War on Democracy

A few years ago, investigative journalist John Pilger made controvesial and celebrated a film centred around regimes which were toppled in the 20th Century. Watch the 10 minute segment on the Chilean Coup.

The Power of Words

">What is the role of Literature in the era of revolution?Click to watch a recent interview with Ariel Dorfman

Thoughts about Ariel Dorfman's afterword

I felt that the rhetorical questions posed by Dorfman in his afterword really resonated with many things that are going on and have gone on in the world. Though his questions stemmed from a Chilean point of view, they certainly are universal.

"How to heal a country that has been traumatised by repression if the fear to speak out is still omnipresent everywhere?"

This is a question that in my opinion is at the very core of Death and the Maiden. On the one hand, we have Gerardo who seems quite willing to let the past lie and ruffle the least amount of feathers, despite his position on the truth Commissions. On the other hand we have Paulina, who is willing to take matters into her own hands and find justice herself - to go to the extreme and kill a man in order to find justice.

One could say that Gerardo is a representation of the masses just after the fall of a dictatorship - wanting a sense of unity, justice and peace, but suffering from too much fear and paranoia to be outspoken and vocal about their opinions.

Paulina, despite being much more forceful about her convictions in the play is just like Gerardo (the masses) in a sense. She herself suffers from fear and paranoia, though of a different kind. She decides to exact justice upon Roberto because of her mistrust of the judiciary system, and conviction that they are useless. But where does this mistrust come from? People may disagree with this, but I think that Paulina's judgement has more to do with what she perceives as a never ending cycle of corruption than any concrete knowledge of legislation. Due to years of silence and repression at the hands of a corrupt government, Paulina is no longer able to see that life could possibly turn out any other way.

Now you may say that Paulina has every right to think the way she thinks and act the way she acts given her circumstances - but if we looked at the bigger picture, how would a country ever heal if every man and every woman thought the way Paulina thought and acted the way she acted? If a country's people have no faith that they can change their own government for the better, then nothing will change and they will continue to be stuck in a limbo between dictatorship and democracy. When I thought about Paulina's actions in this way, I realised that what she did was particularly selfish as it benefited only herself. If she had found a way to present her case to the Truth Commission before killing Roberto she could have helped countless other torture victims and maybe have helped her country to move in the right direction. Killing Roberto will not change anything for Paulina because no one knows what happened her, and so her suffering still remains a "secret" to her government and her country. She may be appeased for sometime after Roberto's death, but it is my belief that in the long run she will never be truly healed.

Ariel Dorfman on why he was inspired to write Death and the Maiden

"Ariel Dorfman is probably best known for Death and the Maiden, the play he wrote in Chile during that country's transition to democracy in the summer of 1990. Since its first production in Chile, the story of Paulina Salas, a woman who kidnaps the man she suspects tortured her more than 20 years ago, has been staged in more than thirty countries. In Germany alone, in 1993 there were more than 50 different productions all running at the same time. Taught in colleges and high schools, still performed around the globe, Death and the Maiden is a classic example of the coming together of art and the struggle for human rights." The play won the Laurence Olivier award for Best New Play of 1992.
From the Duke University website where Ariel Dorfman is a distinguished professor: http://www.adorfman.duke.edu/

Death and the Maiden - Afterword to the Original Stage Play

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