On Wednesday, October 5, in the Gothic Reading Room of Duke University’s Perkins Library, Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist, and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman will read from his new memoir, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). This is the sequel to his award-winning book, Heading South, Looking North, which was the basis for the documentary A Promise to the Dead, short-listed for the Oscars in 2009.
Dorfman, Walter Hines Page Chair of Literature and Latin American Studies at the Duke University Center for International Studies, is one of the world’s most politically engaged contemporary authors. Once a member of Salvador Allende’s administration in Chile, he went into exile when Augusto Pinochet seized power in 1973. Since then, his writings have often examined human rights abuses, the impact of totalitarian governments and ideology on individuals, and the experience of life in exile.
Copies of the book will be available, for professor Dorfman to sign following the event.
In September 1973 the military took power in Chile, and Ariel Dorfman, a young leftist allied with President Allende, was forced to flee for his life. In Feeding on Dreams, Dorfman portrays, through visceral scenes and startling honesty, the personal and political maelstroms that have defined his life since the Pinochet coup. In Buenos Aires, he’s on the run from death squads. Next, still holding out hope for Chile’s return to democracy, he lives in ever-rotating safe houses in Paris and Amsterdam, where his loyalty to his political party and his wife’s loyalty to him are dramatically tested. Finally he finds an uneasy refuge in America, his childhood home, where he must confront the “earthquake of bilingualism.” And then, seventeen years after he was forced to leave Chile, Pinohet is out and Dorfman goes back to live there, setting in motion an unimaginable outcome.
Dorfman’s wry and masterfully told account provides a page-turning tour of the past several decades of North/South political history and of the complex consequences of tyranny and turmoil of a transition to democracy, and his perspective could not be more relevant today. Feeding on Dreams is a passionate reminder that “we are all exiles,” that we are all “threatened with annihilation if we do not find and celebrate the refuge of common humanity,” as Dorfman did during his “decades of loss and resurrection.”
