The return home : experiences of deterritorialization in post-Pinochet Chilean literature

Abstract

In response to the experiences of exile and the return, the subsequent preoccupation with a sense of belonging, the blurring of the traditional understanding of borders triggered by a permanent sense of displacement, and the quest for assimilation within the boundaries of the restored motherland have become some of the most dominant themes of post-Pinochet Chilean literature. In chapter one, the characters in Ariel Dorfman's play La muerte y la doncella (1991) illustrate returnees, struggles to establish a sense of place so that they may recover their original imagined community and highlight the breakdown of communication due to the effects of dislocation. But when an exile experiences separation from home and lives in the context of another place, the imagined community representing the original home and the new one begin to mix and merge. Seen in Heading South, Looking North (1997), Dorfman reinterprets what this original community represents and demonstrates acceptance of an ironic conception of nostalgia that celebrates the fragmentation of a place balanced in-between. Antonio Skármeta evokes the memory of home and exile in the second chapter as two distinct, independent locations. Skármeta remembers the place called home in the play Ardiente paciencia (1983) and the place of exile in the novel Match Ball (1989) as home and host communities. In this manna, Skármeta replaces nostalgia for home and the expression of national traditions with the exposition of transnational migrants, socio-political refugees, and international frontier conditions. The third chapter looks at a younger generation of post-Pinochet writers, represented by author Alberto Fuguet, who inherited the experience of exile and the return as “borrowed” conditions, and who experienced the return to Chile not as a process of re-discovery but rather as new discovery. Fuguet's novel Mala onda (1991) and short story collection Por favor, rebobinar (1994), express the emergence of young Chileans into deterritorialized worlds where sentiments of dislocation caused by the blurring of the definitions of home and location represent a society existing in a precarious and orphaned state.