The Messages People Carry | Alicia Partnoy

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Messages That Preserve Reality

Alicia: My daughter was a year and a half when I was arrested, so I was separated from my child. For the five months that I was disappeared, I didn't know what had happened to her. They try to break this relationship. They try to break everything human in you. And so if you manage to communicate, write it down.

CJ: Welcome to Reculture, my name is CJ Casciotta. This is a show in search of better messages. Messages that don't just grab attention, but actually help people orient, especially in confusing moments. In the last episode, we talked a lot about artifacts—messages that brands, leaders, and organizations create that continue shaping people long after they're made. What I want to do on this episode is play you a conversation I had recently because it is one of the most profound examples of the power of artifacts I've encountered in a really long time. So in 1977, a woman named Alicia Partnoy was disappeared by Argentina's military dictatorship.

She was just a young mom at the time, separated from her 18-month-old daughter. She was blindfolded in prison and tortured inside the regime's secret detention center that they called "The Little School." While she was there, she wrote poems, stories, and memories. Not because she was trying to build an audience or a brand—things we're very familiar with today—but because writing became the only way of preserving reality for her, creating something people could eventually point to, reference, and return to. The beauty of all of this is decades later, those writings would help serve as testimony in trials against the very dictatorship that imprisoned her.

The reason this matters is we live in a very strange and disorienting moment right now where it is increasingly hard to know what is real, what lasts, or what to trust. If you are wondering what the strategy should be, let me offer something really clear: make messages that become artifacts, that orient people, that hold, not distract, that are steeped in human experience and emotion. This is the work, people. Clarity and meaning are the things that get results once the fog lifts. Just ask Alicia. Here's our conversation recorded live in Los Angeles, along with my good friend, Esteban Gast.

Alicia Partnoy on Survival, Solidarity, and Human Connection

Esteban: I’m so curious—and I realize this is an impossibly large question—but how do you begin to think about the things you went through, and maybe even right after that moment where you were able to take the blindfold off? How do you even begin to think about that?

Alicia: Not much thinking at the very beginning, just enduring. This was 1977 when they got to me. They came to my house, and I was there with my daughter. My husband was working. It was noontime. I was blindfolded there with my hands tied and forced to lay on the mattress, and we were tortured. We survived this because of the international solidarity, because of the work of the other people in the movement who did not get scared. As much as I'm triggered today by what is going on in our streets here in Los Angeles, in Minneapolis, and the whole country, I'm also heartened by the solidarity. That's for me the center of whatever I call survival now.

Poetry, Storytelling, and Bearing Witness

CJ: Would you read us a poem that makes sense, or maybe attempted to make sense of the world you were living in, especially when that injustice was happening to you?

Alicia: You got me thinking with this message thing. I thought we were going to be getting together, thinking of messages and slogans and things that work and not working. And I say, what the heck? You got me thinking a lot. I see myself as a bridge poet, and I usually don't write out of rage, but this was before justice was done. It was before the trials. It was before the validation of the voice of the survivors. So this was my message.

“They asked me for my message as though it were a cornerstone or offered some kind of salvation.

My message, like the postman, like envelopes, I bring only facts: screams, torture, that great injustice, roots without water, they disappeared.

My message, if they truly insist on it, will pour down like a bitter waterfall on their bellies; then they will either take off walking or stay rooted in themselves waiting for my message.”

So this is in Revenge of the Apple. The title poem is: "We are all rotten apples. We were thrown out of the crate because we were rotten. Now we are cider. We'll kill our tormentors by making them so drunk," because cider in our country is alcoholic. "It's what you have now. There wasn't something like that back in the eighties in the States that I knew of. So that..."

CJ: ...you’re saying you were the original hipster.

Esteban: We’re living in the future.

Why Storytelling Can Become an Act of Resistance

CJ: Okay, all right. So this gets at something. You have one of my new favorite quotes of all time. You ever have one of those moments where it's like, this is now, this will forever be one of my favorite things? You said that poetry or storytelling can be an act of resistance, which I think is...can serve as an act of resistance.

Writing Poems in Prison and Preserving Humanity

Alicia: I started reciting poetry in the prison in public; it was forbidden. So we would hide in the showers, and somebody was keeping watch. If the guard came, we would just pretend we were taking showers or just nothing. My daughter was a year and a half when I was arrested, so I was separated from my child. For the five months that I was disappeared, I didn't know what had happened to her. I could talk on and on about what happened in that secret detention place, in that killing place, or in the prison, but the worst pain was the psychological torture of not knowing what they had. They would tell me they had my daughter. They could tell me all kinds of lies, but luckily she was with my parents. The poems that I would write were for my daughter. I couldn't touch my daughter for three years, and the short stories for prisoners could be sent to their kids too. They try to break this relationship. This is what happens: they try to break everything human in you. And so if you manage to communicate, I could send these little poems.

