Patch and writing by Hannah.  Alicia's daughter Ruti made the patch that lies directly above this one on the quilt, and her mother Raquel made the one that lies directly below it. 

“I, Alicia Partnoy, am still alive.” 

This is the sentence she repeated to herself every morning in the “Little School,” a prison that held disappeared people in Argentina during the military dictatorship of 1976-1983.  And indeed, over 20 years later, Alicia Partnoy is still alive.  This simple fact of her survival distinguishes her from most of the other prisoners in the Little School.  Furthermore, she has been both able and willing to share her story with the world through writing, teaching, and speaking.

In February of 2001, Professor Betsy Cohn brought Alicia, her mother, and her daughter to Goucher College.  We witnessed a wonderful living history as the three women spoke, and their stories stayed with us even as they left.  Now I bring them together in a new way on this quilt.  Alicia herself could not make me a patch, but both Raquel (her mother) and Ruti (her daughter) have done so.  I waited until I received both of these patches before starting Alicia’s, and have interacted with them here. 

The Little School[1] abounds with hopeful imagery and creative moments.  I have not created the symbols on this patch; I have simply taken them from Alicia’s narrative and combined them in a way that makes sense to me.  The first symbol I knew I wanted to incorporate on this patch was bread.  Prisoners in the Little School had almost no possessions, and sometimes the daily bread ration was all Alicia and others owned.  As a sign of solidarity with each other, as well as the simple kindness of giving to others their only possession even as hunger was enveloping everyone, people would find ways to share their bread.  Sometimes they would ask the guards; other times they would sneak bread to each other behind blankets.  Alicia writes that “pieces of bread go up and down at the will of stomachs and hearts.”[2]  In this patch Alicia is passing bread up to her daughter and down to her mother.  The perfect placement of these hands, reaching out not only to the other patches but specifically to the women on them, was actually coincidental.  The patch has taken on a life of its own.

Another beautiful coincidence has occurred with the raindrops.  First, the significance: one day in the Little School it begins to rain, and the roof starts to leak.  Drops of water fall into buckets and onto floors; at one point the guards even try Chinese water torture under a leak, something Alicia finds more amusing than torturous.  The rain reminds Alicia of freedom, and when she realizes there is a leak right next to her bed that she can reach out and touch, she whispers to her friend, “I own a leak”… Another possession in this torture camp that tries to steal everything.  I placed the drops (the leak) where I did simply so they would fall on Alicia, so that she could own the leak.  Looking at the three patches now, however, I see that the drops come directly from Ruti, who is standing on a patch of grass, arms raised to the sun.  The leak is a leak of freedom, a connection to the outside world, a connection to Ruti.  Going in the opposite direction, the water could be nurturing the ground Ruti stands on, the flowers that surround her. 

The drops then fall through Alicia’s patch and land on the edge of Raquel’s blindfold (assuming the woman is Raquel).  I imagine the drops flowing through the blindfold, the doves, into Raquel’s head/eyes/body.  The blue that surrounds Raquel and her scale could be the puddle from these drops.  The three patches are connected through the freedom and life that water brings.

Looking at Raquel’s scale reminded me of a scene in The Little School where Alicia arm wrestles one of the guards in order to distract him from beating another prisoner.  The struggle, the attempt to find balance, to throw off balance, to tip the scales in the direction of both equity and humanism – these themes connect the stories.  Alicia and the guard wrestle, and Alicia, as skinny as she is, actually beats the guard.  They have several matches, and by the end the guard has “won” easily, but Alicia has successfully diverted the guard’s attention from her friend Benja and saved him from at least a few blows. 

Sight finds its way into all three patches.  In this patch, Alicia is blindfolded for the simple reason that she was blindfolded for months in the Little School.  Still, she was able to see out of the bottom of the blindfold enough to notice the slippers she had been given: one had a huge plastic flower; the other didn’t.  The importance of the slippers on the patch is twofold: first, they remind us that Alicia was indeed able to see through the blindfold; secondly, they show the absurdity of Alicia’s situation and remind us how strong Alicia and others had to have been to stay alive – truly alive – in the midst of fake (plastic) life and very real death. 

This patch is for Alicia, in gratitude for her story and in deep appreciation for the strength and truth of her affirmation:

“I, Alicia Partnoy, am still alive.”