In Al-Riḥla: Ayyām ṭāliba miṣriyya fī Amrīka (The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America, 1983), Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour (Raḍwa ‘Ashūr) (1946–2014) recalls the 1973 massacre of 5,000 detainees in the Chilean national stadium after Pinochet’s military coup against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. In the 1970s, Ashour was in her mid-twenties, a young PhD student of African American literature at the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. When the widow of Allende recounted the details of the massacre in a small church at Yale University, Radwa was in the audience: ‘I cheered along with the crowd for a government of national unity and “el pueblo unido jamás sera vencido / the people united will never be defeated”’ (90–1; 110, emphasis in original). In Al-Riḥla, she buys two records by singer-guitarist Victor Jara and her Puerto Rican friend translates the lyrics. One of the records features on the cover the famous poem about the 5,000 prisoners in Santiago stadium that he wrote before they cut off his hands and killed him. Although Ashour writes about her study abroad (1973–75) in her memoir, the 1970s are framed within African, Arab and Latin American solidarity in the waning days of pan-Africanism and Third Worldism. Ashour’s memoir retains the ethos of the 1960s and links Arab, African and Latin American struggles.

Arab writers drew on Latin American literature and political iconography on many occasions, reviving links at historically remote moments. They did so within the frame of two important encounters: on the one hand, Latin American literature had a wide circulation in the Arab world; on the other hand, a generation of leftist Arab writers engaged with Third World movements.