About Heading South, Looking North by Ariel Dorfman

Ariel Dorfman's memoir Heading South, Looking North is the narrative of his "bilingual journey" between the United States and Latin America. As he grows up and as he travels, he finds himself going through great changes of identity that are associated with the languages he speaks. At one point in his youth, he finds his languages--English and Spanish--competing to be the more appropriate in which to express particular thoughts. At that age he was devoted to the United States and to being a strictly English speaking American.

When his leftist family leaves the United States to escape the watchful eye of McCarthyism during the Cold War, his new country, Chile, slowly begins to seep into his considerations of his identity. Before he identifies himself as Chilean, he is confused by which is him and which is his doppelgänger, the English Edward or the Spanish Vlady. In his youth he had rejected any knowledge of Spanish, and later in life would reject English in the same way. However, at the time when he was comfortable with his bilingual ability, his two languages helped to interpret and understand politics, revolution, and culture, as he used them separately to decipher the happenings of each country in the particular language in which those happenings occurred. Dorfman's journey is about finding his identity through language and country, but it is also about his often dangerous political journey. Growing up in New York, his mind absorbed American culture and opportunity, but his unwilling return to Chile, and his eventual identification with that country, would make him highly critical of the United States.

His first insight into the influence of the United States on Latin America is when a friend from his English school tells him his plan to melt pennies down into copper bars, which would be more valuable than the coins' worth as money. While he had hated Chile and thought of it as the third world and as a barbaric-tongued country, he recognized his friend's plot as a certain process--that the United States is "bent on screwing the country out of its metal." His friend's racist remarks about Chileans, his greed, and his excitement about conning them planted in Dorfman the first seeds of a defensiveness for Chile. After all, Chile was the country that had embraced his parents when they felt they must move from the north. Later he compares that incident as a mini version of the United States' relations with Latin America. His thoughts about cultural imperialism and political revolution were shaped by the languages that put into words those phenomena, and even his difficulty with the notion of violence enabling revolution became a matter of which language in which to be, or not to be, violent.

As a supporter of and advisor to President Allende, Dorfman was one of many in immediate jeopardy upon the government takeover in 1973. This led him into another of many exiles or "endurings". Throughout his life he had been foreign whether he found himself in Argentina, America, Chile, or Europe. Even upon finding an identity as Chilean, he would always be marked as different because of his ethnic Jewishness. It is clear that Dorfman's life has been a cultural, lingual, and political struggle with his identity, but as he notes in his memoir, now he is able to write his story in either language.

© 2003 chadofborg@yahoo.com

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