Two events gave birth to this play: the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet
by the spanish courts and the 1995 death of Aguirre's uncle, who drank
himself to death on Vancouver's skid row, never living to make a
victorious return to his country. It has taken decades of silence for
Aguirre to understand and come to terms with her family's experience as
refugees and exiles: "The few times we spoke about it to other people,
we were accused of being pathological liars and being crazy," she says
of those years. "We learned never to talk about what was happening in
Chile. From the moment when I told some classmates very matter-of-factly
in grade two that my stepfather and some of my family members had just
come out of a concentration camp that was the national soccer stadium, I
was Crazy Carmen."
Laid bare in the ?ctionalized autobiographical details of The Refugee
Hotel are the universal truths the victims and survivors of political
oppression continue to experience everywhere: the terror of persecution,
arrest and torture; the exhausted elation of escape; the trauma of
learning to live again with the losses, betrayals and agonies of the
past; the irrational guilt of the survivor--even the tragedy of
surviving the nightmares of the past only to have them return to
challenge any hope of a future.
Set in a run-down hotel in 1974, only months after the start of the
infamous Pinochet regime, eight Chilean refugees struggle, at times
haplessly, at times profoundly, to decide if ?eeing their homeland means
they have abandoned their friends and responsibilities or not.
More than a dark comedy about a group of Chilean refugees who arrive in
Vancouver after Pinochet's coup, this play is Carmen Aguirre's attempt
to give voice to refugee communities from all corners of the globe.
