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welcome to hardtalk i am stephen sackur. in all cultures, all languages, there are writers whose imaginations prompt them to challenge the status quo. in democracies, they are called critical voices. in authoritarian regimes, they are labelled enemies of the state. the novelist and playwright ariel dorfman was forced into exile and saw his books burned in chile after the coup of 1973. he made a new life straddling the us and post— dictatorship chile, his international literary success with books full of ghosts and foreboding. why?

ariel dorfman in north carolina, welcome to hardtalk. i am so glad to be with you. we are delighted to have you. your latest book, the compensation bureau. it is fascinating on many levels but if i had to, i guess i would describe it as a surreal apocalypse fantasy. is that because that is where you believe we human beings are right now? i think we are in danger of apocalypse certainly from climate change, pestilence and especially from nuclear warfare which i think is going to be

easier to come by because of the climate change that is coming. wars for water, war for land, for resources. but the novel is apocalyptic only towards the end, really. it began in a very different way as a, i don't know whether i should describe what it's about so that we understand where it's going towards, why it ends towards that. a lot of people around the world are watching and haven't read the book. give a sense on what kind of world you have created. briefly, i imagine, being an atheist myself, i imagine a universe which is governed from the start by a series of guardians and custodians of all life in billions and billions of worlds. and one of these custodians, a woman, i made herfemale, discovers a glitch in a tiny little speck called earth. a glitch in the dna

which brings these people towards warlike consistent violence over and over again. and she comes with a plan that she cannot time travel back to fix it and she cannot go there personally because it's forbidden to interfere directly in human or other organisms affairs. she conceives a bureau that will take every human being has been unfairly killed or suffered and given a second chance, a virtual theatre of life, give them a second chance to live and this will have also the consequences and a consequence that comes towards the end is the revelation, the apocalypse is coming but none of this is helped at all to end this warlike quality that we suffer.

it is pretty bleak, you have to admit and i find fascinating about it and so much of your work, really exploring the good and the bad that exists within we human beings in this book is encouraging the notion of an audit of what is the really bad, cruel, inhumane and human beings but clearly there is good and there is love too. which ultimately, without giving away the ending of your book, which do you think is going to triumph for us humans? love is going to triumph, finally. we are all going to die, not only our earth but the whole universe is going to at some point either explode or implode and the love that was there, what i called the rain in the garden, you cannot erase that. and it's a love story because one of the overseers who every day has got to recreate a thousand lives, falls in love with one woman

in particular and decides to go outside of the rules and give her over and over again because he is so in love with her, it is a voyeuristic fantasy that the woman that he cannot live with or touch, he gives her the wonderful life that she should have and he is caught with this and condemned to a certain punishment which i do not want to reveal too much. but it has to deal with that sense that his love for her will end up having a great effect upon how humanity might possibly save itself from this apocalypse. i do not want to give away the ending. we will get back to that later but what i want to drill down to is this capapcity that you have and it is evoked in the bookm for seeing things on the outside, i mean, here, the central character is an overseer, an actuary that

looks from the outside but it strikes me that in your own life, you have been something of a detached outsider in the society that you lived in for various complex personal reasons. do you feel like an outsider looking in? ifeel that, yes, let's say i had to re— concile myself being an outsider and all my life is be inside, dance with the others, be a part of a group, be accepted and then i realised, especially during some of the years of exile and expatriation, this is my condition, as a writer, this is what i can give others. as long as it is a compassionate outsider and not just an outsider looking in and surveying, i'm somewhat of a voyeur myself, a gentle voyeur because that's what writers are. they are voyeurs of their own characters. i am looking at these characters i'm looking at the world and trying to find way into that world so that it becomes clear to readers or to spectators of my plays and films or my poems,

how they can go into that world with me and yet, save a certain sense of not being overwhelmed by the road itself. ——world itself. do you think it brings you a greater clarity of vision the fact you are not fully of anywhere is make you spend a lot of time and your young adulthood in chile but then you're forced to flee after the military coup in the toppling and the killing of salvador. you ended up in the united states and you are a us citizen but nonetheless, you spend a lot of time in chile and in the spanish—speaking world. does the life you live now, does he give you a greater clarity of vision, do you think? i hope so. i think is gives me certain clarity and concerning possibilities and i see myself

