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Something Fierce, Memoir of a Revolutionary Daughter (D&M $32.95)
In her memoir Something Fierce, Carmen Aguirre boldly describes her upbringing in the long shadow of the Chilean dictator Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte. For 10 years, from 1979 to 1989, she takes the reader inside Chile, war-ridden Peru, the Bolivian dictatorship of Luis Garcia Meza, strife-ridden Argentina and naive Canada.
Carmen Aguirre was six years old when her family fled to Vancouver after a CIA-inspired coup in Chile ousted the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and brought army general Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973.
Five years later, her mother and step-father returned to South America to spend the next decade working for the Chilean leftist resistance. Her mother refused to be separated from her two daughters, choosing closeness and danger for them over distance and safety. As her oldest daughter, Carmen Aguirre has now written Something Fierce, Memoir of a Revolutionary Daughter (D&M $32.95), a riveting testimonial of bravery and fear.
The family's activities over the next decade span Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile, interspersed with return trips to Canada. Blacklisted, they were unable to re-enter Chile by train or plane. Journeys were made circuitously with detours and doublings back to throw off the secret police.
In order to operate safe houses, Aguirre's parents maintained a middle-class disguise, doing conventional jobs. The girls were conditioned to secrecy, trained to never confide in anyone or reveal details of family life.
This life of unremitting drama and concealment would prove excellent training for Aguirre's later work as a performance artist and actor in Vancouver, where she has also gained considerable acceptance as a playwright [See BCBW cover story, Autumn 2008, abcbookworld.com].
Parental absences were sudden and unexplained. The sisters were told: Never answer a knock at the door. If you hear nothing for twenty-four hours, you will call a secret phone number, and say you're with the Tall One and Raquel. Within an hour, someone will knock at the door. Go with that person. The phone number will be revealed when you hold this blank page over a flame. Memorize it, burn the paper, flush the ashes away.
The story line for Something Fierce is linear, the writing rough-edged, with abrupt changes of scene and occasional lapses into cliché, but this serves the content well, since anything polished or contrived would diminish its force and authenticity.
The evocation of danger from the point of view of a young girl is so strong-and maintained so steadily, vividly describing the terrors that surround her-that when Aguirre finally spills out everything to a lover, in her late teens, the reader feels a wave of alarm. (Fortunately, her confidante is a true companero).
Details of historical events and the exact nature of the resistance organization and hierarchy of the resistance are mostly blurred. Only later, for instance, does Aguirre realize that an intimate family friend was a superior in the movement. Such vagueness is entirely appropriate since Aguirre was deliberately kept in the dark, and direct knowledge of her full situation was suppressed, presumably for her own protection.
But Something Fierce is more than a journey into the shadows of political repression. What could have been a narrative of unremitting horror is relieved by joyous occasions-an idyllic holiday with Chilean grandparents, several adolescent love affairs-and by poetic descriptions of surroundings, such as Aguirre's first view of the Bolivian capital city, La Paz, a place she comes to love:
"We drove for hours, until the land broke like a Greek plate and there was a drop in the road. I looked out to see nothing but sky. The universe. Then, I looked down, and there below us was a city in a bowl. A bowl like the deepest crater on the moon, with a little house stuck to every last square inch of it. The bus drove over the edge of the bowl and down.";
At one point Aguirre collapses under the strain. She candidly describes her emotional meltdown, wrought by the pressure of fear, her step-father's stress-induced anger and a long period of isolation in a house with a diminishing food supply. "I was an agoraphobic fifteen-year-old skeleton with an obsessive-compulsive disorder,"; she writes.
It comes as a revelation when an acquaintance tells her, "Girls, always know this: it's your human right to be happy."; She wonders what that means for someone like her. "Did that mean children shouldn't have to think about revolutions, or safe houses, or being tortured to death?"; she asks.
Distraught, she slashes a wrist and is sent to a psychiatrist to whom she can confide nothing. The suicidal episode results in her return to Vancouver, where she completes her first year of high school. Shortly after her arrival there, she is joined by her mother and step-father who have barely escaped capture. Broken and defeated, they go their separate ways.
