Writing Return in the Works of Laura Alcoba and Lina Meruane: Renaming the World

This paper focuses on Manèges: Petite histoire argentine (2007), by Laura Alcoba, and Volverse Palestina (2013), by Lina Meruane, two narratives that blur temporal boundaries and literary genres, and pivot around the concept and the performance of ‘return’. Against the backdrop of memory and inheritance studies, it seeks to understand the multi-layered violence that underpins the contexts in which the works are inscribed: Argentina under the military junta and post-Nakba Palestine, and how these echo in the present. The analysis will foreground the several in-betweens inhabited by Meruane and Alcoba’s characters as, in an exercise that places memory and imagination in dialogue with each another, they make sense of their selves, their inherited silences, their pasts, and how their works can generate new readings of our future. The returns that underpin Volverse Palestina and Manèges add nuance to how we might understand the present of Palestine and Argentina and give us the syntax and vocabulary with which to read and narrate other contexts, and to expand our sense of the possible. These works thus put forward the idea of ‘return’ as a political and prospective gesture that might allow us to imagine new ways of naming the world, and thus of being in it.