Two of Latin America's most prominent authors said that Chile should not forget its troubled past as it plunges headlong into the global economy.
Ariel Dorfman and Antonio Skármeta spoke to a jam-packed Pickford Theater audience Thursday morning, Feb. 27.
Ariel Dorfman (left) and Antonio Skármeta signed copies of their
books in the Pickford Theater lobby following the program.
Mr. Dorfman is perhaps best known for his play Death and the Maiden -- in which a woman unexpectedly meets a man she believes tortured her in prison years before -- a drama that played on Broadway, won many awards and was made into a film.
Mr. Skármeta is the author of The Postman, which tells a fictional story of how fellow Chilean Pablo Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, became friends with his postman while living in exile. This story was made into the award-winning movie Il Postino.
The Library's Director for Scholarly Programs Prosser Gifford and Hispanic Division Chief Georgette Dorn moderated the panel.
Both Mr. Dorfman and Mr. Skármeta are from Chile but left in 1973, when President Salvador Allende was assassinated and Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power and became the country's military dictator. Mr. Dorfman now lives in the United States and teaches at Duke University. Mr. Skármeta, who lived in exile first in Argentina and later in Berlin, returned to Chile in 1989. The country returned to democratic rule in 1990.
These writers and others were in Washington as part of a group accompanying Chilean President Eduardo Frei, who spoke to a joint session of Congress, also on Feb. 27, and for whom President Clinton gave a White House state dinner on Feb. 25.
Mr. Dorfman talked about some of the unexpected problems that Chile's economic success has brought. "As you know, Chile is vaunted to be one of the great economic miracles. It's supposed to be one of the places in the world that show why globalization is good and why it's good to have supposedly underdeveloped nations integrate into the market. And this is, in fact, related to culture in rather strange ways," he said.
"[Chile] is a country, which, with all its extraordinary economic success, has had a certain mad rush toward consumerism, toward profit-making and toward a lack of solidarity and understanding that there is a need in any country for a community to be taken care of. I think that culture is one of the forms that fall by the wayside in the midst of all this. There is a cultural crisis of identity, not only in Chile, but I would say in any nation that this moment is facing the problems of globalization. ... And I think this is particularly so in Chile because it is a country that has a very troubled past. So I find in Chile people constantly who are haunted by the past and who do not want to acknowledge that haunting. And you know very well that when a ghost is haunting you, if you want to make believe that the ghost is not there, the ghost will come back with all its relatives."
Responding to Mr. Dorfman, Mr. Skármeta said writers measure success differently than politicians. "When you live in Chile, the fact that Chile is building this image of a successful country is a very dramatic thing because you realize that in everyday life this situation doesn't necessarily bring happiness to the people. There are many things that are left behind, and people don't come back to them. Among the things are, of course, all the things that are interesting to writers. When Ariel writes Death and the Maiden, he is bringing ... forward the hidden history of Chile, and he's telling us: 'OK, it's our ghost and we are not talking about our ghosts and here I will show some of them.'"
Both men talked about how Chileans are still struggling to come to grips with the violence and repression that occurred during the 17-year dictatorship of Gen. Pinochet.
"Now, my impression is that this consensus [government] is very good, but it's been arrived at by pretending there is no conflict," Mr. Dorfman said. "Chile is also a country of appearances, but there is a dissociation. It's as if we had gone through such trauma in the past, that we have this fear of conflict. And I would like to suggest that the duende [ghost or elf] of literature and art is one of the ways - the extraordinary ways - in which a society can indirectly, obliquely know itself, contain its pain, have some sort of a dialogue. When one reader reads, let's say The Postman of Antonio, and then another reader reads that same book, it's not just that they may talk about it at a party - it's that somehow they're sharing that vision together."
Mr. Skármeta said, "The feeling you have in Chile is that because of all the political tragedy and because there was a very clever political solution to our problems everybody is trying to do [things] well, and this is why conflict was suppressed. If you go to a TV show and you are critical about this or that, immediately, they will tell a joke or they will go to do something else. It's not censorship, it's just that the important subjects are not put on the table at this point.
