Chilean Exiles in Sweden: Is Alejandro Leiva Wenger a Case of in between Literature?

The article focuses on the literature of the Chilean exile in Sweden. In
particular, it takes into account a short story contained in Alejandro Leiva Wenger’s
collection Till vår ära (2001), “Song for my father”. Through the analysis of textual excerpts
from the story, the study focuses on exile as the “invention of a transnational space” in which
Chilean and Swedish identity meet and merge, contributing to the thematization of a
‘multiple identity’, which draws on different cultures. By drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s
concept of postmemory (2012), our aim is to show that Leiva Wenger’s story is an example of
entangled history (Werner, Zimmermann, 2002), in which the protagonist’s personal sphere
intertwines and is conditioned by a public sphere related to Chile at the time of Pinochet’s
golpe.