Greig Guthey

By all accounts, Ariel Dorfman should be dead.

As an advisor to Fernando Flores, the chief of staff to former Chilean President Salvador Allende, he should have been in the presidential palace, La Moneda, on September 11, 1973, the day that U.S.-backed forces bombed the palace in Santiago, Chile and overthrew Allende.

"I exchanged places with a friend of mine who died in my place," said Dorfman, now a professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "Somebody had taken my name off of a list."

A CLAS alumnus, Dorfman talked about his life for members of the UC Berkeley community during a CLAS-sponsored reading of his new book "Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey" in October. He also received an award from former CLAS Director Beatriz Manz for his life's work and commitment to social justice.

"He is without a doubt one of the most distinguished Latin American writers today," Manz explained, calling him a public intellectual for his ability to bridge the public and academic worlds through his fiction, film and journalism.

Part memoir, autobiography, meditation on language, and existential thriller, "Heading South" details Dorfman's experiences as a government official on the run from Pinochet and as an exile, artist and activist following the coup. "What I do is I go though in excruciating detail the process of escaping death in Chile," he explained in the Alumni House.

During the talk, Dorfman said that his life is full of contradictions, ironies and extremes. As a young boy living in the United States, he refused to speak Spanish and became enamored with American culture. "I can tell you all about Babe Ruth's home runs," he said. "I can tell you about all of The Four Seasons [the musical group]." Conversely, when he returned to Chile, he became equally absorbed in Chilean culture and life.

He also reminisced about returning to the United States in 1968. As a fellow at CLAS, he enjoyed jogging, studying Shakespeare and learning Karate. Nonetheless, he said he felt very Latin American. "I was learning Karate as an exercise in meditation and self-discipline . . . but would later use it to fight the fascists in the streets of Santiago," he said.

Even though his talk covered a wide range of territory- from his decision as a young boy to become a writer after meeting Thomas Mann on a ship to Europe, to his time spent studying in Berkeley, to his decision to call himself an exile rather than a refugee after he fled his country- his presentation and reading showed that there has been a continuity throughout his life.

Over the past thirty years, Dorfman explained that he has become comfortable living as an exile caught between two cultures. "I have embraced this," he said. "You can be relativistic about culture as long as you aren't relativistic about ethics."