Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey by Dorfman Ariel

Author:Dorfman, Ariel [Dorfman, Ariel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1998-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

A CHAPTER DEALING WITH THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE AND LANGUAGE DURING THE YEARS 1960 TO 1964 IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

Where are you from?

It was a question that since the age of two and a half, and until I was eighteen, I had always answered, spontaneously, invariably: I was from America, I was American.

That response had been there, on the tip of my tongue, my first day of class at the Universidad de Chile in March of 1960—a response that stayed there, that I did not let roll off into the politically effervescent air of a Latin America headed for a showdown with the United States.

Where are you from?

Who asked me that, with its implied query: Who are you? I can’t remember the face, only my momentary bewilderment, the fact that I did not dare to admit that I was from the United States. Perhaps it was Claudio Gimeno himself. I did, after all, lay eyes on him that day for the first time, although it would be too bizarre, perhaps too suitably literary and symmetrical, that the man who saved me for this life of exile which has ended up here in the United States should have been the first person in the world to hear me deny my North American origins. I press myself harder to recall that moment and it seems that it was just after Historia de America, the first class on my schedule, where our radical Panamanian mulatto professor had gone about dissecting the term America itself, how the United States had appropriated that word and denied it to the South, much in the way, he said, that the same United States had stolen a great part of Mexico and occupied Nicaragua and now sat on the narrow strip of the Canal refusing to return it to the people of Panama. Once lost, he said, it was difficult to get territory back, but establishing an alternative history was a start, even if his forced exile from his own country proved that such an intellectual enterprise was not without risks. But it was essential that Americans south of the Rio Bravo think of themselves differently, in freedom and with sovereignty, because from that thinking, from that territory of the imagination, history could be altered. Just look at Jose Marti, who died in 1895, before his dream of Cuba’s independence could materialize, before his words of warning against the United States proved prophetic: the most powerful nation in the hemisphere had entered the war against Spain (and Teddy Roosevelt never charged up that hill—it was all a fraud, a trumped-up photo) and then kept Puerto Rico as a colony and occupied Cuba for years and invaded it whenever it was felt that “those people,” in General Shafter’s memorable phrase, “who were no more fit for self-government than gun-powder is for hell,” deserved to be taught a lesson. But because of Marti and his words, Fidel Castro had staged his first insurrection in 1953 and taken the Moncada and,

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