood from home. You know, the uniforms, the military, murders. What I had heard from my mother at home about the police, the military, all that.

What kind of continuities and breaks are expressed in this story? While the political mandate that shaped the lives of the children of political refugees is evident, we do not know how it was transmitted. Rita’s narrative expresses not only the impact of dramatic memories of state violence on a child but also the persistence of an emotional regime in diasporic communities, where the evil was located symbolically in the figure of Pinochet and the military.

In their study of the grandchildren of former Political Prisoners of the Civic – Military Dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990), Faúndez Abarca and Goecke (2016) show that most of the narratives focus on the experiences of grandfathers, even when grandmothers shared similar experiences of prison and exile. The accounts of our research participants with their emphasis on the role of mothers in the making of homes challenge masculinist exile and diaspora discourses among the Latin American political diaspora, with its imperative masculinist demand to return to the homeland (Eastmond, 1997). Diane Kay (1988) argues in her study of Chilean men and women exiled in Britain that public and private spheres were brought into a new and more conflictual relationship in exile. In our study, the home emerges at a central space of the doing of memory (and politics).

Claudia provides further instances of the doing of home and the doing of the political in the diaspora, but these memories are framed through ambivalent feelings:

The smoke . . . everybody smoked in those days . . . and that there were always uncles discussing things, and my mother and the aunties laughing and gossiping in the kitchen . . . I . . . my sister loved it when they began to sing, but my mother, she . . . I felt she was somewhere else when they got into the songs . . . As if she was not my mother any more . . . No, that is unfair . . . But it is so different for me and my sister. She loves the songs . . . I, well, it is not that I do not like them . . . but they make me feel sad. I know that this is childish but, when she heard the songs, something happened to her, as if my mother – who never missed a match when I played handball – was not there. I do not know, sorry that I cannot explain it better, but she was not my mother any more.

Her sister loves the songs, but for Claudia, the singing recalls a moment when she felt abandoned by her mother (who was somewhere else). She seems not to have a term to articulate the feeling that she defines as childish, and moves between a protective and loving mother (who followed her sports activities) and an absent mother or, rather, the transformation of a mother into a person she does not recognise. Even those who were able to flee with their significant others confronted not only new languages and different cultures but also and particularly the radical transformation of significant others in their subject position of survivors, something that many of the interviewed name as forms of mothering shaped by a difficult and solid silence regarding ‘what really happened’.

The silence of the mothers, or rather the tension between voice in the political narratives and silence regarding personal experiences, is a recurrent topic in our material. ‘She could scream all night with nightmares and then wake up and make tea and scones as if nothing had happened’, writes Lizette Romero Niknami (2020) in a poem about her mother, after her father was assassinated by the military dictatorship in Chile.

In her reflections of memory and state violence in Chile, feminist scholar Temma Kaplan (2002) explores the vital links between violation of human rights and sexual violence, explaining the silence in woman political activists that have been the target of diverse forms of sexual violence as related to feelings of shame. The author suggests that women’s silence, pertaining to their own experiences of state violence in countries such as South Africa and Chile, is an effect of misplaced modesty as well as pain, concluding that, ‘Their shame effectively places them in a conspiracy of silence with their torturers, as if the victims bore some responsibility for what happened’ (Kaplan, 2002: xx). Our material complicates Kaplan’s interpretation that links woman political activists’ silences to feelings of shame, as a clue to understanding why female political activists have been silent on their experiences of torture and, particularly, sexual violence. Silence, in our material, has many and contradictory layers. Silence tends to be connected, in some narratives, to the term ‘hard’, as in the accounts of Marta and Mariche:

She never spoke about what happened to her. Often said things like: ‘Nothing; we are alive’. My mother would never recognise this . . . but when I was a teenager and was very depressed about my first love crush, she would come to my room with tea and biscuits and pastries and listen and listen, and after a while she would say, ‘It’s okay to be sad for two or three weeks. But then, think of the privilege of being alive – think of those who were assassinated before they could even have a heartbreak’ . . . We always joke with my brothers: the ‘Command’ allowed only for two weeks after a heartbreak. Today she would deny that she said this; maybe she does not remember, but . . . She was so hard. {Laughs}

My mother, she was hard. She never spoke about her time in prison or anything else. My father, he was more sensitive. He cried and that kind of thing. But my mother . . . She had two jobs as a cleaner and then all of us to take care of. She was made of steel.

A mother body made of steel seems to be a subject position that the research subjects recognise within the specific motherwork needed to raise children in a context of marginalisation and racism. For many of the women/mothers who came to Sweden as refugees, the politically committed self was a subject position where individual feelings and personal emotions were subordinated to the collective struggle for social justice (Calveiro, 2006).

It is possible that for this group, the silence on the matter of personal experiences has a different meaning, one not necessarily linked to shame. In the first quote, the memory is of a mother whose care work was shaped through the need to celebrate life in a context of destruction, a need that (in the daughter’s narrative) was shaped by a classification system regarding levels of emotional suffering, and where being alive evolves as a family mandate that also demanded remembering and prioritising the suffering of others. The memory is told with a recognition of the care work symbolised in the food provided, but the memory is also told as a challenge to a mother who, according to the daughter, would not (today) recognise (‘remember’ in the daughter’s story) these parenting practices. In Mariche’s narrative, the second quote, the word ‘hard’ is reinforced by the notion of a mother body made of steel, when compared with a father experienced as more sensitive. A silence permeating the mother–daughter relationship seems to go hand in hand with a powerful acknowledgement of the commitment of mothers to the survival and wellbeing of their children.

