SOURCE: Kaminsky, Amy. “Gender and Exile in Cristina Peri Rossi.” In Continental, Latin-American and Francophone Women Writers, edited by Eunice Myers and Ginette Adamson, pp. 149–59. Lanham: Md.: University Press of America, 1987.

In the following essay, Kaminsky explores the ways in which gender and exile interact in Peri Rossi's work following the 1972 military coup in Uruguay.

According to Angel Rama, “literary production in forced or voluntary exile is almost a continental standard from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego” (17).¹ Though Rama may have overstated his case, it is certainly true that exile is a condition of literary production in much of Spanish America, and that it is not simply idiosyncratic to individual writers but is, significantly, a result of the communal experience of political repression and economic suffering.

The exile writer's responsibility is expressed by the Chilean novelist, Antonio Skármeta, who calls writing in exile “an emergency operation to...