/ARTS WEEKLY/LITERATURE-CHILE: A Poet’s Anguished Return

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Sep 2 2003 (IPS) - Raúl Zurita, who many consider Chile’s greatest contemporary poet, has broken a three-year silence with the publication of "INRI", a lyrical testimony to the sorrows that are resurfacing in this country as the 30th anniversary of the Sep. 11, 1973 military coup d’état draws near.

Zurita, winner of Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2000, provides an "echo" in his newest collection of poems to the emergence of truths in this country since 2001 about the crimes against humanity committed during the iron-fisted military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

"Astonishing bait rains from the sky/ Astonishing bait over the sea/ Below, the ocean, above the unusual clouds of a clear day." reads one of the poems included in "INRI", which Zurita presented last week in Santiago. (Sorprendentes carnadas llueven del cielo/ Sorprendentes carnadas sobre el mar/ Abajo el océano, arriba las inusitadas nubes de un día claro…)

The "bait" raining from the sky are the bodies of the detained-disappeared who, according to admissions by the armed forces, were thrown out of aircraft into the sea and rivers and into the craters of volcanoes.

"’INRI’ is the inscription of the passion of suffering, and above all the dream of resurrection," the poet said in a recent interview with the state-run newspaper La Nación.

INRI, initials of the Latin "Iesus, Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum" (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews), is said to have been inscribed at the base of the cross upon which Christ was crucified.

The Chilean landscapes are in the end the tomb of the disappeared "and the love of those landscapes is the only thing that provided them refuge," he added.

Born in Santiago in 1951, Zurita studied civil engineering in the nearby coastal city of Valparaíso and was a political prisoner for a brief time following the Pinochet-led coup in 1973. He was tortured in the hold of the "Maipo", a ship belonging to a private business.

Zurita became known during the military regime for his artistic acts of protest and denunciation.

In an act of "performance art" in the late 1970s in front of the Fine Arts Museum in the capital, he burned his face with acid, masturbated in public and attempted to blind himself.

Literary experts underscore the mythic nature of Zurita’s poems, which also often take on mystical tones, making use of the psalm, elegy, and versicle in an oeuvre that is often "profane" in its themes.

His published collections of poems include "Purgatory" (1979), "Anteparadise" (1982), "Canto a su amor desaparecido (Song to a Disappeared Love – 1986), "El amor de Chile" (The Love of Chile – 1987), "Selection of Poems" (1990), "La vida nueva" (The New Life – 1994), "Militant Poems" (2000) and "Sobre el amor y el sufrimiento" (On Love and Suffering – 2000).

With "INRI" Zurita updates the non-conformist mark of his poetics, in which he draws on the existential anguish of an entire country, which in an abrupt awakening two years ago saw military officials themselves confirm that political prisoners had been murdered and disappeared during the dictatorship.

"The poet shakes us up from the beginning with his sharp-edged message, which forces us to travel the geography of our country along the route of tragedy and the horror of the human rights violations perpetrated during the military dictatorship," said journalist Leyla Ramírez.

According to the government’s 1991 Truth and Reconciliation Report, there were some 3,000 casualties of human rights crimes, around 1,200 of which were forced disappearances.

Until the late 1990s, the military argued that the denunciations implicating them in human rights abuses were unfounded, and maintained that the armed forces knew nothing about the fate of the disappeared.

It was not until 1999 when the military agreed to participate in a "dialogue panel" with human rights lawyers representing the families of the dictatorship’s victims, and with other civil society representatives, to set up a system of investigation and to begin to delve into Chile’s recent political past.

In January 2001, when the timeline established by the panel had reached its end, the army, navy, air force and the Caribineros (militarised police) announced that the bodies of many political prisoners had been thrown into the Pacific Ocean from helicopters.

Zurita broke his silence precisely to use his poetry to provide a "burial" of words for those victims who were not mourned with a normal funeral.

"Chile is a country that as a society is beginning to become aware of the incredible pain that was inflicted upon others, of the crimes that were committed here. But it is a process much more profound and deep," said the poet.

"The only thing poetry can do is teach us to take another look at the landscapes that hold the remains of the disappeared. Perhaps when we take that second look, the bodies will truly be buried, because the landscape and human experience will finally be reconciled and will be one."

"What poetry does is to symbolically carry out the rite of interment on behalf of a society that has not been able and has not wanted to do so," explained the poet.

The experience of writing "INRI" was a dramatic and painful experience for Zurita, but he says it was also an attempt to open the way for Chileans to reconcile themselves with their past, carried by verse.

In "El Mar" (The Sea), he writes: "I heard whirlpools of fish devouring the pink flesh of the astonishing bait/ I heard millions of fish that are tombs with pieces of sky inside/ with hundreds of words that could never be uttered/ with hundreds of flowers of red meat and pieces of sky in the eyes."

(Oí torbellinos de peces devorando las carnes rosa de sorprendentes carnadas/ Oí millones de peces que son tumbas con pedazos de cielo adentro,/ con cientos de palabras que no alcanzan a decirse,/ con cientos de flores de carne roja y pedazos de cielo en los ojos.)