NYPR Archives & Preservation
Ariel Dorfman: Exile and Disappearance
With a voice that is gentle yet insistent and relentless in its search for truth, Ariel Dorfman describes his and every caring person’s obligation to not forget those secretly killed by totalitarian regimes. In this 1988 talk interspersed with poems, the Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist and poet asks us to remember “the remote dead . . . those whom we can hardly remember, who can’t speak anymore.” Dorfman’s experience of loss is immediate and intimate: many of his friends were murdered during the regime of Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator.
In this forty-five minute recording, Dorfman uses several short, carefully crafted poems to try to capture the brutal abstract and solitary experience of the dead and the dreadful feeling of loss felt by the living. He reads his poem “Hope”, a plangent tale of parents seeking word of a lost son, who find surreal solace from reports of him screaming in pain while being tortured in jail; such news means he may still be alive. In “Corncake”, the poet weaves a vignette of despair – a mother stolen from her family, who is now remembered by a kettle on the stove. In “Nuptial” a lover converses with his missing spouse, telling her “in my dream you scream and I can’t make you stop.”
Dorfman seems fated to have become a leading voice for the souls of desaparecidos, those who have been “disappeared” for speaking out against brutal dictatorships. Born May 6, 1942 in Buenos Aires -- the son of Eastern European Jews who fled Hitler’s Europe at the outbreak of World War II -- he spent his early years in the United States, where his father taught economics. In 1954, the family moved to Chile, where he studied literature at the Universidad de Chile and achieved early acclaim criticizing North America’s influence on Latin American culture. In 1970, Salvador Allende, then the democratically elected Socialist president of Chile, appointed Dorfman to his cabinet as Cultural Adviser.
On September 10, 1973, the night before General Pinochet launched his infamous coup, Dorfman unknowingly switched shifts at the presidential palace with his good friend, Claudio Jimeno. His friend was murdered along with Allende by Pinochet henchmen. Spared death, Dorfman fled Chile with his young family, traveling to Paris, Amsterdam and, finally, the United States. During his exile and continuing upon his periodic returns to Chile before and after the reemergence of democracy there, Dorfman has been on a mission to bear witness, to use words to bring back those who have been denied by political evil their time and space in life.
In works like his play Death and the Maiden and novels such as Hard Rain, Widows, and The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Dorfman explores how a state exerts control over its people by imposing death. He notes that Hitler first perfected the technique of making people disappear for political reasons, transporting victims to distant death sites so that their graves could not become a rallying point or memorial. By keeping corpses hidden, the repressors deny the bereaved an object for mourning, extending sorrow into an endless process. This technique was perversely refined in numerous Latin American countries such as Uruguay, Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, and, of course, Chile. The refinement: citizens were disappeared not by an occupying force, but by their own state. In Chile, the state’s efforts to extend control went beyond death. Thus, when a village found that thirteen of its men were executed and their bodies dumped in a mine, the government sealed the mine to prevent it from becoming a grieving place.
But Dorfman insists that the mind can go where the body cannot. So while a repressive state may be able to destroy thousands of its people, it is not able to destroy the imagination of the living, who remain tied to a nostalgia connected to the past. Dorfman believes that it falls to writers like himself to make the future possible by creating the words that allow the dead to speak even to those who are yet to be born.
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Note: The Ariel Dorfman talk was originally presented at the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library on April 14, 1988 and broadcast as part of the Voices at the NYPL series over WNYC on April 4, 1993. The talk is followed by a short documentary report (twelve minutes) describing the various international organizations that assist those who have experienced the loss of loved ones at the hands of totalitarian regimes or have survived politically imposed torture and exile.