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Liborio Justo (1902-2003)
Rogelio García Lupo
Thought and action
dominated Liborio Justo's long life, his work as a writer and a historian
should be closely read at present in order to decipher
some
of the most worrying contradictions of twentieth century Argentina.
His autobiography, written when he was only 36 - when for a moment he
imagined his death was close -, is a magnificent portrait of an era which
challenges the passage of time. This should not surprise us as , on a
personal basis, he also challenged time and lived for over a century,
constructing, with his restless search of what he called "the truth of his
time", a work whose reappraisal has already started.
At one
point, Justo summarized his position towards life asserting that "first it
was thought, then it was action and later thought again", a formula which
embraces his medical studies , his voluntary recruitment as a forestry
labourer in the Paraguayan Chaco, the inevitable European forays of the
youth of his class, whale fishing in the South Seas and his intense visit
to a USA then devastated by an economic and social crisis, which branded
him for ever as a revolutionary.
Fiction writing was, for Liborio Justo, almost an indulgence in the midst
of his militancy for world revolution, the utopia that inspired him till
his very last days, lighting his heart with hope in spite of the defeats.
The subordination of the vigorous Justo narrator to the political Justo
was an iron compromise which deprived Argentine literature of its own
Conrad, as can be surmised early on from his tragic stories about
Patagonia published with the title of "La Tierra Maldita" ("The Cursed
Land") and in the dramatic tales of the islands and marshes of the Delta
of the Parana River, subject of "Rio Abajo" ("Downstream").
Justo was reserved about his literary work, masking his identity under
the pseudonym Lobodon Garra , considering that the time he dedicated to
fiction would be better employed on urgent revolutionary matters.
His creative work was sacrificed in the altar of ideology to the extent
that some of his best narrative was relegated to a secondary position ,
behind some of his most extreme political pamphlets- so difficult to
understand nowadays- full of names of characters now forgotten by history.
It is before them that the rough South seamen and the Patagonian
adventurers seem to be raising their heads, as enduring creations of an
exceptional writer.
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