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mapoui
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28 Oct 2012 11:41 - 28 Oct 2012 12:03 #108075
by mapoui
Chairman, VB.......
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www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/26/poetry-a...american-revolution/
POETRY AND REVOLUTION
There are three houses, three dwellings, that used to belong to one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, to ‘Don Pablo’ as he was known in Chile, or Pablo Neruda as he has been known all over the world. All three houses are stunning, all three he helped to build with his own hands.
One house is attached to a hill, in a bohemian neighborhood of Bellavista, in Santiago de Chile.
The second one is in the port city of Valparaiso, commanding a stunning view of the bay, the port and the open ocean, spreading towards the horizon. The last one stands in what used to be a humble coastal village, called Isla Negra, ‘Black Island’, which is actually not an island at all but a cluster of houses, near a marvelous rocky coast. This is where Pablo Neruda wrote some of his most powerful poems, in a tiny wooden shack facing the enormous waves of the Pacific.
Many of Neruda’s poems were full of outrage; they were like a passionate call to arms. Don
Pablo was a Communist, and he believed in the Latin American struggle for true independence, he believed in revolution and above all –in the unity of this continent. His, arguably the greatest and the most monumental poem, is called “The Heights of Machu Picchuâ€. It ends in spectacular rebelliousness and solidarity:
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.
Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.
Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.
But despite its power, this was not the poem that had been chosen to be engraved on the columns in front of La Sebastiana, and it is not the poem that, during the long years of fascist darkness, inspired young men and women to fight the horrible dictatorship installed from abroad. It is not the poem that made them risk their lives, to die for Chile and for its freedom.
Surprisingly, some of the most simple and the most humble verses written to a woman he loved, actually became that symbol; one of the battle cries of the resistance:
…The fifth thing is your eyes,
my Matilda, my beloved,
I do not want to sleep without your eyes,
I do not want to live without you looking at me:
I will give the spring
for that you’ll keep watching me.
And here exactly lies the secret! The Latin American Revolution and its recent victories have not been constructed solely on the ideals related to the struggle for social justice. Those who think that it is only the Left Wing rationale, dialectics, and well-defined pragmatic goals or principles, that brought the recent success and the victories to almost the entire continent, are fully misunderstanding The Process.
The revolutions in this part of the world have been equally about the pathos, about the poetry, about sentimental outbursts, about the arts: they were, and were expected to be essentially quixotic, emotional and beautiful.
* * *
The arts and the world of dreams play an essential role in the Latin American struggle
an egalitarian society, and even in the armed struggle.
Here, the rebellion often ferments from the lines of the poems, from songs, from canvases. The Theatres of Buenos Aires and of Santiago de Chile, can be as explosive as car trunks packed with semtex.
Often there is no borderline between the revolution and poetry; they blend together.
[“In the novel ‘Love in the Time of Cholera,’ a man, Florentino Ariza, had all his dreams shattered when the love of his life refused himâ€, a theatre actor in a Chilean port city of Valparaiso once told me.
He was supposed to act in my play and we met to discuss his role, but instead the meeting turned out to be philosophical.
“Fermina Daza married someone else, and Florentino had only two options: to give up his love for her or to fight… and to wait… No matter how long it would take, just wait. He decided to fight and to wait. He waited for fifty-one years, nine months and four days… But in the end he won. The woman he loved became his… at the age of seventy something, but his. Do you understand?â€
“He was obsessed…†I began to analyze.
“No!†shouted the actor in desperation. How could I be so thick? He ordered another round of white wine witch cherimoya juice “Don’t you see? It is like with the revolution! We waited; we fought. We sacrificed so much… But it is here. The victory is finally ours.â€
Of course Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a great Communist novelist. And of course his ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ is a tremendous literary achievement, powerful and complex. But I never thought about the parallel – Fermina Daza and the revolution. ‘But why not?’ I thought, downing the wine, as the accordionist began playing another desperate tango right behind my back, ‘Why not? Waiting for Fermina Daza is like waiting for the revolution…’
Stories, books, poetry, music, dance, and theatre – they are all very essential here. No revolution in Latin America could happen without them.
Before deciding to go to the barricades, the people of this continent have to be touched, moved, not just ‘convinced’.
A few years ago, while visiting my Australian friend Tamara Pierson, in the Venezuelan city of Merida in the middle of Andes (Tamara is a person who gave plenty to Venezuela and to the revolution), my visit coincided with a government campaign of giving away millions of books to the poor, to the masses. Classics like Don Quixote were literally handed out by the tons and all for free, all over the country. This was in addition to almost complimentary editions, of poetry and the masterpieces of world literature, available in all the government run bookshops.
The gesture was a great one, but it was not just a gesture! It was a very logical and strategic move, because what Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, Ecuador and other countries were fighting for were actually very basic principles of humanism. One did not have to go all the way to Karl Marx, Chairman Mao, or Lenin or Chavez; the essence was all there – in the classics of Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Maxim Gorki, Tolstoy and Tagore.
Under the pretext that working class people and peasants were simply brainless beasts who could never understand intellectual peaks like poetry and novels, elites in much of the world ‘reserved’ the rights for philosophical thought and ‘noble emotions’ strictly for themselves. In direct contrast, in some of the countries in Latin America, we said that everyone could and should have right to think, and to feel, as we began distributing the great books to everybody. By defying all the elitist theories, even the most humble people actually began to read the great classics, enjoying and easily understanding them.
Then more they understood, the more they supported those who treated them as equals. They came to the revolution not through ideology, but through natural human instincts. They simply embraced those who respected them, were sharing with them and treated them with kindness.
Exposing society to the arts also began to have a very positive and deep influence on the many trends in progressive Latin American societies. What is the point, for instance, of ‘fighting’ against domestic violence, if people are only exposed from their early age to brutal, vulgar videos, and standardized, mostly soulless and commercially driven entertainment? Isn’t it clear that a man who reads Marti, Neruda or Tagore will less likely beat and terrorize his wife and children?
People accustomed to comparing good and evil, not superficially, or because they are obliged to by their religion or ideology, but voluntarily and in depth, would logically also refuse to observe idly, as marginalized people are rotting alive in the slums or directly on the streets, in front of their eyes.
“Tamara, have you liked my theatre play ‘Ghosts of Valparaiso’?†I asked my friend before departing from Merida.
“My boyfriend and I read it aloud, twice, for two nights in a rowâ€, explained with an absolutely serious face this tough activist with revolutionary spirit. “And we cried for two nights straightâ€. There was nothing more to add and I was happy; by South American standards she gave me some of the highest marks of appreciation, pure and sincere.
I knew men in Peru and Colombia and in other places of the continent who would cry when reading the poems of Marti or Cesar Vallejo at night, then wake up in the morning, and go without any hesitation into the most beastly battles, with absolutely no fear. I knew men who would write poems to their wives or girlfriends in the trenches.
Last edit: 28 Oct 2012 12:03 by mapoui.
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