Recuerdos de la prisión: The Politics of Being Norah Borges

Norah Borges was arrested and imprisoned in 1948 for her participation in a demonstration against the Argentinian President, Juan Perón. In critical material relating to Jorge Luis Borges, this incident is often cited as one which crystallized his resentment of Perón, but no one has yet studied the effect it had on Norah or on her work. This article explores Norah Borges’s political ideology through a variety of sources. It notes the ways in which Norah deflects attention from her arrest in interviews and uses Norah’s personal correspondence with her cousin Esther Haedo de Amorim to reconsider this public reticence. It will analyse two of Norah’s later works in detail to highlight her ability to integrate politicized events into the ‘mundo más pequeño y perfecto’, which she made, arguably, both an aesthetic and ethical creed.