Esteban: That's really beautiful that when thinking about what's the most human thing you can do, you chose poetry in that, right? When they're trying to take away your humanity, you chose poetry as the way to reinsert your humanity.

Communication, Memory, and the Power of Human Presence

Alicia: The most human thing to do is to be present for the others. When we were blindfolded with our hands tied, we were beaten up for talking. When we were starved, we collected a lot of information. That information, plus what is in the book The Little School, was used as evidence in the trials—mind you, 40 years later or 30 years later. Write it down. If you are a survivor, write it down, write it down. You're going to forget the details, and they're going to question your memory a lot. So write it down.

Political Polarization, Democracy, and Social Trust

Esteban: How are you thinking about this current moment in terms of American politics? What are things that we can be thinking about now to make sure that no one else has to live the stories that you're living?

Alicia: I used to say, "Well, you have a Congress. We didn't have a Congress. You have a Congress." So I get a lot of hope from this Congress, but I think this is the most desperate moment I've seen in this state. And we have to save ourselves, to protect ourselves, to keep going.

Staying, Leaving, and Fighting for the Places We Love

Esteban: This is a question from the audience, and I think it's really beautiful, and I think people are grappling with where you draw the line between staying and fighting for a place you maybe no longer believe in, or going to a different place, leaving, going to a different place that maybe aligns more with your values?

Alicia: I don't think I'm in a place I don't believe in ever because I suffered the consequences, and I was with 800 women in that prison for political prisoners. I'm always figuring out, am I in the place I want to be? I am in the place I want to be. And thanks to you, because you find me in this place where I am. And you let me amplify this and you let me confirm that I want to be in this place. I don't know if I answered that. I'm not sure.

Esteban: You keep saying that after the most beautiful thing. You say the most poetic things and then you're like, "I don't know if I'm saying anything." Everyone's crying.

Beyond Content: Why Bearing Witness Still Matters

CJ: For me, what I'm realizing during this conversation is sometimes I can over-complicate what can be done, but bearing witness is something that throughout history people have done, and we've seen the results of that. You just simplify it to say, "No, write it down, record it, be part of the legacy." We talk so much about content this and content that; we live so much in a "content" world that we forget about the real reason for these gifts of communication, which is to bear witness to this human life, the love and the suffering together. That is something that I'm realizing anew because of you and your story.

Alicia: Thank you. In solidarity, and having your support network. Cecilia Vicuña, Chilean poet, says, "We open words, palabras. Words become weapons." And she says solidarity in Spanish means to give and give some: Sol, y dar, y dar. Sol is sand, dar is to give.

CJ: Give the sun.

Alicia: To give and give sun.

Why Humans Return to Poetry During Uncertain Times

CJ: You know, one of the things that Alicia made me think about is how human beings keep returning to poetry during moments of uncertainty, transition, grief, and disorientation, because language doesn't just express what people are feeling.

Sometimes it becomes the thing that preserves reality itself. Alicia’s poems didn't just help her survive psychologically; they helped serve as testimony. They brought people to justice. They codified reality. Whether it's prison poems written in Argentina in the '70s or younger poets today trying to make sense of our present moment, I think there's something worth paying attention to here.

Underneath all the noise and the performance and the content for content's sake, people are still trying to leave artifacts behind that matter, and you can't kill that, and it feels pretty primal. Before we close, I wanted to share one more example of somebody writing not just to perform but to remember. This is my good friend, poet Arielle Astoria, who also joined us in LA for that same gathering.

Arielle Astoria on Grief, Meaning, and Making Something Beautiful

Arielle: I am fresh on the tips, on the edge, on the crevices of grief. I lost my grandmother a week ago Sunday, my granny. As I was on my walk, I was like, okay, “lessons for the living.”

At the end of the day, who's to say all of this actually matters?

Maybe it's not the meaning of it all, but the making of it.

How do you take lemons and turn them into lemonade?

You squeeze all the juice, rind the peel, don't miss a drop, add water depending on your preference, add sugar, but not too much—just enough to cut the sour,

unless you're into that sort of thing.

So life, life is all that.

Making something that you can't quite sip slow and taste as you go.

Mistakes might be made.

It won't taste the same every time because you will be different and the ingredients will be different.

So enjoy while we have right now because it won't be like this again.

So what then if it all matters?

What if it's all needed, and nothing is wasted?

CJ: Thanks so much for listening. If these conversations resonate with you, you can explore more episodes, writing, and ideas at notes.reculture.tv. If you'd like to learn more about Reculture, our sense-making studio focused on brand, culture, and media advisory, our home is reculture.tv.