It must have been fate that I finally opened Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum during the week of September 8. I’d asked for the book ages ago and then kept avoiding it because it looked thick and the title was… not where I was at. But I had forgotten why I’d wanted to read this book in the first place—it’s an investigation of Chile’s past (specifically the death of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973) and Dorfman’s relationship to his country in and out of exile.
I’d wanted to read this book because Chile is a mythical land to me, a place I lived once when I was small enough that the white calla lilies in our garden were taller than I was. Small enough that my younger brother and I found infinite entertainment in the snails that covered our driveway. Small enough to not really understand what was happening in the country in the mid-1980s, but not small enough to not have heard about what happened at the stadium or to know about the ongoing protests. I’d wanted to read this book because I wanted to investigate my own memories of Chile with actual information this time. What I found was a gloriously complex narrative and some pretty fantastic writing.
The Truth of Fiction vs. Memoir
The Suicide Museum is billed as a novel, not a memoir, although many of the life events happened to Dorfman and the people who surround him in the novel are the real people of his life (or at least versions of them). I love that he chose this conceit, because it freed me to be sucked into the narrative rather than fact-checking the book in my mind as I went. It was also an important framing because what the Dorfman of the narrative is tasked with is finding the truth about the death of Allende.
One of the most beautiful things about the way that this book is constructed, then, is a near constant unveiling of different truths as experienced by different characters. This is most notable in the investigation of Allende’s death when we find earnest character after earnest character telling their version of what happened that day at La Moneda and yet each story contradicts the last. It’s a Rashomon-like experience, but with such a warmth of feeling that I believed all of them. And the truth was the complexity.
A Feminist Vein
There is a strong respect for women that is woven throughout this book, one that was unfamiliar to me from my own experience of Chile and also from my experience of men of Dorfman’s generation. It was a relief, honestly. While very few of the characters who were present at La Moneda were women (history is what it is), Dorfman presents wives, daughters, mothers, and girlfriends as whole people who also shaped the historical events and who were shaped by them.
I was surprised to find as Dorfman was describing a play he was writing during the events of the book that I recognized the play. In fact the play, Death and the Maiden became a movie that was very important to me as I was living in Poland, and later as I was writing Polska, 1994. It is the story of a woman who was broken by a military dictatorship and the strength she eventually finds in retribution. I hadn’t known that Dorfman was the author, but this helped me understand the closeness I felt to his writing from the start. Dorfman also looks closely at class and how the full populace of Chile was and was not served by any of the governments.
It sounds like a sociology text the way I’m describing it, but it’s not. The Suicide Museum is a deeply moving and engaging story that I often stayed up far too late reading.
A Fractured Life
One thing Dorfman explores in The Suicide Museum is the ways that exile and return make his view and experience different from the people who could and did stay. I have never been sorry that I had the privilege to live abroad as a kid (not once, but twice), but it also changed me in ways I’m still trying to understand. Reading Dorfman helped me at least find camaraderie in the fracture.
“Maybe it was just that the trauma of changing countries and cities and homes and languages had left me wallowing in a paralyzing incertitude about who I really was and whether I could ever truly belong anywhere” – Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum
This keeps coming up for me, as I’d read an essay this summer by Luc Sante about his relationship to the French of his childhood versus the English he lives in. He wrote, “A chasm yawns between languages, between my childhood and my present age. But there is an advantage hidden in this predicament: French is an archaeological site of emotions, a pipeline to my infant self. It preserves the very rawest, deepest, least guarded feelings.” I feel this, though less than I once did as I’ve let my languages go. Where in my twenties I’d run around throwing whatever word felt right into a sentence, no matter the language, I’ve reverted almost entirely to English anymore and I rarely have anyone around who would understand the “foreign” word or its nuance anyway. It’s time for that to change, though, and I found strength and encouragement in the September 2023 issue of Poetry Magazine which was almost entirely bilingual (in multiple languages) as though plurality is a strength.
I look for traces of Chile, still, finding comfort in the Latinissimo cookbook my husband bought me last Christmas (the flavors and also the rich plurality of the history of each dish). And I’ve been screening records by Inti-Illimani that my dad and his partner gave me, listening for rhythms that remind me of who I was then and there. Luc Sante also wrote, “I suppose I am never completely present in any given moment, since different aspects of myself are contained in different rooms of language, and a complicated apparatus of airlocks prevents the doors from being flung open all at once… That sometimes makes me feel as though I have no language at all, but it also gives me the advantage of mobility. I can leave, anytime, and not be found.”
In these ways I am myriad, as we all are. But not everyone gets to picture my little brother dancing the Cueca when you hear just the right song.
Or to know, when Dorfman mentions Santa Lucía Hill, just what it feels like to climb those steps.
I’ve never been back to Chile in body, but someday. Someday I’ll return. Until then I am grateful for this opportunity to learn more about a place and a time that made me who I am today. And to appreciate that for the gift it is.
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