“HOW MANY TIMES?”
There is a special comfort that comes from quantifying qualitative experiences, traumatic ones especially. Facts. Evidence. Acknowledgement. In the South American country of Chile, thousands of families are still waiting for answers, waiting for the healing power of the real, real truth.
In October 1970, Salvador Allende became the first democratically elected Marxist president of Chile, the first socialist leader in Latin America. Three years later, his government was overthrown by a military coup, General Augusto Pinochet becoming the new ruler of Chile.
On September 11th, 1973, Chilean armed forces surrounded La Moneda in Santiago. The presidential palace was bombed by air force jets before being burned by troops. And so began Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship: 17 years ravaged with repression, torture, fear, disappearance, and exile. Authorities believe the regime was responsible for at least 3,200 killings and 38,000 cases of torture. Additionally, Chilean courts rejected over 5,000 missing persons cases; 5,000 families torn apart by Pinochet’s secret police.
A cultural advisor to the President’s chief of staff, Ariel Dorfman was supposed to be at La Moneda that tragic day. He says, “I don’t believe there was a God who spared me. But I do believe in something like destiny, or that you turn the accidents that happen to you in life into something necessary and inevitable. What I think I did is I turned myself into the storyteller.”
Dorfman has committed his life’s work to writing about the country of Chile and calling out the violations of the Pinochet dictatorship. However, in his first years of political exile, Dorfman found it terribly difficult to write, “I would look at the blank page and I wouldn’t be able to write anything…I didn’t want to describe the degradation of my country without showing some sign of hope, but I couldn’t fake the hope.”
Published in 1990, the same year Pinochet stepped down as dictator, Ariel Dorfman wrote Death and the Maiden. A play that, although not explicitly stated, undoubtedly confronts the aftermath of the dictatorship’s cruel practices, torture specifically, and the victims who are forced to coexist with those who have destroyed their lives.
In an open letter to General Augusto Pinochet, Ariel Dorfman writes, “I have asked myself what would happen to you if you were forced to hear day after day the multiple stories of your victims and to acknowledge their existence. You who believe in God, General: Consider the blessing that your wise, compassionate, and severe God has sent you in these, your final days – the possibility of your repentance. That you might pierce this terrible circle of your crimes and ask forgiveness and tell us where our dead are.”
Renée Zipp, Dramaturg
Bag&Baggage’s Death and the Maiden ticket and schedule information here.
The post From Dramaturg Renée Zipp – Bag&Baggage: Death and the Maiden appeared first on .