/ARTS WEEKLY/LITERATURE-CHILE: New Anthology Celebrates Work of Leftist Literary ‘Misfit’

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Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, May 16 2005 (IPS) - ‘Restaurant Chile’ is a newly released anthology of poems by José Angel Cuevas, a collection of works spanning the 26-year career of this self-described "misfit", a respected writer who nonetheless prefers to dwell on the fringes of the country’s literary elite.

Born in 1945, Cuevas came of age in the 1960s, shaped by the literary and political influences of beatnik poetry, the Latin American protest song movement, rock and roll, hippie culture and the social struggles that led up to the 1970 electoral victory of "the Chilean road to socialism" under Salvador Allende and the leftist Popular Unity (UP) coalition.

Educated in both the classrooms of the University of Chile Teaching Institute, where he graduated as a philosophy instructor, and the ranks of the Communist Youth, Cuevas formed part of a sweeping cultural phenomenon, a generation of young artists who fought for their ideals with words and music.

As young poet Jaime Pinos remarked at the release of ‘Restaurant Chile’ late last month, Cuevas was one of the thousands and thousands of young people "marching after the dream of taking heaven by storm, the golden dream of revolution. Thousands and thousands of people who, without realising it, marched straight to the precipice."

The precipice was the military coup of Sept. 11, 1973, which overthrew Allende and ushered in 17 years of dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet.

According to Pinos, Cuevas’ poetry is an essential key to understanding life under the de facto regime, when Chile became an "occupied" country, and the all-pervasiveness of evil and betrayal made daily survival a heroic act.

"I was just beginning to tie up my own loose ends/when the coup hit/a firm hand/that blocked out the moon/and the sun/everything stopped," recounts one of the poems in the new anthology dating back to that era.

One of the consequences of the coup was a massive exodus of artists and intellectuals who fled into exile, in which Cuevas himself did not take part.

”All of my friends left, everyone from the university, the ‘underground’ poets, and most of all, that free, powerful life was destroyed. It was more, much more than Popular Unity that was lost. Why didn’t I leave? I should have left, I had more of a right to leave than others, I think to myself sometimes, with regret," he reflected in an article published in January 2002 in the magazine ‘La Calabaza del Diablo’.

Cuevas was one of the many Chileans who were persecuted by the dictatorship. His home in the upper middle class Santiago neighbourhood of Ñuñoa was seized, and he was dismissed from his job as a philosophy teacher at a public secondary school.

”I went to live on the outskirts of the San Gregorio slum. I lived among people who ate roasted dog near a canal full of sewer rats. In 1975, sitting on the edge of that canal, I made the decision to start over. The dictatorship would not be short-lived. I resolved to ‘write’ as an ethical outlet for my life,” he recalled.

But it was not until May 1979 that he resolved to publish his work, pushed into this decision, ironically, by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the Chilean secret police.

DINA agents arrested Cuevas and ordered him to collaborate with the dictatorship by making contact with members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), a group with which he had no actual political ties.

Cuevas was alone, faced with the prospect of turning into an informer. Out of desperation, he compiled a few poems he had written and took them to a print shop, which put together a flimsy paperback volume for him. This allowed him to register as a member of the Chilean Writers Society (SECH), one of the few oases of creative freedom that survived during the 17- year dictatorship.

He went to the SECH to seek support, and fortunately, the DINA agents did not come back for him. In the meantime, the book he had cobbled together to save his life was published that same year under the title ‘Efectos personales y dominios públicos’ (‘Personal Effects and Public Domains’).

This was the starting point for a prolific writing and publishing career that produced close to a dozen volumes of poetry, culminating with the new anthology ‘Restaurant Chile’.

Cuevas has also published several works in prose, including the 1998 book ‘Diario de la ciudad ardiente’ (‘Diary of the Burning City’).

He recently ventured into the world of filmmaking as well, as co-author with Alvaro Monge of the screenplay for the documentary ‘Ningún libro de historia hablará de nosotros’ (‘We’ll Never Be in the History Books’), which tells the story of the communist underground movement during the dictatorship.

In August 2004, Cuevas published an open letter to defend himself from the anonymous attacks directed at him after a group of intellectuals and academics, without consulting him, put forward his name for the National Literature Prize.

”I only recently found out that they had nominated me. I know it is meant as a act of validation. But I do not want to be official. I am on the fringes. If I am ever awarded a prize, I would want it to come from the people, the workers, a prize from my generation, etc., nothing more,” he stated.

”I have fought back against illegitimate power, to maintain and preserve an ethical, clean life. I despise lobbying, I have denounced it. I do not live in a posh neighbourhood. I have stayed here among the garbage dumps of Puente Alto (a marginal district on the outskirts of Santiago),” he added.

In the same letter, the poet noted that he lives off of a pension granted to him by the government as compensation for having been fired from his teaching job, an income of barely 200 dollars a month.

Journalist Ximena Duarte has noted that Cuevas’ poetry ”tells the story of those who stayed in Chile, those who didn’t come back from abroad with university degrees or government posts.”

For his part, Ignacio Valente, one of Chile’s most influential conservative literary critics, has praised ”the simple, always understated, gently ironic, modestly individual voice of a poet who speaks of tragedy without a tragic tone, who does not adopt the accent of ideology or the future tense, who simply tells his own small story.”

It is the small story of the lives of the poet and his fellow travellers, as reflected in Poem 212, one of the most moving in his book ‘1973’:

”I salute my generation in Titho Tello, recently released from the Santiago Psychiatric Hospital, his body full of alcohol, with almost no neurons left.

”Sputtering the party line of the Central Committee, defeated and destroyed, Titho carries a piece of Soviet in his liver.

”With no teeth and no shoes, he has immolated himself like a martyr, who believed it was possible to live and have his own bit of power.

”Nobody pays attention to him, or even notices him. When he walks through the neighbourhood, they call him Borrachov (a play on the Spanish word ‘borracho’, which means drunk).”