The Other 9/11 | New Writing | Granta Magazine
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/dorfman
02 SEPTEMBER 2011 | ESSAYS & MEMOIR | ARIEL DORFMAN
The Other 9/11
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The Other 9/11 | New Writing | Granta Magazine
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/dorfman
On 11 September 1973 a military-led junta under the control of General
Pinochet took control of power in Chile, overthrowing the democratically
elected President Salvador Allende. In the aftermath tens of thousands of
Chileans were arrested or detained with an unknown number being
tortured by the new regime and in many cases murdered. From 1970 to 73
Ariel Dorfman served as a cultural advisor to President Allende before being
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The Other 9/11 | New Writing | Granta Magazine
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/dorfman
forced into exile and has since written several acclaimed books, including
Heading South, Looking North and plays, including Death and the Maiden,
which will receive its London revival this autumn. The following is an
excerpt from Dorfman’s forthcoming memoir, Feeding on Dreams.
S
o we set out, with cameras at the ready, for New York, another city of my
dreams assaulted on another September 11, again a Tuesday morning
when fire fell from the sky. Though by 2001 very few people in the world
recalled the existence of that remote Chilean date, I was besieged by the need
to extract some hidden meaning behind the juxtaposition and coincidence of
those twinned episodes bequeathed to me by the malignant gods of random
history. There was something horribly familiar in that experience of disaster,
confirmed during my visit to the ruins where the twin towers had once
reached for the sky.
What I recognized was a parallel suffering, a disorientation that echoed what
we had lived through in Chile. Its most turbulent incarnation was the
hundreds of relatives roaming the streets of New York after 9/11, clutching
photographs of sons, fathers, lovers,
daughters, husbands, begging for
There was something
information, are they alive, are they
horribly familiar in
dead?, every citizen of the United States
that experience of
forced to look into the chasm of what it
disaster, confirmed
means to be desaparecido, with no
during my visit to the
certainty or funeral possible for those
ruins where the twin
who are missing. The photographs were
towers had once
still there in 2006, pinned on the wires
reached for the sky.
separating the ogling spectators from the
abyss, encouraging me to use the unique perspective of my own life to forge a
message to the citizens of America lost in a labyrinth of pain.
Call it a gift from Chile to the nation that did so much to destroy our
democracy, the nation that was also mine, the America where I thrive and
teach and write, where my grand daughters, my Isabella and my Catalina will
grow.
We Americans – yes, we – received that day all of a sudden the curse and
blessing of being able to look at ourselves in a way habitually denied to most
of our citizens, the chance to distressingly imagine ourselves as part of the
rest of humanity. Never before had they – yes, they – been ripped apart to
this degree by the ravages of guilt and rage, the difficulties of memory and
forgiveness, the uses and abuses of power, the true meaning of freedom and
responsibility. And consequently never were Americans more tempted to
apply amnesia to their yesterdays and innocence to their tomorrows, never
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The Other 9/11 | New Writing | Granta Magazine
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/dorfman
was it more perilous and easier to sweetly, vindictively rid themselves of the
complexity and contradictions of their newly naked predicament.
C
hile, for all its imperfections and failures, found a way of responding to
the terror inflicted on us (yes, us, we Chileans), a path of peace rather
than war, a path of understanding rather than retribution. A model that the
United States, wrestling with the mirage of its imperial ambitions, did not
have the immediate wisdom to follow. And yet the complacent invulnerability
of this nation where I now abide has been fractured forever, as the gash in
that site at Ground Zero reveals. We
citizens will have to share, whether we
The complacent
wish to or not, the precariousness and
invulnerability of this
uncertainty that is the daily lot of the
nation where I now
majority of this planet’s other inhabitants.
abide has been
A crisis of this magnitude is one of those
fractured forever..
opportunities for regeneration and
self-knowledge that are granted, from time to time, to certain nations. It can
lead to renewal or destruction, used for aggression or for reconciliation, for
vengeance or for justice, for the militarization of a society or its
humanization.
One of the ways for Americans to go beyond the insecurity that has been
swallowing us since 9/11 is to admit that our suffering is neither unique nor
exclusive. If we are willing to look at ourselves in the vast mirror of our
common humanity, we may find ourselves connected with many apparently
faraway men and women who have trekked through similar situations of
injury and fury.
A message I was able to deliver with more forcefulness because I had, in
2005, recently become a US citizen.
