What women from Chile - the country where Isabel Allende started her writing career, as a journalist for the feminist publication Paula - want is what women from all over the world are fighting for: to stop being victim of violence, to be allowed equal pay, ownership of their own bodies, to be free.
The collection of autobiographical articles that I´ve had access to in audiobook format - read by German actress Barbara Auer - Was wir Frauen wollen (What we, women want) translated from Spanish by Svenja Becker - has a documentary value as for the history of feminist movements, particularly in South America.
Allende evokes the Chile of the 1960s, whose consideration for women rights was ´lightyears´ from the mindset in the rest of the ´Western´ world. She retraces her own awakening and how she started not only to be aware of the topics she eventually will write about, but also to believe in. Her militantism will lead to her blacklisting during the dictatorship of general Pinochet, and she left the country, but those topics are well reflected and developed in her fiction.
It is the situation of women globally better since then? Not necessarily and not as long as we, women we are not aware of what we really want. Women as mother, daughter, beings getting old, carrying on a physical body, fighting for their right to reproduce or not. Everyday life stories told by one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
Although Was wir Frauen wollen may not say too many new things about what does it mean being a woman, it has a value of testimony for a specific episode of South American history, but also outlines a personal acccount of the history of Chile. After all, Chile was the first country in South America to elect a woman as president, in the person of the current UN Commissioner for Human Rights since 2018, Michelle Bachelet - a woman with an interesting life story as well.
Rating: 3 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment