The Diasporic Subject in Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North

Abstract

Esta es la historia de una pesadilla. Y de su comprension y superacion por medio del arte. Todos hemos vivido, hemos visto vivir, hemos sonado esta pesadilla. No todos hemos sabido superarla. This is the story of a nightmare. And o fits understanding and overcoming through art. We have all lived, have seen live, have dreamed this nightmare. Not all of us have known how to overcome it. --Ariel Dorfman in El absurdo entre cuatro paredes Dorfman wrote this epigraph to his first book in Chile in 1908 during a time when hopes for revolutionary change were sweeping the globe. Little did he know that his musing on the ways that art can overcome nightmares would undergo an extreme test after September 11, 1973 when Salvador Allende's presidency was brutally overthrown by Augusto Pinochet and all those who had worked with Allende, including Dorfman, became victims of a violent military dictatorship. In an act of foreshadowing that has consistently haunted Dorfman's literary career, these first words could also be used to open his memoir. (1) Heading South, Looking North is surrounded by pain and guided by hope. To read Ariel Dorfman's memoir is to engage with some of the most pressing questions concerning the ties between literary representation and historical event; art and activism; and writing memoir and recording history. Heading South, Looking North asks the reader to play an active role in the recovery and recollection of Dorfman's life, and his memoir highlights the multiple ways that his life story intertwines personal memory and the history of the Americas. (2) Paralleling Amitav Ghosh's notion of the shadow line as the blurry, shifting boundary between the self and the nation that is both absurd illusion and a source of terrifying violence (n.p.), Dorfman's memoir points to the conflicts that distinguish identity from identity markers. These conflicts between the self and the terms used to define the self are alternately imposed and desired, external and internal, national and transnational, material and imaginary, fixed and fluid. Identity is not only shaped by the tensions between agency and cultural politics; it is also governed by competing forces of time and space, history and nation. A carefully constructed text that tests the form of memoir and the boundaries of bicultural identity, Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North requires a reading that moves beyond many of the traditional critical categories used to understand ethnic, diasporic life writing. Academic studies of US ethnic literature, exemplified by the early work of Werner Sollors, were originally organized around a dominant critical paradigm that understood the ethnic self as bicultural: divided across two cultures, two languages, two identities, struggling between assimilation to and dissimilation from mainstream culture, caught between dominant and minority culture. (3) This focus on the bifurcated subject receded when ethnic studies increasingly considered the self as hybrid, multiple, and plentiful. With the work of such scholars and creative writers as Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, axes of identity registered a number of markers that exceeded traditional ethnic categories and included gender, sexuality, and class. Recent globalization theory has expanded further on this sense of self by considering the subject in relation to local and transnational spaces (Mendieta; de la Campa). In addition, the concepts of postcolonial, subaltern, and postnational chart interpretations of ethnic writing as seen, for example, in the work of Azade Seyhan. In a parallel vein, the theoretical bases for autobiography studies have shifted recently. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson provide a periodization of critical approaches to life writing; they highlight three key phases: 1) studies that focused on the way that autobiographies record the life of a great man; 2) studies that problematized the representation of the subject; and 3) contemporary studies that focus on the referentiality and relationality of life narrative (139). …