A Conversation With: Author Ariel Dorfman

Courtesy of DSC Jaipur Literature Festival 2013 Ariel Dorfman.

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American writer, poet, playwright and essayist. He went into political exile in 1973 when President Salvador Allende Gossens of Chile died in a military coup and his democratically elected government was overthrown. Mr. Dorfman has been a strong voice against political oppression and human rights abuses. His notable works include “Death and the Maiden,” a play that was turned into a Hollywood film in 1994 by the same name. After living in Europe for several years, he settled in the United States and has taught literature and Latin American studies at Duke University for nearly three decades.

Mr. Dorfman is working on a libretto for an opera based on a story from the Upanishads, philosophical Hindu texts, that is scheduled to premiere in India in November. India Ink spoke to him earlier this year when he visited India.

Q.

What is it like being a writer in exile

A.

It is wonderful how the distance that I have created from Chile from Latin America allows me to come here, to have a certain distance and to become a person who is at home everywhere. I feel as if I can take Indian stories, make them mine and take them to the world.

Exile has been fundamental in my life. I started my exile when I was two-and-a-half years old. I left Argentina to go to New York, and I became an American and I adopted everything American. My father had to leave the States for Chile, and then I became a Chilean, and then I had to leave Chile because I became by then a “world person.”

The forces of the world and the local, of going home and losing home, have constantly buffeted me. And though I don’t desire this to anybody, it’s not a fate I wish upon anybody. It is a fate that I have now embraced. Rather, it’s a destiny that I have embraced because it has allowed me to write the way I write. I think to be in exile is a curse, and you need to turn it into a blessing. You’ve been thrown into exile to die really, to silence you so that your voice cannot come home. And so my whole life has been dedicated to saying, “I will not be silenced.”

Q.

How does a writer turn an exile into a blessing

A.

Well, you discover that the distance is very painful, but it allows you to see. It allows you to be free of the local; it allows you to be free of the immediate. Your mind can wander, and there’s a great deal of liberty, now that liberty is a liberty which is conditional.

The real problem is when you’re in exile and terrible things are happening back home. You feel in some way responsible to the people back home, to those who are being killed, to those who are being tortured in jail or exiled themselves. The real question is how to maintain loyalty to those people and simultaneously a loyalty to be a critic, to be somebody who will transgress to break down something â€" don’t leave the world the same way you found it.

So I feel more comfortable with the fact that I am no longer a political writer. I am not boxed in the category of “political.” I write about people who are tortured because I have many friends who were tortured. It is a way of dealing with an extreme situation of what is real, what is true, what is untrue, what is relative, what is evil. But you could say that repression chose me; I didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose to become this writer, but given the circumstances that I was given, I tried to turn it into a form of transgressive freedom and compassionate imagination, which is very important.

Q.

You have said that a writer must always be, in a sense, alienated even if he is in his homeland. Could you talk more on that

A.

Most writers who leave their country physically have already left it mentally and emotionally. It’s because they don’t fit in their country, but one of the definitions of the writer is that she or he does not fit. If they fit, they wouldn’t write anything. What you see around your writing is a void of meaning, a lack of something. When I came back to Chile, nobody wanted to talk about the theme of torture and memory â€" nobody. And I said, I am not going to write about this and I am going to keep quiet. And then I saw for six months, nobody was writing about this and I have to. Because there’s a meaning to this, which is not being told; there’s a story here, which is not being told. People are silencing their own stories. I have to tell these stories. So the point is that I did not fit in the country.

If I had stayed in Chile, I would have never dared to write a play in which a human rights lawyer, who is the hero of the transition to democracy, is also a cheat and a liar. Or where the woman who is the victim ends up beating up the other person, so she is death really. My most famous play is a play where you are consistently breaking down the stereotypes that people have got in their heads. I have done this with a play just recently in Spain, where I break down all categories of the relationship between men and women. So I love the idea of not fitting in â€" that means that I am an exile even if I am in my country. I will continue to be in exile. It’s just that it’s more comfortable if given that you do not fit into your country, you might as well leave it and therefore be comfortable outside and not be irritated all the time.

Q.

At what point in your life were you conscious that you wanted to become a writer

A.

When I was 9 years old. I was going on a ship from New York to Europe, and Thomas Mann was one that trip. My father said, “This is a great man.” And I thought to myself, “I want to be that great man. I want also for somebody like my father to speak of me like that.” But also, I could already see that we were going to leave the States. On that trip, I realized that I could carry my language with me anywhere. I asked, “In what language does he write” My father said, “In German.” And I thought, So Thomas Mann writes in German, but he’s been in States in California. So no matter where they send me, I won’t lose my language, I won’t lose my identity â€" I will be able to write in any language.

I wrote my first novel when I was 9. I have a little thing from Simon & Schuster where they say, “We love your book, but we think you’re not quite ready yet.” Writing gave me a power over my circumstances, over who I was. That was the one world where I was in control. I discovered later that the characters were the ones in control of me. At that moment, I thought that I really have a chance to mold a world of my own.
I’m the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it’s the best of both possible worlds.

Q.

You seem to suggest that you are a global citizen. Do you think there is an alienation that you have experienced from your roots that has had an impact on your writing

A.

I don’t think I’m a global citizen - I think I’m a human citizen. I owe myself to humanity, and wherever there is oppression or problems I will speak out or I will tell stories. I have been formed by my Latin American upbringing, very clearly, so I have a primary loyalty towards my own continent. But we are a continent made of all the strands of humanity - as India is. We’re all meeting points. Each of us is a meeting point.

I feel as if I can’t be controlled by governments, which is good because then I can be free to speak. But I don’t think of myself as above in the clouds at all. I’m very, very terrestrial in that sense. My homeland is my wife and family, my literature and my work for human rights. And wherever the question comes from, I will try to answer it in some ways. But I never forget that this is about human suffering or human glory in its most concrete.

I don’t speak about roots very much because we’re not trees. Trees are static. We are mobile, and we move between the idea of paradise as some place we would come back to and the idea of the Gilgamesh, everybody leaves home. If you don’t leave home, you will never grow up; if you don’t come back home, you will never die in peace.

Q.

How do you think Latin American writing â€" however useful that broad category might or might not be â€" has changed between generations

A.

Latin American republics are relatively recent as republics go, and we have been plagued with the strife of civil wars and killing and fratricide. These incomplete republics are calling out for words to name them, to imagine them. One of things that Latin American novelists do in particular, and essayists do as well, is that we name our continent - it’s like we’re Adam and Eve. We have to give names to the continent because those who should be responsible for it â€" the Thomas Jeffersons and the George Washingtons of our time â€" haven’t done it. Every leader of ours who went into the independence war died in exile far away - none of them ended up as the presidents of their nations. There was this void in a sense, and novelists are called upon in Latin America to create a way of understanding each other, a collective imaginary.

My collective imaginary is very different from, say, Santiago Roncagliolo [a Peruvian writer and journalist] because he is much more cynical and skeptical of politics. My generation participated in politics to try to change Latin America, and we didn’t do very well. He says, “I’d rather not get involved with this.”

Yet their work is just as political as mine is finally. Because when your father or motherland hurts, you answer. You don’t want to give an answer which is already decided, a comforting answer or a previous answer from yesterday - you want to open up tomorrow, you want to question, you want to disturb, you want to agitate. But agitating is not just a question of political things. The constitutions of tomorrow will be written with the love poems of today. If I write a love poem today, I am helping people act towards one another in ways that will be loving and caring rather than brutal and cynical.

Q.

Based on your experience, what advice would you give to writers who are writing in exile

A.

I think that besides talent you have to have guts. Don’t be afraid. But I never give advice to anybody, to tell you the truth. It’s useless to give advice to anybody because if they don’t discover it on their own, they won’t discover it because I’m telling them. But I would say just don’t be afraid to tell the truth because the truth is fundamental. The problem is it’s very, very painful.

Q.

What projects are you working on at present

A.

I am working on “Nachiketa,” the libretto of the opera based on a story of the Upanishads. What I do is I take it into our time. This little boy goes to Death and asks Death three things: “What is love” And Death takes him on a trip to India to the child prostitute who wants to kill her own baby. “What is reconciliation” And Death takes him to Africa to the child soldier who has gouged out the eyes of his best friend and killed his own parents. “What comes after death” And then Death takes him to Chile or Argentina, where there are two orphans who don’t know whether their parents are alive or dead.

It’s a musical epic that will be opening soon. This is my major project, but basically I’m writing love poems and stories right now, and I have a couple of films as possibilities. I’m really not interested in working too much outside my house - if possible, I just want to be home with my wife and do my poems and stories and things. I just brought out “Feeding on Dreams” in the United States â€" that is my memoir and speaks of these things.

(The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)