"This is a very interesting situation for a writer because there is the hidden country full of emotions and feelings and there is the productive country that goes ahead and says, 'Okay, we made mistakes. That is the past. We don't talk about it - just go ahead.'
"I think those of us - so to say - the politicians, the men who are doing business are doing their work and we, writers, filmmakers, the people who are working in the media are doing our work also, but these two countries, they don't come together."
Mr. Dorfman then told a story. "When I was there last - I was there around a month and a half ago - I noticed one day that my mother-in-law, Elva, who is the mother of my wife, Angelica, and who was staying with us in our little bungalow there that we have in Santiago, was desperately looking for her glasses. She couldn't find her reading glasses. She was trying to read something. She was looking and looking and the whole family started looking and couldn't find them. And she said, 'Well I know why this is happening. Son los duendes. The little elves. I did not give them milk last night. I didn't put milk out for them so they could have their milk and help me find these things.'
"And I said, 'Well you know, I think we should put some milk out, by all means. We have to find your glasses.' So we did and the next day we found them very easily in places where we had looked arduously, covetously. And they were there. 'I think the elves have brought them back,' she said.
"And I began thinking and thinking about this. ... This seems to be the problem of the country. I think that we've forgotten that the duendes are there, that the elves are there. We've forgotten that there are invisible spirits. That there is a need to feed what is invisible - that is not itemized in any budget whatsoever. ... And I would suggest that the way to do it was to put a bit more money into culture, into literature, into books, into libraries," Mr. Dorfman said.
During the question-and-answer session, Mr. Skármeta, who currently hosts an award-winning TV show that he created in Chile called "Books and Writers," was asked how he came to write The Postman.
"In 1983, I was living in exile in Berlin, and I was living quite a poor life. I didn't speak especially well the language. I was trying to make a living as a freelance writer, and I had had some small successes writing scripts for films, among them, a couple related to the political situation in Latin America. At that time, for the first time in my life in exile, I had gathered enough money to give myself a grant, a six-month grant to write a novel I wanted with all my heart and soul to write. A novel that would be called Burning Patience because Pablo Neruda once ... said those words. And I concentrated on my work and didn't take any other jobs and was working quite a lot with energy on that project. I had written around 500 pages for a big novel. This big novel would be a novel in the novels of the boom style, a very large novel ... that would embrace all the history of the world from Adam and Eve to the coup in 1973.
"I was in the middle of this project [when] the producer for whom I had written these successful scripts recently [and] I had dinner and we talked quite a lot. After dinner he asked me what I was doing. I told him I was writing a story about this and that and I don't know why - because of the wine maybe - I put the accent on, as I was telling the story, on two characters who were only part of this big mural painting: the poet and the postman. The producer listened to that and he said to me immediately: 'This is a script for a film. Please write it for me.' I said to him: 'No. No way. I'm not going to do it. I just want to write the novel. I have enough money now. I don't need to sell anything to make a living.'
"He said: 'No, no, no. It's a good idea. It's a good idea. We can make a film out of it. A little film with a low budget. I have the money.'
"I said: 'No. I won't do that.'
"And then he did something irresistible for a writer living in exile. He wrote a check.
"Well, the next morning I forgot the novel and began to write the script."
Ariel Dorfman, Books in English: Death and the Maiden, Some Write to the Future, Hard Rain, Windows, My House Is on Fire, Chile from Within 1973-1988, Mascara, The Unborn Make History, Last Waltz in Santiago and Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, The Empire's Old Clothes, Missing, Konfidenz and How to Read Donald Duck.
Antonio Skármeta, Books in English: The Postman, Burning Patience, Stories, Watch Where the Wolf Is Going, The Insurrection, I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning, Chileno! and Love-Fifteen.
