Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
Carmen Aguirre
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0345813820
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The winner of CBC's Canada Reads 2012, Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre, re-issued by Vintage Canada.
Six-year-old Carmen Aguirre fled to Canada with her family following General Augusto Pinochet's violent 1973 coup in Chile. Five years later, when her mother and stepfather returned to South America as Chilean resistance members, Carmen and her sister went with them, quickly assuming double lives of their own. At 18, Carmen became a militant herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and euphoria.
Something Fierce takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictator-ruled Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's Chile in the eventful decade between 1979 and 1989. Dramatic, suspenseful and darkly comic, it is a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life and a passionate argument against forgetting.
gesturing to me to offer my palms. I willed my hands to stay in place as the stick cracked through the air, coming down hard. Two tears shot like projectiles from my eyes as I took my seat. From the front of the class, the teacher lectured on art and revolution, accompanying his words with lively quick sketches on the blackboard. The artist must be ruthless in his pursuit of the truth, he said, and when he found the truth, he must utter it with love and beauty, whatever the danger involved. “An
middle-class look. It all made sense now: my mother’s Charlie’s Angels attire, Ale and I in our brand-new shoes, all the rage with their white platforms and blue suede tops, the Pepsi logo stitched on the side. We had to look normal. Mainstream. We had to stand out for the right reasons from now on, not the wrong ones. Lots of our friends in Vancouver had come straight from the detention centres in Chile. They’d arrived with crooked spines, missing an eye or their balls or nipples or
defending the motherland.” I sat stock still at my desk in the back of the classroom, fingers braided, eyes focussed on a Charly García verse etched on my desk: “Don’t bomb Buenos Aires, we cannot defend ourselves. The kids in my neighbourhood are hiding in the sewers, spying the sky... Today I’m afraid of a blond, tomorrow I don’t know who I’ll fear.” That was one good thing about the Malvinas War: the ban on all things English had meant an explosion of national rock, with Charly García, one of
I shook so hard it was as if I’d had a seizure. At six in the morning, I climbed out the window and walked home along the icy sidewalks, an ache between my legs that reached up through my centre, filled my heart and beamed out through my toes and fingertips. The moon breathed over the lake. Dante stayed in my life for the next two months. On weekends we’d go dancing at By Pass, the Brain or Grisu, which was right on the lake, and on weeknights he’d help me with my homework. He took it upon
We were learning to categorize people at a glance: informer, agent, possible helper, militant. From inside the telephone company, we saw the man run outside and look in all directions. His right hand reached for something under his jacket. Was he carrying a pistol or a semi-automatic? Three men who also looked Chilean were waiting in a grey Peugeot 504 nearby, dressed in suits and dark glasses. No doubt they too were armed to the teeth. The man in the brown suit jumped into the passenger seat,