Acceso usuarios
José F. Colmeiro
The voices of Spanish women who were silenced and imprisoned, literally and metaphorically, during Franco's dictatorship, have begun to be heard in recent years, and have started to demand a space in the nation's collective memory. This essay examines the process of recovery and literary use of these voices in Dulce Chacon's "La voz dormida" (2002), which presents a series of collective "testimonios" of Spanish women in a fictionalized literary form, following the characteristically hybrid nature of the testimonial novel genre. The novel recollects and reconstructs women's memories of the resistance against Franco. As a fundamentally hybrid form, mixing the oral and the literary, the testimonial and the novelistic, the personal and the collective, the memorial and the archival, and the multiples voices of informants, characters, narrator and author, Chacon's novel transforms the raw materials recollected into a new creation that effectively produces what I call a "hybridization of memories"
