That “the personal is political” is widely accepted thanks to the feminist movement, but that “the political is personal” seems entangled with difficult questions of witnessing, memory, history, and generational trauma. This article is about the latter: the political that is also personal, and the fear of outgrowing the timeframe of memory. Today Chile commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the American-backed coup d’état that ended the democratically elected government of the Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973). The number of years — fifty — matters, because it marks the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of a generation of first-hand witnesses and victims.
