In this book, Brigitte Vasallo challenges two silences: that of family history, imposed by gender-based violence, and that of political history, imposed by the dictatorship and the Transition. A memoir without a monument that begins in her family’s place of origin, the Chandrexa de Queixa mountain range, and expands toward the margins of official history. Its central theme is the dismantling of the pre-capitalist countryside in southern Europe with the arrival of the so-called economic miracles of the 1950s, and the identity of the mutating descendants of that diaspora, orphaned of meaning.
In order to reclaim her mother’s elusive history, Vasallo contacts Gilles Charmat, the boy her mother raised in Paris as a domestic worker. The letters she writes to him, and his silence, are the central thread of La fosa abierta and embody the difficulty subaltern subjects face in accessing their own history, which is always guarded by the ruling classes.
The author seeks a language that bridges two worlds: that of oral tradition and that of written literature, that of individual memory and that of the possibility of collective narrative. The txarnega identity—queer in itself and reappropriated—is the prism through which the analysis is structured, ultimately creating a space for its own enunciation. From this position of subalternity, Vasallo constructs a literary artifact that not only recovers a silenced history but also names what was buried in order to confront hegemonic narratives about progress, gender, and history. In order to reclaim her mother’s elusive history, Vasallo contacts Gilles Charmat, the boy her mother raised in Paris as a domestic worker. The letters she writes to him, and his silence, are the central thread of La fosa abierta and embody the difficulty subaltern subjects face in accessing their own history, which is always guarded by the ruling classes