Novelist/public intellectual Ariel Dorfman cannot take language for granted. Early in the twentieth century, Ariel Dorfman’s parents fled tsarist Russia for Argentine: “My father left Odessa (now in Ukraine, then part of Greater Russia), my mother Kishinev (the capital of Moldova, once part of Romania, later of the Soviet Union). They each ended up in Argentina, where they met–in Spanish. They were both bilingual–my mother in Yiddish and Spanish, my father in Russian and Spanish. They made me in Spanish, you could say. So that was the language that caught me at birth.” A mother tongue of sorts, though not his mother’s (or father’s mother tongue). And at the age of three in 1945, the boy was thrust into English in the US, renouncing Spanish… Only to be dumped into Spanish (as a de facto monoglot speaker of English) nine years later.
Committed to Chile and the readopted Spanish language and the leftist regime the Nixon administration (plus ITT) were actively destabilizing, Dorfman believes that he should have died with President Salvador Allende when the coup headed by Gen. Pinochet strafed the presidential palace, where Dorfman worked (9/11/1973). He was ordered (by the party organization of the democratically elected president) to go into exile. The linguistic and other travails of these formative dislocation were the subject of Dorfman’s memoir, published a decade ago, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey.
His new memoir, Feeding on Dream: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, is not organized chronologically and presents something of a kaleidoscope of arrivals and departures. Following the Pinochet coup, Dorfman’s path that ran from the Argentine embassy in Santiago to the land of his birth to Paris and Amsterdam, where he and his wife and son (eventually, two) lived on charity while raising funds for the Chilean resistance. Being destitute in Paris kept French from being a language he liked to use. Dutch (which is more dissimilar to Spanish than French is) was not as tied to unpleasantness.
He was a blocked writer in any language until taking a job in the US, and returning to the English language he had embraced and then renounced. He accepted a job offer in Mexico City, but was denied a work permit and took a position teaching one semester a year at Duke, a temporary expedient that has continued, including through a time when he moved back to Chile after the restoration of democracy.
Large chunks of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile are from his 1990 journal (in translation? I’m not sure, though he wrote the memoir in English and then translated it into Spanish) concerning discomforts in the land filled with people who had tortured and/or disappeared Dorfman’s comrades. Those who served the dictatorship feared him and those who had not resented his success elsewhere, while they were living through the Pinochet reign of terror.
The second protracted residence in the US had turned Dorfman into an alien in Chile, if not into total comfort with being an American. He wrote the play “La Muerte y la doncella” (Death and the Maiden) in Chile, in Spanish. It became a huge international success and an excellent Roman Polanski movie, but when it finally was mounted in Chile received absurdly negative reviews (“the worst Chilean play ever staged”). Addressing what had happened (torture, murder, collusion etc.) was “inopportune” in the view of those living a cohabitation of victims and victimizers, both eager to forget what happened.
At a book tour stop here for the earlier memoir, (Heading North, Looking South) I heard Dorfman say that that book could not possibly have been composed in Spanish, because there is no confessional tradition in Spanish, that one does not put such personal feelings on display in Spanish. The new memoir is far more confessional and exploring of personal feelings, and impossible for Dorfman to conceive of writing in Spanish. At his San Francisco appearance last week (interviewed onstage at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center by Jewish Mexican/American writer Ilan Stavans, whose own memoir is entitled On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language), Dorfman added that the code of honor, which requires not acknowledging shameful deeds and thoughts, is engrained in Spanish. In the book, despite “unrepentant” being in its subtitle, Dorfman discusses his shame at having misled some supporters that a cut of the money raised went to the party and dismay that it took so long for him to acknowledge the crimes of the Soviet Empire (until attempted suppression of the workers’ Solidarity movement in Poland). (Not that he was a communist before then, but a noncommunist not expressing his nonacceptance of how Chilean and other communists operated.)
Stavans probed the question of when did he stop being an exile, asking when an “exile” becomes an “immigrant.” Dorfman suggested that an exile has to be in danger, so that he probably ceased to be an exile when democracy was restored in Chile. He could legally/safely reside again in Chile… but like Joyce and Beckett in Ireland, could not breathe. He felt that he was an exile from the Chile he knew (with Allende) while living in Chile in 1990. “Expatriate” is probably the most apt label for his current status.
I had the chance to ask about the modifier, “unrepentant.” It seems to me that Dorfman regrets the cost of the series of exiles on his wife and sons and some of what he did in Europe – and he is certainly sorry about failures of the Allende government in which he served, difficult as it was for it to overcome US interference that culminated in planning and supporting the 1973 coup. Dorfman’s answer did not dispel my confusion. He said he did not repent of having gone into exile. As I’ve already noted, this was following orders. And he agreed that he had written about his regrets for some of what he did and its cost on his family. “I can forgive myself, but not what I did to others,” he said.
There is quite a bit on how the play “Death and the Maiden” came into being, practically nothing on his other writing in Feeding. He said there would be a third memoir focused on his creative life/works. He also said that he is a very dialogic teacher, urging students to read under the surface of texts – to read Talamudically, Stavans suggested, and Dorfman accepted.
Though he said there is no space for his writing in current Chile, he said he has never turned his back on addressing Chilean culture and society. And that tied to Pinochet as an antithesis as he has been, the Pinochet dictatorship does not figure in much of his writing (I’m not sure there is no influence in a play he said he is writing or has written and is being produced about Picasso in Nazi-occupied Paris; for that matter “Death and the Maiden” could as easily take place in Argentina as in Chile).
I’d advise readers to start with the first memoir. The chronology (written in a sly third-person) at the back of Feeding (which Dorfman told Stavans was his idea, not suggested by his publisher) is very helpful even to someone (like me) who had read the earlier memoir and knew the itinerary of places and languages. Dorfman is aware that he has been very lucky to survive and to prosper and to find voice (and audiences and publishers) in two languages.