My Invented Country

Isabel Allende

Harper Collins

Otago Daily Times, 2003

For Isabel Allende, writing is a constant exercise in longing.   As she says in the introduction to her new memoir, she has been an outsider nearly all her life. In one of those mysterious symmetries of fate, her years as a voyager are bounded by Tuesday September 11, 1973 and Tuesday September 11, 2001.  On the first date, a CIA-orchestrated coup overthrew the Chilean government of her cousin, Salvador Allende, and overnight she lost a country.  On the second, the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York coalesced her identity as one of the multicoloured population of North America and she gained a country-and led to her latest memoir.  

Having wandered through 5 continents as both exile and immigrant, she has constructed an identity for herself through her writing, created a homeland from the strands of memory and story that has evolved and solidified with each novel.  Although this country is not, strictly speaking, “real” (for nothing seen through the selective and self-editing lens of reminiscence can be), its roots are firmly fixed in the Chile of her childhood, soil which has been carried through numerous transplantations and sustained her through many years of exile. 

In My Invented Country, Allende explores this landscape, and paints such a vivid and loving portrait of Chile and its people that is both physically tangible and intensely personal.   Family and family duty are central to the Chilean psyche, so the author combines with descriptions of local custom and belief with portraits of her relatives (some of whom will be recognisable from her novels) to illustrate a culture rich in tradition, contradiction, and pragmatism.  For example, Chile is a stronghold of Catholicism (in fact the most Catholic country in the world).  However, despite the fact that “churches are filled on Sundays, and the Pope is venerated…nobody pays any attention to his views on contraceptives because it’s thought that there’s no way an aged celibate who doesn’t have to work for a living can be an expert on the subject.” There is also a long tradition of belief in witchcraft and evil spirits.  Allende’s grandfather swore blind he saw the devil on a bus (recognizable by his green cloven hooves), and it is family legend that her great Aunt sprouted wings.

Although some of the characteristics Allende ascribes to the Chilean people are not entirely complimentary (for example, a tendency to fatalism), she freely acknowledges that she, too, shares this trait, and can laugh at it.  She also glories in the positive side, the generosity, the spirit and the poetic soul of the Chilean people.    Her writing invokes the spirited, intelligent young girl who loved her country while rebelling against the misogynistic, authoritarian society in which she grew up, who grieved for the democracy killed by the coup, but continued to hope for and work toward its resurrection.  I have never read any of her novels, but having heard the beauty, honesty and humour of her narrative voice, I look forward to a long and enjoyable acquaintance.