Journeys into Death, Belonging, and Hope

"¿Y por qué no lo escribió en español?" were my sister's less than enthusiastic first words when I shared with her one of the best books of 1998, a book I thought spoke to our own bicultural experience. Why, indeed, didn't Ariel Dorfman write Heading South, Looking North in Spanish? Was it because he was already looking South, to Latin America? These are only two of the questions that emerge from this autobiographical meditation on death and life, dying and surviving, exile and belonging, silence and language, North and South America, conquest and resistance, forgetting and remembering, identity and dualit, and, always, hope. Heading South, Looking North weaves together these themes in a narrative about a life forever marked by the experience of biculturalism and the events along the Chilean road to socialism and the military coup that buried it.

Heading South, Looking North is contrapuntal in structure: chapters telling about the author's experience of the events of September 1973 are followed by chapters describing his growing up. Thus, two lines of narration emerge and eventually come together. The book opens with Dorfman explaining how (he still cannot tell why) he should not even be around to tell the story: but for a series of choices, not all of them his, he might have been at the Chilean presidential palace on September 11, 1973, the day the military stormed it. The second narrative strand tells his own story from his birth to Jewish immigrant parents in Argentina, to his early childhood and Americanization in New York, to his youth in Chile, his adoption of and by that unhappy country, his exile in Argentina and, eventually, again in the United States (the North).

In many ways, the more intensely personal aspects of the book are also the most interesting and successful. Yet, they are less personal than they seem at first. Dorfman discloses with charming honesty the secrets of those (un)fortunate enough to get to choose an answer to the question "where are you from?"--often just another way of asking "whose side are you on?" The answer has as much to do with loyalties and commitments as it does with language. Language is, of course, mere words. Yet, it is also the medium through which we experience the world--everything from "joy" to "the social relations of production" is grasped only through words. And words differ. While there is not a single concept that cannot be translated, many words have no simple equivalent--and the fact of using one set rather than another puts us in context with different people. It is not only a question of who understands us or of who associates with whom. Language, especially idiomatic language, conveys basic attitudes about the relationship of person to world in ways not immediately apparent. Thus, Dorfman remarks how in Spanish "se [le] fué la micro" (the bus went away from him) while, in English, he "missed the bus" (221). What does it mean to experience a world governed, among other things, by a myth of helplessness? What does it mean to live a world governed, among other things, by a myth of personal responsibility? Can one person share and identify with the stories of two peoples? Can that person be accepted by either, or both, as their own? Can the particularity of one experience transcend the particularities of two cultures?

Dorfman, at different points in his life, comes up with different solutions to a dilemma which is in many ways also the dilemma of Latin America. "Born into Spanish" in Argentina, he grows up in New York when his parents flee the fascism of Peròn. In a New York hospital, Dorfman the child decides to learn English and forget his Spanish; soon he abandons his given name, Vladimiro (yes, after V.I. himself), for Eddie. He will insist on using this name when his parents flee a McCarthyite North for the safe haven of Chile. Later, as he recovers his Spanish, he will continue to write in English until he decides to give up on English during a 1968 sojourn in Berkeley. This was also when Eddie became Ariel. To this day, Dorfman does not seem to have entirely reconciled the contradictions: he is still Ariel but, as Jesse Helms reminded the U.S. Senate in a mid-1980s diatribe, his legal name is still Vladimiro.

Dorfman's questions and dilemmas bear upon our understanding of language and ask that we consider its relation to culture and to political and social structure. They are also questions that confront two specific cultures and their relationship. One of them, the North, has for much of this century spread its values to the four winds with a success unmatched by anything else since Christianity or Islam. The other, the South, is born into Spanish but must always look North. Latin America is a place where a syncretic culture made of Mediterranean, indigenous, and African elements clashes with North American commercialism and power to produce the very uniqueness of Latin America. Perhaps this is why these dilemmas have, in one way or another, long informed the work of its intellectuals.

ARIEL DORFMAN FITS WELL THE MODEL OF THE LATIN AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL---a figure patterned after a certain reading of the "renaissance man." Dorfman is a scholar of literature and a literary critic; he is a playwright who has written television and radio ads; having served as cultural and media advisor to Salvador Allende's chief of staff, he has a claim to having participated in the governance of his (one of his?) country; today mostly he is a prominent novelist and essayist. In the North, he is probably best known for his Death and the Maiden in which he explores the fine lines between retributive justice and vengeance and between beauty, and horror through a victim unexpectedly confronted with her torturer. (The novel was the basis for the Roman Polanski film of the same title.) More recently, Konfidenz demonstrates the complex connections between his own work and existentialism and magic realism as it takes on questions of history and memory through a multilayered tale of espionage, exile, confrontation with international fascism, and a long telephone conversation that may, or may not, have taken place.