I
had resisted taking that step with as much passion as I had put into trying
to remain in Chile during our unfortunate six months in 1990. My wife, the
implacably practical Angélica had decided to seek naturalization soon after
we resettled for good in the States, and then hauled our two sons to Charlotte,
North Carolina, for the interviews and swearing-in ceremonies.
I was a tougher nut to crack. I had already switched allegiances twice before –
from Argentina to the States and from the States to Chile – and damned if I
was going to relapse a third time, especially now that physical absence might
weaken my ties to Latin America. Though my obstinacy had more intricate
reasons.
No matter how much I might proclaim my mission to be a bridge between the
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The Other 9/11 | New Writing | Granta Magazine
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/dorfman
Americas, the voice I had created for myself, the persona I projected, was that
of a Latino from the South. I derived authority, power, credentials from that
outsider status, relished being a sort of unofficial spokesperson for those who
could not make themselves heard from our derelict lands. I had grown
comfortable with that tone and viewpoint.
It served me well on television and radio,
One of the ways for
in my op-ed columns and interviews, in
Americans to go
readings at bookstores and
beyond the insecurity
commencement speeches, a deepening of
that has been
the perspective I had discovered that
swallowing us since
morning in Bethesda watching the snow
9/11 is to admit that
that was and was not mine fall silently. It
our suffering is neither
had crusted into a second skin, become a
unique nor exclusive.
home away from home, struck the right
balance by allowing me to intervene in both Chile and the States from a
middle point of intersection and detachment. And each time after 9/11 that I
faintly contemplated reconsidering Angélica’s arguments in favour of
nationalization, something would flare up, in Santiago or Mexico or some
neglected corner of Latin America and the words would come flying, in
English and in Spanish, and I didn’t want to squander that – there is nothing
more difficult to abandon than a voice.
And then had come the arrest of General Pinochet in London in 1998, and his
year and a half of captivity, and all of a sudden my public persona was more
valuable than ever, on the BBC and Charlie Rose and Chilean TV. You see, I
said to my wife, ya ves, if I were an American citizen, how could I possibly
write publicly to Pinochet and tell him that this was the best thing that could
have happened to him, that he has been afforded an implausible chance to
repent. It is only feasible to write words like those as a Chilean, that’s why I
could write to an unknown Iraqi dissident in the Washington Post and say
that I understood why he wanted to be rid of the tyrant Saddam but not at the
price of an intervention from abroad, explain that I would have rejected such
a solution for my Chile in the days of our dictatorship, even if it had meant
that friends were to die. I felt that my role as a public intellectual depended
on keeping my distance from any official association with a United States
misruled by George W. Bush, that Chile was more relevant than ever, the
glass darkly through which I saw torture and the erosion of civil rights and
‘extraordinary rendition’, again the outrageous familiarity. I had grown
accustomed to the idea that the United States, with all its blemishes and
shortcomings, was a haven against persecution, at least for someone like me,
and now it was threatening to turn into a police state, foreigners were being
rounded up, permanent residency was no guarantee against abuses and
Guantánamo, my Lord, and Dick Cheney, no longer a congressman receiving
my copy of Widows in 1983, was churning out real widows all across the oil
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The Other 9/11 | New Writing | Granta Magazine
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homelands of the planet twenty years later.
A
ngélica would hand me clippings, as if I couldn’t read, as if I didn’t know:
Listen to this provision of the Patriot Act, no, Ariel, I want you to listen.
And also: You want to be effective? Then break out of the snug cocoon, say we
when you speak to Americans, include yourself in that we.
And she was worrying, my wife, Escúchame, Ariel, if they expel you, I’m not
leaving, this time I’m not following you, you want to never see your
granddaughters again? Angélica would not give up. It was absurd, there was
no chance of anything of the sort happening to me, not with my contacts, not
with my profile, not with — it can’t happen here? Wait, wait, hadn’t I written,
just last year, that it can happen anywhere, make people afraid enough and
they’ll let the government do anything in their name? ■
Want to join the discussion? Come to one of the worldwide Granta events to
mark the launch of Ten Years Later, including this one featuring Ariel
Dorfman:
Raleigh, NC
Quail Ridge Books & Music
8 September, 7 p.m., 3522 Wade Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27607
With Chilean writer and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman,
novelist Randall Kenan and writer and historian Tim Tyson in
conversation with book critic J. Peder Zane. Free.
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