as a bridge between different worlds. the world is made of overlapping communities and i belong to many different overlapping communities. the question is, this pluralism that we believe in democracy and society, can we not accept it also in our own selves that we have many cells inside ourselves this meant that we are many people and we have many faces and many masks and i feel like i'm a bridge between two languages. i can go back between two different languages and two different cultures in two different opposing countries, which have been at odds with one another for a long time. different continents and i think, that was not my choice. it was what i wanted my life turn out to be, i would've loved to have stayed back there forever in one place and write like yeats, that is not what happened. what is interesting is that you talk about the life that you led, and belonging

in different places but in essence, not being rooted in any of them. i'm just thinking that perhaps, the notion of being a truly internationalist person would have been very common and regarded as the norm in a certain sector of society in the 1990s and early 2000s when we all believed that the world was forever globalising. since then, things have changed. borders have been rebuilt, nationalism has been on the march and we have a prime minister who once said that everybody needed to be a citizen of somewhere rather than a citizen of nowhere. so, maybe your internationalism is no longer the fashion? how about being the citizen of elsewhere? john once told my friend and said, i am a patriot of elsewhere. maybe that's a good place to be. but at the same time, i have roots. i do have roots in my past

and my home is my wife of 56 years we have been married and it's my family, my friends. it is the memories that i've got, it is the sense of struggle. i have a home in that struggle and have a home in my literature. every day i wake up and i imagine worlds where other people can come in, they can share with me and i have lived a series of experiences of the utmost terror and great hope. and i am buffeted between despair and that idea that we can do better, but at the same time, iam not a preacher, iam not trying to disturb my readers, but i want them to ask these questions because it would not be easy to get out of the situation and we're talking by the beginning, that apocalypse is coming and i think we are close to it, we're getting closer and closer to it, that we are only going to get out of it if we participate more and more and ask ourselves very difficult questions. the time for the intellectual that i am and the imaginative writer that i am, to ask these

difficult questions and you are helping me in that sense by getting my message or at least my person, my ideas out to many people, i would lay people to participate in that. i do not see myself as superior to them. ijust happen to have this quirk of the imagination which i cannot stop imagining things and thinking of things. you cannot stop imagining things and you imagine them in both spanish and english and you're talking to me in english but you write poetry and plays and novels in both english and in spanish. you are truly even beyond bilingual and i'm just wondering, is this sense of imagination identifiably different from that of the english ariel dorfman? they are overlapping languages. i speak of them as i am married to two languages but it is an adulterous

relationship, i do not know who was the mistress and who was the wife, i do not know, i go between one and the other in this english that you are hearing, growing up in new york as a kid, as a child. this english you are hearing is somehow inhabited by the ghost of the spanish. traces of the spanish. it doesn't seem like that because my accent or because of my rhetorical english, my eloquence, but i botched it. but the point is, if english is inhabited by the spanish and the spanish has a residence inside itself of english. when i am writing, there is a fusion of both in one person. i am a strange character. briefly, i want to talk about two seminal moments. the first when you are a very small child we are about two and a half years old when your parents first came to the united states of america, i think it was 1945, you were a sickly kid

who was rushing to hospital with pneumonia and for at least three weeks, in this new country, a language that was new to you, you were completely separated from your parents and it seems that you've written about, that had a traumatic effect on you which has lived with you for the rest of your life. are determined my life. when they left the hospital i did not speak another word of spanish. which is right now my main language and i refused to speak it. i said i'm not speaking this language any more and they would say... i would say i don't understand what you're saying. i do not understand. and i know what happened there. i don't remember anything there, of the trauma, but i know that when i

was in that hospital, i felt abandoned by that language and it felt abandoned by my parents and its at other effects, i always try to please everybody but i wanted to be loved closely, excessively all the time and. i think it is a form of fear, insecurity of what you could lose at any moment and there's that aspect to your character. and i did lose everything over and over again. i lost chile again. and a seminal moment in your life, which is 1973, you are a successful young writer, you are working in chile and working as an adviser to salvador and you're a true believer in socialism, you're very excited about the future and then it is all taken away from you and all of the supporters of that government because the military move in and take over, and you are forced to flee. you have been living with that for the rest of your life too.

