Novelist in exile

UNESCO Courier, Jan, 1998

* What sort of a childhood did you have?

Luis Sepulveda: I was lucky enough to have a normal childhood in a family which was imbued with the spirit of curiosity and which gave me the urge and the opportunity to travel. From the age of fourteen onwards, I used to spend my holidays backpacking around Chile - which is 5,000 km from north to south - and the neighbouring countries, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay.

* What about your studies?

L.S.: After secondary school in Santiago, I studied theatre production at the National University. In 1969, I was given a five-year scholarship to continue my drama studies at Moscow University, but it was withdrawn after five months on account of "misconduct" - I had made friends with some dissidents, who in my opinion were producing the best art in the Soviet Union. I had to go back to Chile.

* How did you become a writer?

L.S.: Through reading, especially the great authors of adventure stories like Jules Verne, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson. We read a lot at home. My grandfather, who was a Spanish anarchist, loved books and had a small library. I think the urge to write came from reading Francisco Coloana, a Chilean writer.

* What was your first book?

L.S.: It came out in 1966, a collection of very bad juvenile poetry I shall never have republished. I went on writing because I had acquired a taste for it, but without believing myself to be a writer. Then one day a friend put together a dozen of my stories into a book, Cronicas de Pedro Nadie, and sent it to Cuba, where it won the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1969. Later it was published in Colombia and Argentina, and I started to be known throughout Latin America. I'd become a writer through force of circumstance! I was also writing for the theatre and the radio, which I think is excellent training for a writer because of the need to meet deadlines.

* You had a political role at the same time ...

L.S.: While writing I was also politically active, first as a leader of the student movement and then in the Salvador Allende administration, especially in the department of cultural affairs. I acted as a mediator between the government and big business, and I also worked for the department of cultural affairs. I was in charge of a series of cheap editions of classics of world literature for the general public.

* Then came the 1973 putsch ...

L.S.: I was jailed for two-and-a-half years. I obtained a conditional release through the efforts of the German branch of Amnesty International but was then kept under house arrest. I managed to escape and went underground for nearly a year. With the help of a friend who was head of the Alliance Francaise in Valparaiso I was able to find work. We set up a drama group that became the first cultural focus of resistance, but I was rearrested and given a life sentence for treason and subversion, finally reduced to twenty-eight years, thanks to my defence lawyer.

* This time you were well and truly jailed ...

L.S.: No, in fact the German section of Amnesty International intervened again on my behalf and my prison sentence was commuted to eight years' exile, so in 1977 I left the prison for the airport to fly to Sweden, where I was to teach Spanish literature. At the first stopover, Buenos Aires, I managed to make my getaway.

* That was the start of a long exile ...

L.S.: Yes, I went first to Uruguay but many of my friends there, as in Argentina, which was then a dictatorship, were dead or in prison, so I went on to Brazil, to Sao Paulo, but had to leave there for Paraguay, where I couldn't stay because of the regime. I went from there to Bolivia and then to Peru, finally taking up residence in Ecuador after a great friend of mine, the novelist and poet Jorge Enrique Adoum, had invited me to attend a meeting of Latin American writers there. In Quito I was director of the Alliance Francaise theatre and founded a theatrical company and then I took part in a UNESCO expedition to assess the impact of colonization on the Shuar Indians.

* Was that important for you?

L.S.: Enormously important. I shared the life of the Shuars for seven months. It was a decisive experience that changed my whole outlook. I suddenly realized what it really meant to be Latin American, to belong to a multicultural, multilingual continent - over ninety languages, not counting Spanish and Portuguese - with its own conceptions of time and history, its own rites. I realized that the Marxism-Leninism I had grown up with was not a recipe that could be applied to a continent whose population is mainly rural and stands in a close relationship of dependence and protectiveness with nature. I worked in contact with the Indian organizations and I drew up the first literacy teaching plan for the Ibambura peasants' federation, in the Andes.

* Then you went on again to another country...

L.S.: Yes, but I went on writing short stories the whole time and I had plans for longer works. In 1979, I joined the Simon Bolivar international brigade, which was fighting in Nicaragua. Immediately after the victory of the revolution, I started working as a journalist writing on international affairs, but the following year I decided to leave Nicaragua and go to Europe.