ABSTRACT
Isabel Allende’s 1982 genealogical novel, The House of the Spirits, partly tells the story of one of the more infamous episodes of social injustice in the 20th century: the 1973 United States’ instigated and fomented coup against the democratically elected socialist government of Chile under Salvador Allende, the “first Nine-11,” as Martin Espada has called it.1 The coup ushered in Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year reign of terror against the people of Chile, especially the artists, writers, leftists, and other subversives who had supported Allende. The above passage, coming on the last page and a half of the novel, teaches us, through its character Alba, as she totters between two generational poles of the patriarchy, clinging to her impending motherhood and the promise of female agency, that social justice often comes out of a horrific history, of events whereby we realize the absence of social justice. Often social justice demands that writers create in spaces of danger. Danticat ponders this paradox in the first pages of her beautifully written collection of essays, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2011):
Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them . . . . Camus . . . suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception . . . are dangerous under-takings, disobedience to a directive.
