1) Life.
“Poetry could fill stadiums.”[1]
“Es verdad, no es un cuento; hay un Angel Guardián”[2]
A guardian angel, she wrote. Poetry, joy, life. Overflowing. Filling stadiums.
Did she know how needed this would be, this guardian angel “que te toma y te lleva como el viento”? Did she have any idea? And how could she have? How could any of us?
2) Death.
“We never imagined that in the not-too-distant future these same stadiums would be filled with political prisoners, victims of torture…”[3]
September 11, 1973. Chile.
“Somos cinco mil aqui en esta parte de la ciudad.”
Thus begins Victor Jara’s last poem, written from Chile’s National Stadium in September 1973 and smuggled out before his death. A translation of Jara’s haunting poem follows:
There are five thousand of us here in this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all the cities and in the whole country?
Here alone are ten thousand hands which plant seeds and make the factories run.
How much humanity exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain, moral pressure, terror and insanity?
Six of us were lost as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I could never have believed a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror—one jumping into nothingness, another beating his head against a wall, but all with the fixed stare of death.
What horror the face of fascism creates! They carry out their plans with knife-like precision.
Nothing matters to them.
To them, blood equals medals,
slaughter is an act of heroism.
Oh God, is this the world that you created, for this your seven days of wonder and work?
Within these four walls only a number exists which does not progress, which slowly will wish more and more for death.
But suddenly my conscience awakes and I see that this tide has no heartbeat, only the pulse of machines and the military showing their midwives’ faces full of sweetness.
Let Mexico, Cuba and the world cry out against this atrocity!
We are ten thousand hands which can produce nothing.
How many of us in the whole country?
The blood of our President, our compañero, will strike with more strength than bombs and machine guns!
So will our fist strike again!
How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living, horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much and so many moments of infinity in which silence and screams are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel will give birth to the moment…[4]
3) Life.
“Then, when it seems we will never smile again, life comes back.”[5]
Democracy again in Chile, in Argentina, in many countries. It is true, people are no longer being disappeared, no longer systematically tortured. An entire generation of justice-seeking students, activists, and people with bad luck is still missing, but young people today enjoy relative safety. This is true. But the real democracy, the real reclamation/affirmation can only come through the people. And through the people it comes…
November 17, 2001. Ft. Benning, Georgia. USA.
We didn’t have a street permit the first day, which certainly wouldn’t stop some, but for Saturday the plan was to keep it legal. So we gathered in a stadium. A stadium. Gathered in a stadium to denounce the terror our country creates within the walls of the School of the Americas[6]. The terror we then export all over Latin America – Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Panamá – they say Noriega was a star student…
So we gathered in a stadium. The irony did not escape us.
And then the puppet show – huge, larger-than-life puppets portraying victims of terror everywhere, death, destruction…
But then suddenly they’re all running around, all two hundred of them. Running around inciting the crowd:
“Is another world possible?!”
“Is another world possible?!”
Is another
world
possible?!
“Yes!” (laughing and crying both)
Yes!
And then the song. Joining together, a resounding chorus of voices that sang and sang and sang until I knew it mattered:
♫ We are rising up and our spirits are on fire
We are rising up.
Affirming life.
In solidarity with all, our spirits on fire.
[1] Agosín, Marjorie. Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: The Arpillera Movement in Chile 1974-1994. University of New Mexico Press. Albuquerque, NM. 1996. p. 2. Here Agosín discusses the thriving culture in democratic Chile before the U.S.-backed military coup on September 11, 1973.
[2] Mistral, Gabriela. “El Angel Guardián.” www.uchile.cl/actividades_culturales/premios_nobel/mistral/index4.htm#angel. Gabriela Mistral, Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, wrote this poem during the time when “poetry could fill stadiums.” I filled my patch’s stadium seats with the beginning lines of this hopeful poem: "Es verdad, no es un cuento; / hay un Angel Guardián / que te toma y te lleva como el viento / y con los niños va por donde van." ("It's true, it isn't a story; / there is a Guardian Angel / who takes you and carries you like the wind / and goes with children wherever children go.").
[3] Agosín, Marjorie. p. 2.
[4] I took this translation from the CD jacket of “HARP: A Time to Sing!” Appleseed Recordings. Calico Tracks Music. 2001.
[5] This line comes from a poster I have, published by the Borealis Press in Surry, Maine in 1997.
[6] The school is now called the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” or WHISC. Many people view this as merely a cosmetic change. Adversaries of the school continue to refer to it as the “School of the Assassins.”