Politics & Power Quote by Isabel Allende

Allende opens with a time-warp joke that’s doing real political work. “Born in ancient times, at the end of the world” is cheeky exaggeration, but it also locates Chile as doubly marginal: geographically peripheral and culturally time-lagged by tradition. The punchline is that oppression can feel like living in a museum where the exhibits are your daily rules.

The sentence stacks identities like weights: patriarchal, Catholic, conservative. It’s not just autobiography; it’s a compressed map of the forces that disciplined mid-century Latin American girlhood, especially for someone who would later make her name turning private lives into public narrative. Then she flips the causal chain. Instead of “despite” that upbringing, she gives “no wonder” - as if feminism is the predictable immune response to an environment that insists you stay small.

The most revealing clause is the last one: “the term had not reached Chile yet.” Allende isn’t claiming feminism was absent; she’s pointing out how language arrives unevenly, and how a society can pathologize what it hasn’t learned to name. “Nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me” weaponizes humor against that diagnostic gaze. The child isn’t wrong; the culture is under-equipped.

Her intent reads less like a manifesto than a reminder that political consciousness often starts as a childhood misfit feeling - the sense that the script is bad before you have vocabulary for “patriarchy.” Allende makes that misfitness charming, but not harmless: a five-year-old “raging” hints at lifelong refusal, the kind that later becomes literature.