Around the poetry of the refugee camps: two approximations of the testimony (Celso Amieva and Teresa Gracia)

The present article considers two radically different approaches to the experience of internment camps. Celso Amieva's La Almohada de Arena offers a versified chronicle of the moral and material conditions of detention for Spanish Republican refugees who in 1939 most stood to fear the reprisals of Franco's regime. The testimony is clearly militant. Teresa Gracia's course in Destierro rests on a therapeutic style of writing which explores the world of vestigial memories, even if this means cultivating a form of dissidence with ideological rationality.