Book Bag: Departing at Dawn

review By Michael Hopping

Written by Gloria Lisé, translated by Alice Weldon

North Americans who remember the South American Dirty Wars of thirty years ago usually recall the dictators Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla or the plaintive photograph galleries of the disappeared.

Argentine author Gloria Lisé doesn’t focus on any of them in her novel Departing at Dawn. Instead she chooses people in the spotlight’s shadow, close enough to be exposed, struggling to remain anonymous and thus alive.

Berta is a young medical student and girlfriend of a union
organizer. The book opens as he’s thrown off a balcony by a faceless
“them” to explode on the sidewalk in front of her. “Berta looked at his
shattered head, and before his blood could start stinking like the
slaughterhouse, she… did the same as everybody else in the vicinity:
she pretended she had not seen him and making sure her face did not
give away her true feelings, she crossed the square.”

It is the first of several departures for Berta. Step by mundane
step, she is forced to tear herself away from family and the life she’s
known, hoping to stay ahead of death squad agents never seen but ever
present.

Translation, notes and historical afterward
by UNCA professor Alice Weldon. Published by The Feminist Press, 175 pages, $14.95