i've been living with the fact that it was felt that i should have died with that and they didn't. it is too complicated to explain here. i've explained it in my memoir. and in that memoir, i explained that i should've been there. in a series of fortuitous coincidences save my life and i've been living ever since the idea that i am a ghost, but i am a survivor in some ways. but also the sense that if i survive, it was to tell the story. it was so that someone could tell us the story. and i tell it in a one—sided way and saying these are the bad people, these are the good people. but what it has taught us, but to those traumatic situations teach us about forgiveness, revolution, about change, but gentleness and about love? and i tried constantly to create that and the bureau is one more

step in the question of what do we do with the victims? what do we do with the trees that are the victims of the perpetrators? what do we do with the world that is in such pain and how do we assuage that pain? and we feel it, if we find a way of fuming each other in some ways and understanding each other�*s as brothers and sisters in the earth, it is possible that we will be able to avoid the terrible things that i think are going to come if we do not find a way of loving each other as we should. many of us know you best as the player wrote as a woman torture victim is brought face—to—face with her torturer. supposed torturer. we do not know if it is him for sure, ijust want to make sure about that. fair point. now, it is three decades pretty much since you wrote that play, as you reflect on it and it's not just about chile, it's about dictatorship and it's about cruelty, inhumanity and in many different corners of the world

that many different times. what is your feeling about how, as you put it, to build those bridges between those who suffer and those who inflict the suffering? i believe in restorative justice. in other words, i do believe that's very important that the law punish those who have committed terrible crimes. but i also believe it is important that each of us look inside of ourselves and find whatjoins us put the victim and perpetrators. i don't think i have a little dictator inside myself. but ordinary people do terrible things. we have to create a situation that really asks the audience to look at themselves in the mirror and say, what can i do? how am i complacent in the system was make it their way in which i can change the way my life, my relationship to other people?

can i get rid of the cruelty in everyday life? and it is a play which is about transition to democracy, which by the way, tends to be very important to the world today because democracy is under such assault and is being besieged so much in so many places that the play alas, is terribly relevant and tortures happening everywhere. we havejournals being killed day by day and people are being imprisoned and books are being burned. it is not as if the world has advanced that much. in certain ways we have advanced in other ways we have not. but that play continues to be relevant as i think most of my books but the question that i go into that darkness and i do not blink and relation to looking at it and i am trying to find the light that may be there, candles and the darkness. how has your own politics

evolved to evoke you from the early 1970s, you are definitely a man who believed in socialism as the way out of chile's inequalities and injustice. latin america has tried socialism in different forms from castro to chavez to morales, all sorts of brands of it and you went to live in the country that back in the early �*70s, you despised, the united states. you will books telling the world how evil american imperialism was and you ended up living there. i'm just wondering, what is happened to your politics of the last 30 years. i was a democratic socialist and i was never for a dictatorship. i thought to reach socialism, more democracy, not less. and i've been very clear about that always and that was important about the experiment was that it was not

an experiment in which we were going to kill our adversaries or silence them, in fact, they ended up killing us and silencing us. but the meditation that i have come to understand is first of all, there is a need for profound and radical change in the ways in which we structured the economy, our social life, the inequalities, right. that is one of the things that is feeding the problems of the world today. the globalisation has brought many benefits and has brought many problems as well. the pandemic is shown a startling relief, all the problems that the health system has of poverty, it is there, right? so i believe in radical change. i believe radical change happens through revolutions that are gentle, that may be disruptive and may be threatening at times to people, but they should not be organised in such a way that we create more democracy and not less. i have evolved in that sense, certainly. and i would be a full if i had not evolved and have not learned a lesson and i don't want the fact that we were defeated such drastic leads are terribly and the pain

we endured was so great that i become conservative and i say to myself, you know what was make no need for change whatsoever. every time you try to change, there's going to be disappeared people, they're going to kill people, hurt people. the best thing is to just leave things as they are to think that is the road to destruction. we need to change radically the way in which we structure our lives and our psychological lives as well as our economic lives. that will take a long time to happen and i might say it's going to happen, but there are forces for change in the road today is a as forces for despotism. it is very difficult situation because i feel that the amount of fake news and fraudulence and the lack of a common agreement on what the truth is.

inviting you to weave together your past and the santiago early �*70s in your present. you have written in recent years, about your deep concerns that america and its democracy are profoundly fragile and a way that reminds you of chile in the 1970s. how far would you take that analogy? i think i take it quite far in fact because i think that chile today has a lesson for the united states. we managed to create a situation today in chile that we are discussing a new constitution. we are discussing a new constitution which is the first time the people of chile have discussed the new constitution that has not been imposed upon them. as the first time in our history that we have been able to take what we want the country to be and turn that into laws, into legislation, into a magna carta. and i think the united states need something similar. you cannot do that unless you look deeply into your own innocence or your own sense that

you are responsible for this. and i think the united states is in a terrible moment, a very difficult moment because of trump is him. but donald trump is just a symptom of something very deep malaise and sickness inside american society. to go back into the beginning. you are really sure that the good in us and the love in us can really trump the bad, the cruel in the inhuman? i am not sure of that at all, but the whole point if i was sure about that, i would be some profit or something. i am waging that that is the way out. and i'm saying there is enough good to give me some hope. it is not a done deal.

0n the contrary, the odds, i would see the odds are against us, but never bet against lovers. that is a great way to end. ariel dorfman thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you so much for having me. hello there. we're starting the new week off on a sunshine and showers theme. we'll have plenty of showers across southern and western areas. a lot of central and eastern parts will tend to stay dry with a good deal of sunshine around. it's going to be breezy for all, quite windy in the north and the west because we'll be close to this area of low pressure which is anchored

to the north of the uk. so you can see quite a few isobars on the chart, these weather fronts enhancing the shower activity as they move from west to east. and we're in a mild air mass, as you can see from the yellow and orange colours. so then we start monday off on a fine note across central and eastern areas, dry with some sunshine. there will be showers from the word go across western areas. these will tend to become more widespread, very frequent across the north—west of scotland. merging together to produce longer spells of rain, quite cloudy too. some heavy ones as well across the south of england. some of these could contain some hail and thunder. a few getting in towards the east on this strong west south—westerly breeze, but many eastern areas should stay dry. and it will be windy, particularly around coasts of scotland, particularly the northern and western isles. temperatures mild again in the south, 1a to 16 celsius, maybe a little bit fresher across scotland and northern ireland. as we move through monday night, it stays breezy, lengthy clear spells, further showers. these showers will tend to fade away because we'll start to see this weather front approaching

northern ireland and western scotland later in the night to bring some windy weather, more cloud and more persistent rain around. it's going to be another pretty mild night to come, temperatures no lower than around six or seven celsius. so here is the pressure chart for tuesday. we've got a pretty vigourous area of low pressure to the north—west of the uk. this weather front will be affecting more northern and west parts of the country. further south and east you are, close to this area of high pressure over the near continent, then it is likely to stay largely dry. but it will be a breezy day wherever you are. like i mentioned, staying largely dry with some sunny spells across southern and eastern areas. cloudier further north and west, outbreaks of rain, some heavy and persistent, particularly across western hills, northern and western scotland, perhaps into north—west england, north—west wales at times. it will be pretty cloudy and dull, but look at these temperatures. despite the cloud and rain in the north, all the sunshine in the south, looking at temperatures a good five degrees above average. it's very mild as we move into the middle part of the week. further wet and windy weather across north—western areas, and by friday, it looks like some of that wet weather will reach southern and eastern parts as well. see you later.

this is bbc news. our top stories. i5 this is bbc news. our top stories. , ., ., ., ., stories. is coca-cola failing to meet — stories. is coca-cola failing to meet its _ stories. is coca-cola failing to meet its promises - stories. is coca-cola failing to meet its promises on - stories. is coca-cola failing - to meet its promises on plastic recycling? the bbc�*s panorama has been investigating the world's largest soft drinks company. remembering the actor james michael tyler who has died aged 59. he was no the world over for died aged 59. he was no the world overfor his died aged 59. he was no the world over for his role as the coffee shop manager gunter in the comedy, friends. we coffee shop manager gunter in the comedy, friends.— the comedy, friends. we 'ust ke -t the comedy, friends. we 'ust kept giving i the comedy, friends. we 'ust kept giving him i the comedy, friends. we 'ust kept giving him more i the comedy, friends. we just kept giving him more and - the comedy, friends. we just l kept giving him more and more and when we realised there was and when we realised there was a storyline with his secret love of rachel, itjust, it was the gift that kept on giving. es, the gift that kept on giving. a fire aboard a containership in british columbia is being brought under control by the colombia ? canadian coast

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