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Sept 11: A Campus Reflects
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Ariel Dorfman

Cold Waters

Editor's Note: This spring, Granta magazine asked more than two dozen writers, scholars and intellectuals to discuss in a short essay the topic "What We Think of America." The following article was submitted by Ariel Dorfman, Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke.

by Ariel Dorfman

September 5, 2002 | DURHAM, NC -- Above all, thirty odd years later, what I remember best is the blonde American brat at the pool - but not, strangely enough, the date of the incident, though it must have been sometime in the fantical blur of the mid sixties. The kid - he couldn't have been more than three years old - was obnoxious beyond belief, hellbent on ruining the calm and wonder of that hot late lazy Chilean afternoon. His bikini-clad gringa mother made no attempt to rein him in, though how she could sleep, sprawled tummy down on that lawn-chair under the giant Eucalyptus when her son was screaming at the top of his lungs was difficult to understand. He had already stopped my then girlfriend Angelica - she was not yet my wife, so that means this happened before 1966 - from dozing off, even though she kept her eyes firmly closed in the fruitless hope of some sort of respite; and as for me, the kid had managed to interrupt my enjoyment of the sunset there at the resort of Jahuel, the sun sliding incandescent red and oranges down the nearby slopes of the Andes. Angelica had been brought up a few miles from here, down in the small town of Santa María, and I had been looking forward for some time to this visit and the promise of a quiet communion with the rocks and ridges and scrub highlands of the Valle del Aconcagua that had blessed her childhood and adolescence. I had just spent a good half hour swimming in the icy crystal-blue waters of the mountain-spring pool and, bizarre as this may sound, had seen my endurance of the freezing temperatures as a sign that I was truly becoming Chilean. When I had first arrived in Chile in 1954 from the States, a twelve year old unable to speak a word of Spanish whose only desire was to return to the New York from where he had been banished, I had felt the fierce chill of the Pacific ocean's Humboldt current and the equally glacial rivers and lakes of the Chilean south to be a personal affront, proving to my protesting body the remoteness of that country's shores and reservoirs, another barrier - or so I thought - to my ever blending into the landscape. But gradually I had fallen in love with the land and the language, and told myself that the evidence that I belonged here could be measured by the way I increasingly relished submerging my flesh and bones in the subzero waters of my adopted homeland.

In all probability that was the real reason why the American urchin was getting on my nerves. It was absurd, but if he'd been brown-skinned and yelped in babytalk Spanish, I'd probably have pardoned his trespasses on our privacy, who could deny him the right to be exasperating in his own land. Instead, the boy uncomfortably reminded me of who I had been, my deep and recently forsaken allegiance to the United States and John Wayne, my ten joyful years in Manhattan, my past embrace of my yankee identity that I was trying so hard to repudiate all through the sixties. So I studiously made believe I did not understand a word he splashed in my direction, tried to make myself into a monolingual Spanish speaker, a chileno whose terrain was being invaded by this foreign spawn. Yes, like everything in the fanatical sixties, the subtext of this and all other relationships - even this tangential one with an American child - was colored by politics. That odious imp and his inconsiderate mother were taking over this serene Chilean pool, this piece of splendid Chilean nature, as if they owned it, a prolongation and projection of the ways in which the U.S. had dominated the backyard of Latin America with its ownership of mines and fields and banks and ships, its marines in Veracruz, its invasions of Nicaragua and Cuba and Guatemala, its proconsuls in Santiago and Buenos Aires and Bogotá, its training of torturers, its coups in Brazil and Bolivia and Honduras, its proclamation that the only thing Latinamericans understand is a kick in the pants. And there was, of course, as for all my generation, the horror of Vietnam. The fact that neither slumbering mother nor squalling babe at the pool in Jahuel, had the slightest awareness of incarnating imperial history only made them more, not less, guilty. What was most irritating about Americans - to me, who had been one, who had been just as unconscious and insensitive in my own day - was their blind innocence, their inability to grasp how their intrusive bodies and loud mouths and naïve incomprehension grated on the eyes of the world. Their professed unconcern - What? Me Worry? - about what was being done in their name seemed, to my eyes, more outrageous than the deeds themselves.

Does this explain what happened next?

The infernal brat teetered at the edge of the pool, merely a few feet away from me, and then, suddenly, as if struck by some sort of evil wind that had roared down from a cavern in the Andes, he lost his balance and fell into the water.

May God forgive me - or if there is no God, may my American-born grand-daughter, now approaching her second birthday as I write this at my wonderous home in the midst of an American forest in North Carolina, may she grant me forgiveness when she is old enough to read these words - but I hesitated. For a couple of seconds, it could not have been more than two seconds as I recall them, I let myself lapse into a murderous passivity, I looked on as that child sunk into that beautiful blue iciness. He did not flail out, as I remember it, did not seem to protest. Just his body sinking slowly and my eyes watching just as slowly.