Aguirre returns to South America. At eighteen, she takes the resistance oath in a cafe in Lima, vowing to reveal no information, even if she is tortured to death, and understanding that if she gives away her comrades during the first twenty-four hours of capture, she will be executed by the organization.
The contrast between her twin lives in North America and South America is, obviously, extreme. She worries that her convictions aren't strong enough to overcome her fears. Nevertheless, with her companero, she carries out cross-border missions into Chile. The life-expectancy of those who undertake such work is two years.
Even though she is twenty pounds underweight and suffers from dizzy spells, Aguirre still pushes herself "to master the skill of killing my heart whenever I crossed the border.";
Powerful impressions are left by determined women.
Dr. Vergara Emerson, a Bolivian pediatrician and professor, walks to the front of a movie theatre to denounce the dictator, Luis Garcia Meza. "You will remember her,"; Carmen's step-father tells her, "because what that woman did is the definition of courage.";
Salvador Allende's sister, Laura Allende, stays with Aguirre's family in Vancouver during her cross-Canada tour, while dying of cancer. Carmen hears her weeping in the night, grieving for the lost of her country, not her life.
Carmen's grandmother is a role model who risks banging pots and pans during the blackouts in Chile. "I've seen fear turn people into informers, monsters,"; she says, "turning in their own friends and neighbors. You're dealing with a country, sick with fear.";
Trinidad, a family friend, has given her life to the underground, at the expense of her husband and children. After a decade of struggle, she tells Aguirre, "The resistance has dissolved... we tried hard, but it's time to state the obvious, we lost. Maybe in ten, twenty, a hundred or a thousand years, the society we dreamed of will come to be, but we lost this round.";
And we meet Carmen's mother, a valiant spirit who can draw a knife to face down a band of human predators when they threaten her daughters. For her, motherhood and family life are not incompatible with revolutionary work.
These are hard acts to follow. But Carmen Aguirre, now a respected playwright, has found the courage to revisit her terrors. She has inherited the heart of a revolutionary, so the struggles for justice and freedom will continue, on the page, or on the stage.978-1-55365-462-9
-- review by Joan Givner
[BCBW 2011]
Carmen Aguirre was six years old when her family fled to Vancouver after a CIA-inspired coup in Chile ousted the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and brought army general Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973.
Five years later, her mother and step-father returned to South America to spend the next decade working for the Chilean leftist resistance. Her mother refused to be separated from her two daughters, choosing closeness and danger for them over distance and safety. As her oldest daughter, Carmen Aguirre has now written Something Fierce, Memoir of a Revolutionary Daughter (D&M $32.95), a riveting testimonial of bravery and fear.
The family's activities over the next decade span Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile, interspersed with return trips to Canada. Blacklisted, they were unable to re-enter Chile by train or plane. Journeys were made circuitously with detours and doublings back to throw off the secret police.
In order to operate safe houses, Aguirre's parents maintained a middle-class disguise, doing conventional jobs. The girls were conditioned to secrecy, trained to never confide in anyone or reveal details of family life.
This life of unremitting drama and concealment would prove excellent training for Aguirre's later work as a performance artist and actor in Vancouver, where she has also gained considerable acceptance as a playwright [See BCBW cover story, Autumn 2008, abcbookworld.com].
Parental absences were sudden and unexplained. The sisters were told: Never answer a knock at the door. If you hear nothing for twenty-four hours, you will call a secret phone number, and say you're with the Tall One and Raquel. Within an hour, someone will knock at the door. Go with that person. The phone number will be revealed when you hold this blank page over a flame. Memorize it, burn the paper, flush the ashes away.
The story line for Something Fierce is linear, the writing rough-edged, with abrupt changes of scene and occasional lapses into cliché, but this serves the content well, since anything polished or contrived would diminish its force and authenticity.
The evocation of danger from the point of view of a young girl is so strong-and maintained so steadily, vividly describing the terrors that surround her-that when Aguirre finally spills out everything to a lover, in her late teens, the reader feels a wave of alarm. (Fortunately, her confidante is a true companero).