While the memory may be receding, in the South, Dorfman's name is still associated with a 1972 work, Para leer al pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), where he and Armand Mattelart present the cultural imperialism thesis through an innovative critique of the culture industry and its products. There, they take on a much beloved and apparently innocent artifact and demonstrate through a close reading its role in the spread of the ideology and cultural hegemony of North American capitalism. Less sure today of his criticism, Dorfman wonders in Heading South, Looking North whether he may "have exaggerated the villainy of the United States and the nobleness of Chile" (252). Despite these doubts, he remains just as committed to the ideals that attracted him to socialism in the first place: democracy, food, and dignity for the downtrodden, justice for victims and torturers, and, above all, hope.

Hope is difficult to sustain now that Disney "has ended up by gobbling up the globe" and Dorfman and those of us still committed to those ideals are left "remembering [our] dead" (254). It was different when Allende came to power at the head of the Popular Unity (UP) coalition in 1970. Then, it seemed possible to transform the world. This, of course, had been conceivable in Cuba in 1959, in central Europe in 1919, in Russia in 1917, perhaps in Paris in 1871. But Chile was different: there the road to socialism began at the ballot box. Despite the doubts (well founded, as it turned out) of the revolutionary left throughout Latin America, progressives everywhere at the end of the 1960s could believe that a new era was dawning. Chile would be different: it would bring about revolutionary transformation without the bloodshed, the purges, or the red and white terrors which had befallen every previous socialist victory. In fact, the Popular Unity government was overthrown by one of the bloodiest military regimes ever to victimize Latin America, and Dorfman's own musings about the reasons for the collapse of this tragic experiment are not especially useful or insightful. Mostly, he suggests that the left in power became arrogant and insensitive to the concerns not so much of the working class as of the liberal intellectuals and the petty bourgeois stratum of independent truckers, public employees and the like who should have been its allies. This insensitivity became an arrogance that "reduc[ed] everything to politics and ideology," that concluded by "squeezing the mystery out of life and explaining away too easily what at times has no explanation" (259).

It is certainly the case that the Allende government and its supporters often acted with disdain toward major sectors of the population. It is also true that there were many on the Leninist and Trotskyist lefts who did not take seriously the need to protect democratic institutions. And, surely, just about every major progressive group in Chile was indifferent, if not hostile, to the aspirations of women and indigenous peoples. Yet, it is not at all clear that a more moderate course or a more feminist course or a more multiculturalist course would have prevented the authoritarian outcome. Should the Allende government have compromised its program to death as the Mitterrand coalition would some ten years later? Would this have prevented the murders, the tortures, the disappearances? As Dorfman himself points out (32-35), important elements of the middle layers, such as the independent truck drivers, were early on organized against the Allende government with United States-provided resources. Middle class and wealthy women were certain to experience the shortages that inspired the "March of the Pots and Pans" as a challenge to their gender role interests: it was they who marched, not working class and peasant women who had always had to cope with such challenges. At any rate, once again, the March was itself engineered by the long term opponents of the UP. Furthermore, Chilean democracy was hardly the only one to collapse before a military regime in the authoritarian 1970s. In fact, it may even be useful to think of the Chilean events in a broader context, the context of "the sixties."

THE UPHEAVALS IN CHILE WERE VERY MUCH A PART OF THE RADICAL WAVE that swept the world between 1959 and 1973, from Havana and Berkeley to Paris and Prague to Tokyo, Hanoi, and Mexico City. Established ruling groups everywhere were shocked and filled with anger and despair--con còlera--when ground was broken for the Chilean road to socialism. This path was to be built from hopes the Chilean working classes and much of the Chilean left shared with so many others at that time. By 1970, however, a countermovement was well on its way. This was also a time, let's not forget, when conservative political scientists such as Samuel P. Huntington, Michel Crozier, and Samuel Brittain were decrying a "crisis of democracy" and the "ungovernability of democracy." In Chile and the United States ruling groups were committed in principle to the golpe because their long term interests and their ideological proclivities prescribed the obliteration not only of the fact but even more of the memory of a government and a movement that made it possible for people to "dar[e] to believe that [they] could build a just society without shedding blood" (54). This is not the place to engage in a long disquisition on how the Allende government might have survived. It is, however, worth noting that the Chilean was very much a part of a broader historical movement. It is also worth remembering that the challenge UP Chile represented was simply too fundamental to go unanswered. Mostly, it is important to remember the challenge and the hope.

In this, Heading South, Looking North is of great help. By telling his story, which in so many ways is also our story, Dorfman manages to inspire thoughtful hope by keeping alive the memory of the dead. Theirs was a different language. It was not Spanish or English as such. It was the language of people who saw possibilities no longer apparent. Sadly, those men and women are no longer with us. Yet by taking stock of their struggles and relating them to today's concerns Dorfman allows us to keep alive the hope for democracy, food, and dignity for the downtrodden, for justice for victims and torturers, and for a meaningful freedom for all. Even if he did not write it in Spanish--aunque no lo escribiò en español. . . .

Contents of No. 27