Left-wing music from Latin America: Mercedes Sosa: A biography that is not

Navel gazing in literature, or what some spend it on, is legion. If you visited the Mainz Mini Press Fair in the past, you would find quite interesting hand press publishers there, or the art of letterpress printing. But the whole thing was probably largely financed by the egomania of the exhibiting fast-writers, who were a dime a dozen, and by their consumers. They got along well. Orgies of back-slapping for trivialities were the norm. This kind of misunderstanding, unbelievably, still exists today.

Recently the book “Mercedes Sosa – The Voice of Hope”. An encounter that changed my life” was published, written by the Danish Anette Christensen, who lives in Bodrum, Turkey. Numerous exciting works have been published in German-speaking countries about the Argentine songwriter Mercedes Sosa (1935–2009), most of which are hardly available anymore. An updated biography is necessary and would be exciting.

The book begins with acknowledgments, which is how it could end as far as I’m concerned. Christensen, for example, thanks her “investors” who “enabled her to work with first-class editors.” Christensen never met or even knew Sosa. “I first heard about Mercedes Sosa when her death was announced in the news.” And now, after “researching Mercedes Sosa for more than 7,000 hours,” Christensen is “a recognized Mercedes Sosa ambassador throughout the world World,” says the laundry list for this book. But Christensen has neither been to Latin America nor used Spanish-language sources. Instead, she has discovered a kind of surrogate mother in the dead Mercedes Sosa, with whose help she now wants to master her life better after several traumas. She refers to “research results from neurobiology”.

What she then puts together about Mercedes Sosa in the first part of the book is an unreflective retelling, uncoordinated and extremely incomplete. To do this, the Dane creates a psychological profile of the folk singer, puts it over the dead woman and draws her conclusions from it. These are very poverty-romanticizing interpretations of their texts; Christensen assumes a “mentality of poverty”.

She states that Mercedes Sosa joined the Communist Party, but left shortly afterwards. In an interview with the Argentine writer Martín Caparrós around the millennium, Sosa remarked: “I joined the CP in ’64, ’65 and left again in ’86, ’87. I don’t know if I would have been a communist in Russia. For us it was a crush, in Russia? I have no idea…” Sosa began singing at a time when most artists and intellectuals were left-wing. Among the “folkloristas” there was a communist nucleus that was in charge: César Isella, Armando Tejada Gómez and Horacio Guarany. She didn’t need Lenin to understand where the injustice was. Sosa did not believe in armed struggle.

When Christensen tries to place her work in a historical context, the Argentine one of the past decades, it becomes adventurous. She neither mentions the “Ezeiza massacre” (1973), in which right-wing Peronists lured left-wing Peronists into an ambush when Perón returned, nor the “Rodrigazo” (1975), a brutal attack on real wages that led to the military coup in 1976. nor the 1978 World Cup. Anyone who doesn’t understand that and ignores that doesn’t understand Argentina.

There are many serious errors in Christensen: Tucumán is not a “state” but a province and La Plata is not a “resort.” The summer evening of 1983 was a winter evening. The “Banjo Flores” district in Baires is called “Bajo Flores”, the border town with Bolivia is not called “La Quack”, but “La Quiaca”. The singer Jorge Cafrune is not Jorge Carne (flesh). A song by Victor Heredia is given as “Ottava Centimos”, it is called “Todavía cantamos” (We still sing), his important song against the genocidal murderers is not called “Inzensier” but “Razón de vivir” (Reason to live). And Sosa’s musician friend from Brazil is not called Chico Baroque, but Buarque.

However, I recommend the second part of the book to all suffering souls who like to feast on the misfortunes of others. It’s all about Anette Christensen and how she saves the world of Anette. Guaranteed without a shooting rifle. The learner dies last.

Anette Christensen: Mercedes Sosa – The Voice of Hope. An encounter that changed my life. Translated by Arno Maierbrugger, BoD, 274 pages, br., 20 €.