Details of historical events and the exact nature of the resistance organization and hierarchy of the resistance are mostly blurred. Only later, for instance, does Aguirre realize that an intimate family friend was a superior in the movement. Such vagueness is entirely appropriate since Aguirre was deliberately kept in the dark, and direct knowledge of her full situation was suppressed, presumably for her own protection.
But Something Fierce is more than a journey into the shadows of political repression. What could have been a narrative of unremitting horror is relieved by joyous occasions-an idyllic holiday with Chilean grandparents, several adolescent love affairs-and by poetic descriptions of surroundings, such as Aguirre's first view of the Bolivian capital city, La Paz, a place she comes to love:
"We drove for hours, until the land broke like a Greek plate and there was a drop in the road. I looked out to see nothing but sky. The universe. Then, I looked down, and there below us was a city in a bowl. A bowl like the deepest crater on the moon, with a little house stuck to every last square inch of it. The bus drove over the edge of the bowl and down.";
At one point Aguirre collapses under the strain. She candidly describes her emotional meltdown, wrought by the pressure of fear, her step-father's stress-induced anger and a long period of isolation in a house with a diminishing food supply. "I was an agoraphobic fifteen-year-old skeleton with an obsessive-compulsive disorder,"; she writes.
It comes as a revelation when an acquaintance tells her, "Girls, always know this: it's your human right to be happy."; She wonders what that means for someone like her. "Did that mean children shouldn't have to think about revolutions, or safe houses, or being tortured to death?"; she asks.
Distraught, she slashes a wrist and is sent to a psychiatrist to whom she can confide nothing. The suicidal episode results in her return to Vancouver, where she completes her first year of high school. Shortly after her arrival there, she is joined by her mother and step-father who have barely escaped capture. Broken and defeated, they go their separate ways.
Aguirre returns to South America. At eighteen, she takes the resistance oath in a cafe in Lima, vowing to reveal no information, even if she is tortured to death, and understanding that if she gives away her comrades during the first twenty-four hours of capture, she will be executed by the organization.
The contrast between her twin lives in North America and South America is, obviously, extreme. She worries that her convictions aren't strong enough to overcome her fears. Nevertheless, with her companero, she carries out cross-border missions into Chile. The life-expectancy of those who undertake such work is two years.
Even though she is twenty pounds underweight and suffers from dizzy spells, Aguirre still pushes herself "to master the skill of killing my heart whenever I crossed the border.";
Powerful impressions are left by determined women.
Dr. Vergara Emerson, a Bolivian pediatrician and professor, walks to the front of a movie theatre to denounce the dictator, Luis Garcia Meza. "You will remember her,"; Carmen's step-father tells her, "because what that woman did is the definition of courage.";
Salvador Allende's sister, Laura Allende, stays with Aguirre's family in Vancouver during her cross-Canada tour, while dying of cancer. Carmen hears her weeping in the night, grieving for the lost of her country, not her life.
Carmen's grandmother is a role model who risks banging pots and pans during the blackouts in Chile. "I've seen fear turn people into informers, monsters,"; she says, "turning in their own friends and neighbors. You're dealing with a country, sick with fear.";
Trinidad, a family friend, has given her life to the underground, at the expense of her husband and children. After a decade of struggle, she tells Aguirre, "The resistance has dissolved... we tried hard, but it's time to state the obvious, we lost. Maybe in ten, twenty, a hundred or a thousand years, the society we dreamed of will come to be, but we lost this round.";
And we meet Carmen's mother, a valiant spirit who can draw a knife to face down a band of human predators when they threaten her daughters. For her, motherhood and family life are not incompatible with revolutionary work.
These are hard acts to follow. But Carmen Aguirre, now a respected playwright, has found the courage to revisit her terrors. She has inherited the heart of a revolutionary, so the struggles for justice and freedom will continue, on the page, or on the stage.978-1-55365-462-9
-- review by Joan Givner
[BCBW 2011]
Submitted on March 10, 2011 in By David.
