Ariel Dorman

A cup shatters and a life is changed.

Here’s a poem by Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman (born May 6, 1942), Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist.

From 1970 to 1973 Dorfman served as a cultural adviser in the administration of Salvador Allende, Chile’s first socialist president, whom the U.S. government actively opposed.

In September 1973 Allende’s democratically elected government was violently overthrown in a military coup that put the dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power. Dorfman was forced into exile, living and writing in the United States until the restoration of Chilean democracy began.

Dorfman's work often deals with the horrors of tyranny and, in later works, the trials of exile. His most famous play, Death and the Maiden, describes the encounter of a former torture victim with the man she believed tortured her.

Prologue: That Deafening Noise
Is The Garbage Truck

Today the cup broke;
how could I be so clumsy.
It made me very sad when it broke,
it was the one we had bought right after
we left the country,
one that we were fond of,
you could say it was almost
our friend,
bright red with white spots
for drinking café con leche
in the mornings,
those first mornings at the beginning.

So that there wouldn’t be any slivers left,
any sharp bits to surprise us afterwards
in our soup, our feet, our eyelids,
I picked up all the tiny fragments
squatting
at first and then on all fours,
with the infinite care of a punished child
doing a chore over again
quietly, quietly,
and slowly.
We had it for
more than four years.

Today I broke a cup
and my exile began.

--Ariel Dorman

[from “In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land”, Duke University Press (2002)