Another topic that emerged in our interviews is the tension between expectations of wording experiences and the classed coded construction of self where these expectations can be fulfilled:

I am the daughter, I am the daughter number six of eight children, and you might begin to think I did not have a very intimate relationship with my mother. Because my mother was a very devoted person. She was a person that lived for us . . . always searching for the way to survive with her children. No? I always remember my mother as a person that was trying to find how to work and how to get for us the simplest things, like what we needed for clothing. Thus, she was a woman that struggled to maintain the home, but I did not have a relationship with her, a relationship of sitting with her and talking, of knowing things about her.

In the narrative, the commitment of the mother for the survival of her children is what defines and shapes the relationship between this daughter and her mother. Here, there is no place for conversations. As a daughter, our interviewee acknowledges the motherwork done for the survival of herself and her siblings. She also acknowledges the skill and knowledge her mother embodied in always finding creative and original ways of ‘feeding the family’ (Gillies, 2007). Being in a different class position from her mother, our interviewee reads their relationship, and the mother’s silences not only through the lenses of different times and places but also from a different emotional regime regarding mother/daughter relationships.

Ariana, a 42-year-old politician, argues that her mother has been silent about many of the horrors she experienced before Ariana was born. All Ariana knows are fragments on which she tries to reconstruct how her mother, who was pregnant with her, could escape persecution. But even though Ariana has been told about concrete events and situations, she feels that she lacks a perception of the feelings of her mother in these situations.

My mother, what she has always told me is . . ., all that happened, all political things, but not much feelings; all the political things, what happened and what she did and so on, rational, but her own feelings have always been absent . . . I have so many gaps like these. Maybe they have come a little bit now. As if there are things that we do not speak about, but they are in the room, they have always been in the room all the time. Things I knew, do not ask me how and why, I did not have to ask. I am sure my mother was depressed, even if she did not understand what it was. There were so many things in the air. No presence.

Ariana’s expectations reflect the complexity of intergenerational transmission of past experiences and also of the silences that make memory an endless work. Reflecting on the memories transmitted by her mother, Ariana points to the differences between describing (political) events and transmitting embodied feelings.

Studies of postmemory address this dissonance (see Salomone, 2015). The practice of not talking about feelings can be in obedience to the parent’s wish to protect their children from experiences of torture, trauma and repression, but also of their reluctance to go back to painful (and perhaps unprocessed) memories. As the Chilean human rights lawyer Carmen Hertz writes in her Memories, remembering her own silence about the murder of her husband, ‘there are topics in life that are silent ones, because silence acts as a protection, as a shield’ (Hertz, 2017: 195, author’s translation). For Ariana, the transmission of her mother’s memories of ‘the political’ is framed by an unspoken pact where the practice of not telling is mirrored in the habit of not asking.

This practice of silence is also a labour of care and love, a strategy for preserving the other from the demons of the self. In her study of Bosnian woman victims of war, Husanović (2015) challenges the commodification of trauma and argues for the need to restore dignity to the bodies that had been destroyed, what the author defines as a ‘politics of witnessing and hope’ (p. 103). A politics of witnessing and hope, we would like to argue, is created and forged through collective forms of remembering that respect and even care for those practices of (difficult) silences, woven through care and love.

Exploring gendered memory work in the diaspora

The narratives of our research subjects identify a number of tensions between on one side positive memories of home and family with its political stories and on the other side negative and upsetting memories of absence, fracture and particularly of silence that the research participants locate in their mothers. The daughters in our study (today, some of them mothers themselves) acknowledge their mothers’ labour of love in creating a liveable life in the Swedish diaspora. Mothers are, however, identified as embodying a silence regarding their own pain and seldom speaking about their individual experiences of the dictatorship. Intergenerational gendered transmission is in the narratives located in the home and shaped through a muteness of the emotional and the individual and by a powerful voice of the political and the collective.

Silence brings to mind issues of forgetting and amnesia. However, in our study, daughters identify both their mothers’ silences, but also and particularly their mothers’ voice and agency, through a doing of the political in an everyday work of gendered memory. Thus, the individual silence of their mothers did not induce forgetting but opened a space according to the daughters, for collective visions of social justice. It is possible that the silence, daughters identify, is linked to unconscious process of repression of memories that are too painful to articulate, as traditional psychoanalytical theory would argue. But it is also possible to conceptualise silences as multiple, contradictory and with different meanings. Voice and silence function not as each other’s opposites but as each other’s continuation, and gendered memory is articulated through the interplay of meaningful (collective) voices and meaningful (individual) silences.

It could be argued that these mothers have been silenced both by myths of heroic political activism coded as male and by nationalist and masculinist discourses of exile and return. We would rather argue that these mothers have developed forms of resistance in the active doing of silences, understanding (individual) silence as opposition to passive victimhood and as a labour of care towards the next generation, in the creation of homes, within an unfriendly diaspora space.