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Page 12/What She Wants/May, 1980

Chilean Women in Resistance and Exile

love for the people and the cause of freedom.

The women prisoners, despite the fact that most had not had leadership positions, despite the fact that most were very young and inexperienced politically, mastered their limitations, their weaknesses, and took a qualitative leap in their emancipation as women as well as in their revolutionary commitment. Once they had lived through the first stage on this second battle front which prison represents, the women went on to live another enriching experience, out of solitary confinement and into the prison community.

There, there were no male companeros, always so good at organizing and at organizing us; in spite of this, the task of organizing was carried out rigorously and carefully. Discipline, a spirit of sacrifice, solidarity, dignity in the face of the enemy, the creation of activities and workshops to fill the lives of the women and avoid stagnation. Each woman had to contribute what she knew, each one had to be generous with her knowledge, with her experience, and with the maturity she had already achieved. If there was anything of importance learned there, it was how to share, to share food, joys, tasks, knowledge, and pain. And there we did exactly what political prisoners all over the world have done: we converted the prison into a school for well-trainedcadres, for combatants, for human beings who were free even behind bars to love more than ever in those conditions the freedom which had been so cruelly torn from us.

Just like our companeros, we women prisoners built our freedom every day. In the absence of ~ ~ freedom of the press, we created wall-newspapers "which would be put up and taken down, depending on the degree of vigilance. In the absence of freedom of expression, we responded by creating poems, songs, theatrical works, dances which reflected our lives and our hopes. We learned that children are not individual property but rather the children of the collectivity. They were the children of one mother and of a hundred aunts. Their feeding, education, entertainment, clothing, bathing, etc., were tasks and . responsibilities of the collectivity. The mother's responsibilities toward her child were the same as those of each one of us.

The majority of women reached exile with this cumulus of experience. With the mutilation inherent in the loss of loved ones, with the traumas remaining from the moments of horror lived while in the hands of the brutal enemy, but also with their hearts overflowing with solidarity received and shared. Externally we were older, but inside we felt renewed by having been able to meet our responsibilities. We arrived at an obligatory but temporary exile, another battle front, less comforting, less gratifying, but as useful, as the previous front-as useful and as necessary. This is the temporal space in which the rearguard is constructed and developed, a rearguard which nourishes, which denounces, which propagandizes, which accumulates international forces while basing itself on the actions carried out on the front lines of the battle. An exile in which we must also prepare the conditions for returning to Chile improved, renewed, strengthened; better than before.

But what we have just defined as our task is being accomplished with difficulty, with advances and retreats. Once again, in exile, party women face the daily contradictions implicit in being a woman, a worker, a mother, a housewife, and a party militant.

In prison, after having thrown off our traditional role in the torture chamber, we reflected at length on our lives, became aware of many things, wrote to our companeros who were also in prison or on the outside, in order to communicate our thoughts. We questioned the unproletarian relationship which existed between men and women, we wanted to develop an ideological discussion on that theme. And the debate, which often became collective, began. In the light of the growth achieved, the whole concept of

the couple was reformulated. In exile, the topic has been brought up more energetically, sometimes advancing the discussion, at other times hampering it, and at still others leading to the break-up of the couple, because women and men emerged from a rich but difficult experience and because both had grown, but not always in parallel ways. Exile has tended to create an inhospitable framework for discussion.

Women were forced to confront the reality of the period recently lived through. The forced separation from our children was followed by reunion with them; in addition to joy, this meant the resumption of an interrupted relationship which had been dramatic for the children and which brought together mother and child as virtual strangers. We women had to learn to walk in the streets and watch the sunsets with the knowledge that never again would we feel the warm hands of those whom we loved who had fallen in battle. We had to swallow our pain in an alien setting, hearing a language which was not ours, and absorbing a culture which others had created. The deprivation of freedom was a thing of the past, but with that situation we women also left behind the collective experience, the hundreds of voices discussing each day in order to dig deep into the truth of each moment. Children were once. again.individual property, so much so that we could not even depend on our companeros.to. share this with us, because they were too busy.

།།

Now we have to summon up the strength to understand that we cannot live in the past, not in the good nor in the-bad which has remained of it; that from the marvelous human group in, which we had lived we must take the strength and the lessons in.. order to project them into the future; that the suffering of yesterday must be relegated to a small corner of our memory and acknowledged only when weak-ness appears, as a way to remind ourselves of how much is yet to be done.

•

Women party members, because of our experiences, had more self-confidence on reaching exile.. -We expected more of ourselves, but also more of our companeros, of our families, of the collectivity. And there was no coherent response to our expectations, not from the companeros, not from the families, not. -from the organizations comprising the collectivity. It was taken for granted that the companeros had advanced: they washed the dishes, set the table, went

out with us to shop. The companeros helped, but did not commit themselves wholeheartedly. Tasks were not equally divided, they were merely lightened a bit. The women continued to bear the major responsibility. Responsibility for what? For accepting everything twice over: double exploitation, doubly difficult exile, because while we face the same difficulties as the exiled men, we also have had to face the job of integrating all our roles, of coordinating them. Once again women have had to make a double effort in order to meet our responsibilities, so as not to be obliged by others to opt for one role at the expense of. another. We aspire to be integral women, to have children while fighting on the front lines or in the