Guardian of Memory
Ariel Dorfman, interviewed by Sam Needleman
“We cannot tell the story if we do not recognize how the past changes as we try to seize and fix it.”
September 2, 2023
Fifty years ago this month, Augusto Pinochet, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, led a US-backed military coup to overthrow Salvador Allende, the democratic socialist president of Chile who had been elected just three years earlier. Among Allende’s staffers who fled from La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, was thirty-one-year-old Ariel Dorfman, a cultural and press adviser and an ardent supporter of Allende’s leftist program. In an essay published in the Review’s Fall Books issue, Dorfman recalls joining hundreds of thousands of Allende’s supporters in the streets of Santiago just before his ouster and death, chanting, “Allende, Allende, el pueblo te defiende.”
After seven years in exile in Europe, Dorfman ended up in the United States. In 1985 he began teaching literature at Duke, where he is now a distinguished professor emeritus. He returned to Chile in 1983 but was arrested and deported in 1986. After the restoration of democracy in 1990, he split his time between Santiago and the US. His novels and plays—as well as his essays, which have appeared regularly in the Review since 2017—have earned him a reputation as a rigorous and devoted chronicler of modern Chile, among a great number of other subjects. Half a century after the coup, as he writes in his essay, he has not lost his faith in Allende’s vision: “Allende’s insistence throughout his life that for our dreams to bear fruit we need more democracy and never less—always, always more democracy—is more relevant than ever.”
I e-mailed Dorfman last week to ask him about the putsch, Gabriel Boric, and the international future of socialism.
Sam Needleman: Your first contribution to The New York Review of Books was your signature on a letter, “Against Loans to Chile,” published in our June 11, 1987, issue. The letter called on the Reagan administration “to support Chilean democratic leaders’ requests for an end to international financial aid to Pinochet.” Among the signatories, you listed your nationality as Chilean, despite living abroad at the time and for extended periods of your life. Why?
Ariel Dorfman: The way I was identified was, in retrospect, symptomatic of my multifaceted, wandering life (geographically and intellectually). The story is convoluted. I was born in Argentina, followed my dad (who was in trouble with the fascists there) to New York (my first exile, at two and a half), and ten years later fled the States (McCarthy!) for Chile, a country that beguiled and enchanted me. There was the splendor of the mountains and sea, and the language, which captivated a young, gringo-educated English-speaking boy, but two whirlwinds of love were ultimately responsible for this ardor: a dazzling young wonder called Angélica (we have now been married for fifty-seven years) and the chance to accompany a people as they emerged from the inner exile of oppression. Both grounded me in a home, an extended heart that was a hearth.
More prosaically, I can remember a day when I felt Chilean through and through, to the chilled bone. When I first arrived, at the age of twelve, the ocean was intolerably cold thanks to the Humboldt Current. It was impossible to dip your ankles in the surf without turning blue. Then one sunny afternoon I stepped in, and I could bear it. I swam out and stayed in those waters for an hour. My body knew before my mind that this was my Pacific. And then, of course, there was Allende’s pacific…revolution.
In “Defending Allende,” you write about working for Fernando Flores, Allende’s chief of staff, in the months leading up to the coup. What was the atmosphere like in that office?
It was clear that a lethal confrontation awaited us, so every minute was filled with urgency and foreboding, but also joy at being able to contribute to the cause. Those were hectic, overflowing, slightly insane days: we were giving advice about how to respond to attacks in the media, promoting street theater and cartoons to combat disinformation, and plugging musicians, muralists, and writers who were in favor of reforms with ongoing educational campaigns.
My main task was to imagine unorthodox ways for us to survive. Just one example: the putschists’ main obstacle was General Carlos Prats, the head of the army, loyal to Allende and the Constitution. They harassed him day and night, trying to force him to resign. We discovered that our opponents were planning to convene the wives of several military officers outside of Prats’s private residence to demand that he abandon Allende. I thought that ridicule was one of our most potent weapons against fascists, so I suggested that we gather a large number of rats and let them loose on the seditious ladies. Cameras would record their panic and dispersal. Alas, the laboratories were all out of our rodent allies. (Maybe because of the American boycott of our economy? A bit too neat an explanation, but it makes a good story.) The women rallied raucously. A few days later, Prats resigned and Pinochet took his place. Prats and his wife were murdered in October 1974 in Buenos Aires by the dictatorship’s secret police.
More:
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/09/02/guardian-of-memory-ariel-dorfman/