Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004

by Ariel Dorfman, Tom Engelhardt (Foreword)

"Let me tell you, America, of the hopes I had for you," Dorfman writes after the fall of the Twin Towers, remembering back to an earlier September 11 in 1973, when he was on the staff of Salvador Allende, then president of Chile, the day he was removed from office and murdered in a coup in which the U.S. government was complicit. "Beware the plague of victimhood, America . . . Nothing is more dangerous than a giant who is afraid."
Included in Other Septembers, Many Americas are major essays about the America south of the border, exploring the ambiguous relationship between power and literature and touching on topics as diverse as bilingualism, barbarians, and video games. In the essay "A Different Drum," Dorfman asks, "Isn’t it time, as war approaches yet again, to tell each other stories of peace over and over again?" Over and over in these jewel-like essays, his best shorter work of the last quarter-century, Dorfman weaves together sentiment and politics with his sense of the larger historical questions, reminding Americans of our unique role in the world, so different from the one put forward by the current administration: the power to resist and to imagine.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 6, 2004

About the author

Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985.

Reviews

[Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea · Rating 4 out of 5]

An anthology of Dorfman's work revolving around another September 11th--September 11th, 1973--the day that the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was murdered by the military in a coup d'etat ushering in the bloody, torturous and tyrannical reign of General Augusto Pinochet. Instead of being murdered, Dorfman fled his native Chile to end up in the U.S.; it's ironic as the government of his new home happened to be the ones backing the Pinochet coup and slaughter of innocent Chileans.

Anyway, I recall reading some very moving pieces in this volume and would recommend it to others. After reading this book--and seeing the kind of shit going on in other places in Latin America--I've grown much more attuned to our neighbors to the south. Dorfman's writing is poetic and moving and always cutting against a regime and his exile from his homeland.

[columbialion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inside horrors of Augusto Pinochet's Chile