Betwixt and Between: Finding Home Again in Chilean Returnee Literature

Exile has historically been considered a temporary event that ends once the return home is realized, putting to an end the pain of living away from home with the restoration of feeling whole. Yet for many returnees, the return home failed to restore a sense of place and belonging. Although some exiles physically returned to the place called home, they continued to imagine other spaces, cultures and languages, and were oftentimes unable to reemerge with their original community. Transitional entities, returnees live caught betwixt and between the positions assigned by custom and convention. Yet it is from or within this very schism that some returnees move beyond the sentiments of loss and disappointment generally associated with exile and the return to render their dislocation as a positive space in which they can foster and explore new identities. Exemplified in three narratives written at the close of the twentieth-century, Ariel Dorfman’s memoir Heading South, Looking North (1997), Antonio Skármeta’s novel Match Ball (1989), and Alberto Fuguet’s work Mala onda (1991) demonstrate how ambiguity and displacement as influenced by the return from exile positively affect the (re)negotiation of belonging, location, and, most importantly, Chilean identity.