New Argentine play on the Malvinas / Falklands portrays Thatcher as devil, the British as pirates

A new play on the Malvinas / Falkland Islands conflict seeks to address the past through parody. // Getty Images News

There are always amusing ways to deal with actual facts through representations. In the play “Malvinas, islas de la memoria” (“Malvinas, islands of memory”), currently running at the Cervantes National theatre in Buenos Aires, writer / director Julio Cardoso and his team make it clear that parody is the only possible way to look back and laugh.

In an hour-long interactive play, several actors embody the protagonists of the Malvinas / Falklands Islands conflict: soldiers, teachers, politicians, generals, islanders. Actress Lucía Adúriz even has the chance to play the challenging role of Margaret Thatcher, who seems the cruelest person in the world when she points out at a map and screams the order: “Sink it!” — referencing the sinking of the Light Cruiser General Belgrano in 1982, considered by many a war crime.

In an interview exclusive to The Independent blogs, Adúriz agrees that her character is not quite realistic.

“Art never speaks about anyone in general terms. Pirates and evil are stereotypes,” she says. “It is an easier way to tell our story. As Latin Americans, we have always associated British people with pirates because that’s how we have seen them politically. We are not talking about people but about politicians.”

For director Julio Cardoso, the fact that they describe characters through this exaggerated way has to do with the play’s genre.

“The essence of parody is to go deeper into general traits that are related to a spirit, not to a specific person,” he opines. “Parody doesn’t make a demon out of somebody else, we laugh at Margaret Thatcher. We don’t hate her. We are able to laugh at her because we are confident of ourselves.”

Based on research carried out by the Malvinas Observatory at the University of Lanús, this fiction tells the history of the conflict. To do this, it uses historical sources and even intimate material, like the letters of soldiers. There is a moving letter written by the sister of a soldier. Along with a drawing of her beloved brother, she writes: “I imagine you this way.”

Adúriz says she was inspired when she first saw these writings.

Explains Adúriz: “I am 26 years-old, I wasn’t even born when the Malvinas occurred, so for me it was very important being in contact with people who have an emotional connection with the islands, they passed on these feelings to me.”

There are fragments of the story that are particularly touching for us, like when we resort to actual testimonies of veterans.”

Indeed, a few memories are worth sharing in their entirety:

An Argentine soldier who fell in love with a kelper (Falkland islander) with whom she crossed paths when she was hanging out the laundry; another soldier who jumped from a ship to save a friend; a veteran who used to swap letters with a teacher, who met her when he came back, fell in love, got married and now has children with her; a soldier that returned to his town and was honoured as soon as he arrived by his schoolmates who sang the national anthem. The histories are countless, and they are reproduced in the play as accurately as possible.

Veterans themselves are happy about it.

“They said something that is very important for us: that out of many plays and movies that tackle Malvinas, this play is the only one that could take them exactly where they were at war,” Adúriz notes.

Why is the audience so touched by these accounts of war?

“Because they talk about love, fellowship, hope, friendship, they address very intimate moments: being far away, being alone, missing our loved ones,” Adúriz replies. They grab the essence of human condition. War makes us realize that we are all the same: we can all kill or die, it equalizes us, it doesn’t matter what your nationality is or your ideological thoughts are.”

Cardoso sees eye to eye with the actress: “Beyond the territorial claim, the Malvinas have become a symbolic element of dispute, the islands orientate our thoughts. For us, the reality of the islands is a colonial one. In our way of thinking, it reminds us of a colonial power, and the dominated ones; and we are situated on the non-colonial side. When we speak about Malvinas, we are speaking about Argentina. Moreover, we are talking about South America.”

So, popular comedy is a good strategy when it comes to thinking about who we are, and who we are not. In the wider Argentine imagination, Thatcher is devil and the British are pirates. Perhaps that’s because it is easier for us to put the blame on someone else. In any event, representations tell us a great deal about how we see others, and how we picture ourselves.

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• Andrés Djordjalian

  Sorry for the late reply. Sam, Mariana is reporting some silly stereotyping of Britons (though the actress says that it is directed at politicians, not common citizens), you seem to be answering with an equally-silly stereotype of the Argentines. We can do better than that.

  To begin with, it is misleading that you portray the Argentine population as
  descendants of ‘conquistadores’ who exterminated and replaced the native
  population, and I say it without meaning any minimization of the
  brutalities committed against indigenous peoples. As you know, the Argentines substantially descend from European immigration taking place years after the genocide and subjugation of the natives. These were mostly poor or lower-middle-class families who were not given land and pretty much struggled alongside numerous natives who were not exterminated.

  You were supporting that narrative with inaccurate data. You’re right, one of the genetic studies I ‘cling to’ is Corach et. al.’s, referred in that article in Discover. It says Amerindian autosomal markers (this is, a gene pool not associated to maternal or paternal lineages) are 17,28% in average, which is compatible with other studies and nothing like ‘infinitesimal’. A >95% cannot be ‘near pure European’ with this average percentage of markers.

  Mitochondrial-DNA tests suggest that the indigenous genes were contributed mostly by women, but that indicates no more than a strong male bias in mixed couples, which is reasonable considering that there were many more males among the unmarried immigrants, particularly before mass immigration. Plus there was a cultural bias; I mean, an European male was likely to mate a humble Amerindian woman, but a humble Amerindian male would rarely marry an European or europeanized female. We don’t need to resort to rape and slavery to find an explanation, and there’s no evidence of this mix happening during the campaigns against indigenous peoples (the population was already very much mixed when those started).

  On the other hand, the larger European component highly owes to this territory not being much populated before mass immigration from Europe, unlike, e.g., Peru and Mexico. The amounts of Amerindians killed during those campaigns are estimated in the order of a hundred thousand, while immigrants from Europe were more than 6 million. Amerindians remained, mostly in the north of the country, but they were not that numerous, so the population ‘whitened’ yet retained a certain native ethnicity.

  I could go on, mentioning the role of British capital in the troubles sustained by indigenous peoples and their descendants, like if that kind of competition for which country behaved worse was helpful to a Falklands/Malvinas debate. But, to put it short, I didn’t find the description and data that you offered to be helpful or even accurate, hence my comment.

  Regarding the Argentine attitudes, to begin with, you fail to consider the pluralism that exists among 40 million Argentinians, including a large amount of self-criticism, particularly of jingoistic stereotyping (if that’s what you mean by ‘this idiotic nationalism’). Public opinion hardly glorifies the 1982 war, they don’t expect Britain to not have responded. I’m sorry but you are not representing anything resembling the opinion in Argentina.

  There were about 1800 islanders at the time, which is less than ‘thousands’.

  Regarding the comments pertaining Falklands/Malvinas, if you’re really interested, you may find this thread useful:

  http://baexpats.org/articles/21587-argentinas-1833-myth-population-expelled-de-bunked-yet-again.html