It is not easy now to return to that slight sliver of time, that scant skin of time when I sat there as the child descended oh so silently into the depths. But I can recollect no active hatred of the boy or his mother, no wish for harm to come to either of them. What troubles me now, so many years later, is the pang of indifference I can remember feeling during the immediacy of those brief moments, the inert voice in the core of my being that told me that what I was witnessing was none of my business, that in some perverse sense the kid had it coming to him, just as the mother who thought that she could brazenly unleash her son on the world and let the world take care of him deserved to be taught some sort of lesson. I cannot be sure that this is what I felt, because I am surely reading into the past much of what transpired later. After all, there had not yet been a coup engineered by the CIA against the democratic government of Chile, there had not been the arming of the contras in Nicaragua, there had not been the training of the death squads in El Salvador, there had not been the bombing of the pharmaceutical complex in Sudan, there had not been the justification for apartheid in South Africa. But my paralysis must have been born of a deep turmoil of grievance and resentment - maybe it was time for them to experience what we experience, the millions drowning in despair. So your kid falls in the pool while you sleep and you expect one of us to rescue him, one of us to care, when you don't give a damn about our starving children, our mutilated lands, our neglected cities, our ravished economies and hopes. That my anger was on behalf of that multitude of unfortunate others and not because of anything done directly to my own affluent self mysteriously made it all the more intense - after all, it was easier to blame the Americans for all the misery that surrounded me than to really do something about it myself.

Whatever it was that was holding me back, it did not last beyond those two seconds.

I plunged in, I scooped the child out, I deposited him sputtering and again screaming on the tiles at the rim of the pool. This time there must have been some special urgency in his shrieks, because his mother woke up and scrambled towards him. There was no need for first aid, no water in the lungs, probably not even a traumatic memory - it had all been so fast.

I was so embarrassed by the mother's gratitude that I forgot to make believe I did not speak English. And therefore spent the next hour talking to her - by then Angelica had also come over to commiserate with mother and child over the accident and to bask in the glory of my role as redeemer of endangered innocents, the Lone Ranger of the Valle del Aconcagua.

It was a surprisingly pleasant conversation. The woman turned out to be a jazz enthusiast and had even attended a Louis Armstrong concert in the Astor Theatre in Santiago - sponsored by the dreaded US Information Service, no less! - where I had myself let loose all my dormant gringo enthusiasm be-bopping in the aisles in a manner absolutely unbecoming to a staid would-be Chilean, and in fact stomping all the way to within a few feet of the great Satchmo and his rasping throat and jubilant trumpet.

That is how easy it was, it still is, to cross over from yankee-basher to enthralled lover of U.S. culture, a zigzag, back-and-forth path of detestation and adoration that milions of my fellow humans around the world have also been treading (or stumbling along, perhaps) during the last decades. But more crucially, perhaps, at that poolside in Jahuel I was engaging in an emotional and intellectual exercise that I've been exploring a good part of my life: the attempt to separate the American people from the policies of their government, trying to reconcile, in fact, the two zones of my life and my past. Though it would take many more years for me to understand that even if the child who had fallen into those lifeless waters - and who was, I learned, more Chilean than I was, having been born on the soil that I wanted to call my own - had been the grandson of the arch-fiend and hypocrite Kissinger himself, he was entirely innocent and his peril should not have induced in me the faintest irresolution or delay in coming to his rescue.

The world has become vastly more complex and nuanced since that day. Over the years I have ended up realizing how we all too frequently use anti-Americanism as a way of not facing our own faults and deficiencies in other parts of the world - even though such self-criticism should not exempt us either from assigning blame to Americans when that blame, as is often the case, is due, particularly because the United States has such incommensurate power for good and for evil and has set itself such a high standard of freedom and tolerance by which to be measured. But I am wary of the automatic response, the sort of blanket condemnation that engulfed me that hot evening in Chile as the sun was setting, making me momentarily lose sight of the common humanity I shared with that obstreperous bothersome brat and his irresponsible mother.

What continues to terrify me today - and that must be the reason why this event has stayed with me, slithering its way into my memory - is how simple it would have been to allow those two seconds to stretch into three and then four and then more, how easy it would be for that kind of indifference to devour the whole world. And this: my certainty that around the globe today there are so many who, as I did all those years ago, would see in that child's descent into the cold quiet maelstrom of the pool some form of heavenly retribution for crimes committed by his elders, all those who have been so badly damaged that they cannot recognize in their hearts the icy waters where that child - be he American or be she of whatever other sad land on this sorry planet of ours - is still sinking so many years later.

Ariel Dorfman is author most recently of In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems from Two Languages. (Duke University Press).


 
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Focus Corner
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Campus Voices: Members of Duke community reflect on the meaning of the 9/11 anniversary.


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___   DUMA Exhibit

A portfolio of images from the DUMA Exhibit "Missing: Documenting the Spontaneous Memorials of 9/11"


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___   Catheryn Cotten

In a recent interview with Dialogue, Catheryn Cotten discusses how universities have had to change their visa administration.

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Audio & Video
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audio Audio from Duke's Karla Holloway on "Talk of the Nation," on National Public Radio. September 11, 2002 Listen.

audio Audio from Professor Ebrahim Moosa on "The Connection," on National Public Radio. September 10, 2002 Listen.

Information for Broadcast Media


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