Bridges of words, from silence to voice: Julián Axat's Diario de un defensor de pibes chorros

Abstract

Diario de un defensor de pibes chorros, published in 2022, is the culmination of a writing itinerary that began more than a decade earlier, when Julián Axat took a position of juvenile criminal defender in the city of La Plata. In this paper we approach Axat's book from the point of view of the forms assumed in it by the tension between voice and silence, which we consider to be the driving force of such writing process. We propose that the remnant of silence that seems to persist in the author's writing about his experience as an advocate not only responds to the difficulties of representing the voices of the “Others” –the young people he defends, marginalized, stigmatized and attacked by the State–, but also to the dilemmas involved in constructing a voice of his own as a narrator. We argue that Axat manages to build that voice by creatively inscribing himself in certain zones of the Argentine literary tradition, linked to Walsh and Arlt, and, above all, due to the insistence of (re)writing, which resists even in the knowledge of the inevitability of a certain ineffable remnant.