Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (review)

Ariel Dorfman's Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile unfolds into a palimpsest of sociopolitical, literary, and multicultural displacements, arrivals, and returns. At the core of the memoir, though, one might perceive a multifarious analysis of the writer's "inbetwixted" self. In the process of cutting open his literary self, Dorfman exposes his existential liminality between the homeland and the host societies. Feeding on Dreams exposes the Chilean political maladies since the military coup in 1973 to the present day democracy. Reading Dorfman's memoir leaves one contemplating on exiles' losses—but also growths—during complex, paradoxical and enduring cultural assimilation processes. Ariel Dorfman's compelling story in Feeding on Dreams inspired the following conversation in December of 2011.¹

Q1:

Feeding on Dreams allows readers to acquaint themselves with some of your most pressing hopes while in exile during the past several decades. In reading your recent memoir one might remember Zygmunt Bauman's words in "Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer," that in "exile, uncertainty meets freedom. Creation is the issue of that wedlock."² Your experience of exile broadens Bauman's perception of it in a very specific way. In your memoir you imply that exile nearly always led to literary and non-literary production, even if it did not always signify freedom. The lack of freedom though never stifled your creativity. Could you comment on this?

A1:

Bauman's words are right on target, though what is missing (from the quote, perhaps not from the context in which the ideas were expressed) is that all too often the uncertainty and the freedom do not lead to creativity. I know of many who were destroyed by exile—the suicide rate is probably the highest among any group in the world. In my own case, I started exile mired in silence. The memoir painfully and painstakingly narrates how I was unable to find even a sliver of literary expressiveness during the first two and a half years. I was disconcerted (uncertainty, about who you are, where you are going, why you were defeated, can lead to this). Nor did the freedom I enjoyed to be anyone I wished to be, to re-forge myself far from my land, the freedom I enjoyed from persecution and death ravaging Chile, liberate me, at least at first. Delving into Bauman's central image, the image of wedlock helps us, I believe, to understand this process: in the first encounters when uncertainty meets freedom few children are born. It takes time before the love affair turns into something more permanent. It is not a foregone conclusion that this meeting will lead to positive activities, political or literary. In my novel, Konfidenz, I explore how exile can undermine and devastate an exiled community. And my literature has been constructed out of an incessant struggle not to take that freedom for granted and, simultaneously, to understand the uncertainty not as a curse (as it first appears when everything around you in a foreign land feels alien and the ground is shifting under your very feet) but as a challenge. Thus, very slowly, exile "scoured" me (I use the exact word from the memoir), made me hit bottom, forced me to scrape despair as if it were rust—and only then was I ready for a rebirth that has, I hope, never ceased and that culminates, in some sense, in this memoir and in its prequel, Heading South, Looking North, both of them a way of fathoming how to survive while far from home, both of them not lying about the price we may have to pay for that survival.

Q2:

Certain segments of your memoir suggest that remembering Chile from and living in Chile during the 1970s is/was in itself an agonistic act. How do you protect yourself from reliving certain traumas while remembering and/or writing about them? Is protecting oneself even possible or desirable?

A2...