La fosa abierta : Anarchivo emocional de un milagro económico

In this book, Brigitte Vasallo challenges two silences: the silence of family history, imposed by gender violence, and the silence of political history, imposed by the dictatorship and the Transition. It is a memory without monuments, beginning in her family's place of origin, the mountains of Chandrexa de Queixa, and expanding to 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 transformed descendants of that diaspora, orphaned of meaning. In order to reclaim her mother's elusive history, Vasallo contacts Gilles Charmat, the boy she raised in Paris as a domestic servant. The letters she writes to him, and his silence, are the thread that runs through *The Open Grave* and embody the difficulty subaltern subjects face in accessing their own history, always guarded by the dominant classes. The author seeks a language that unites 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 unique space of 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.