Writer, academic and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman poses in Santiago, Chile, in 1964. (Dorfman Family Collection/White Pine Pictures)
Novelist, essayist, poet and playwright Ariel Dorfman has been telling the stories of the dead, dispossessed and disappeared since his exile from Chile following General Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed military coup in 1973. His own extraordinary life story is the subject of the documentary A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman by Canadian director Peter Raymont (Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire). Dorfman spoke to CBCNews.ca from his home in North Carolina, where he is a professor at Duke University.
Q: You’ve written extensively about your life in exile, most notably in your memoir Heading South, Looking North. Why did you want to tell this story in a film?
A: I’ve always loved films. And we live in a time, when even a writer like myself, who believes so strongly in the written word, feels as if [a story] is not complete until it’s been given a transformation into celluloid, as if you don’t exist unless you’re an image on a screen.
Q: You feel a great sense of responsibility to tell the truth of what happened, but often that’s been very difficult for people. In A Promise to the Dead, you say that Chileans hated your play Death and the Maiden. And, in another scene, you have a friend recount a story of a colleague who was abducted and killed. By the end, he’s visibly shaken by the memory. When you see how painful these recollections are, does it ever give you pause?
A: Yes, all the time. And in great part, Death and the Maiden is about exactly that. It’s about a country that doesn’t want to think about its past and it has some justification in not wanting to think about it. One of my tasks as a writer, and a human being. is to open up the doors so that those things will be talked about in such a way that – though they may be painful – they also may be healing. And, for a writer, there’s an ambiguity and a tension in those moments that’s also a great creative tension. I’ve just written a play called Picasso’s Closet about Picasso under the Nazi occupation. He’s dealing constantly with the question: What does an artist do in times of war? Do you use the pain you see all around you or do you save a life? Do I spare my friend the pain of remembering or do I use that pain so that he can tell the world something that it needs to know?
A: I’ll never get it right. You can’t possibly speak for the dead – and that’s what makes it interesting to try.
Ariel Dorfman talks to a Pinochet supporter in Santiago, Chile. (Peter Raymont/White Pine Pictures)
A: I do feel that Pinochet has left a void because when you have someone that evil around, it makes life simple. But life has never been simple for me. I think one of the reasons I was able to write Death and the Maiden – and it was one of the most popular and performed plays in South Africa in the early days after apartheid, strangely enough – was because I had prepared myself for the complex questions of transition. I don’t think the regime ever dies; it continues on in very many perverse and interesting ways. The issue is not that the adversary is no longer in the ring, but whether you can recognize that he’s still in the ring. When you can’t blame Pinochet for everything – and I would blame him for traffic jams! – you begin to realize that the problem wasn’t Pinochet; it was complicity. It was our own weaknesses and failures that allowed him to exist. He was the deformed mirror of our own souls. I do agree with Athol that, unfortunately, these horrible regimes make us better writers. That doesn’t justify the regimes, but they do bring us to what [Jean-Paul] Sartre called the “limit situation,” that is, an extreme situation. When you find yourself facing death, interesting things happen.
A: Well, I want her to be at the giddy centre of history, but I don’t want it to come crashing down on her like it did for me. [Laughs.] The idea of life as loss, which is what happened to me, is nothing I want for anyone – including my own self. If I had to choose my life again, I would not choose exile, even though exile formed me and probably created most of my greatest writing. We really want peace for everyone on this Earth and I don’t think that will make life boring. But, of course, it’s not in our hands to decide what history will deal us. History is the invisible protagonist of this film and the perhaps not-so-invisible protagonist of all my work.
A Promise to the Dead screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 8, 11 and 15.
Pen Canada presents An Evening with Ariel Dorfman in Toronto on Sept. 7.
Rachel Giese writes for CBCnews.ca Arts.
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