The Poetry of Displacement and Exile

“The need to destroy yourself and the need to survive fight each other like two brothers who’ve gone out of their minds. We hang up the soul’s clothes in the closet but we haven’t unpacked all its bags. Time passes and the way to deny exile is to deny the country we’re in, its people, its language, to reject them as specific witnesses of a mutilation: our own country is far away, what do these gringos know about its voices, its birds, its mourning, its storms.”

Argentine poet Juan Gelman (1930-2014) wrote those words in 1980, and in wrote them where he was currently living – Rome. With the disappearances and presumed deaths of his son and daughter-in-law at the hands of the military regime, Gelman fled for a safer place. And while exile was a safer place, it was also its own kind of prison.

The military junta ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. It was a brutal and murderous experience, especially for those suspected of left-wing or progressive political beliefs. Thousands of people were arrested and “disappeared,” including Gelman’s son and daughter-in-law. She was pregnant at the time, and, as it turns out, was allowed to live until she gave birth and then killed, the baby given to friends of the military regime. Gelman found his granddaughter 30 years later.

It’s difficult for those of us born and raised in a 241-year-old still-functioning democracy to imagine what drives a person to exile, and then what exile means for day-to-day life. It’s difficult to imagine thousands of people being arrested, and then nothing ever heard of them again. Escaping from one’s one fear of arrest and death is a miraculous thing, but then one must deal with the conditions of escape, being a stranger in a strange land, separated from the streets you know, the home you know, the church you attend, the grocery store where you shop, the holidays you celebrate, and often the very language you speak and understand.

Juan Gelman

This is the plight of the refugee and the exile, difficult even in the best of circumstances. While the United States is a nation of immigrants, and that would include refugees and exiles, but they have likely been a small portion of the overall mix. We contemporary Americans do not know what it means to flee the physical destruction of our land or the destruction of a murderous military regime.

Part of Gelman’s coping mechanism was poetry, including the invention of different personas for himself and “discovering” these lost poems. Reading them in the collection Dark Times Filled with Light is to read the struggle with the pain of personal loss and the pain of loss of self. He felt displaced, knowing the people he walked among in exile could not possibly understand his grief and loss, no matter how much they might sympathize with him.

Early On the Soul Begins to Hurt

Early on the soul begins to hurt / pale /

in the wavering light to explores your not being here /

the heart rises with misgivings /

goes over the sky like the sun

in daylong search / day in or day out / it burns

freezing / as if its bones thrown out

of joint / or like an unsaid word

where i try to march against death /

sould you harmonize harmonies that barely

make it across the world’s width /

broken / it broods over

what you left me / night on its feet

In exile, Gelman had his own separation from the life he knew, as well as the permanent separation from his children. The military regime robbed him of his day-to-day life, but it also robbed him of a future. And what he had to hold on to, he writes, was the determination never to accept the deaths of his son and daughter-in-law until he saw their bodies or their killers.

At Tweetspeak Poetry today, the discussion is continuing about Dark Times Filled with Light, led by L.W. Lindquist. Please visit the post and consider adding your voice.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The past is never past

To read Latin American authors and poets like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz is to see, first, what they have in common. It is a commonality of culture that goes beyond the Spanish language.

It is a culture that understands that the past is never past, that even distinguishing past from present (not to mention the future) is an aberration, an anomaly.

We North Americans nod and say we understand that, sort of, but the culture our writers and poets write from is actually very different. U.S. culture, and to a similar degree Canadian culture, is about remaking, reinventing, constantly focused on forward. The past is what happened 15 minutes ago.

I experienced this routinely when I worked for a Fortune 500 corporation. For more than two decades, the company was sloughing off its past like an old snakeskin and attempting to reinvent itself. When not actively rejecting its history, it imagined a future unaffected but the past or even the present. But its people, including its senior management, were still being shaped daily by what had happened a year ago, 10 years ago, 50 years ago.

At one point late in the attempted cultural revolution, the company deliberately began to toss the archives. The first files that went to the dumpster were the old employee photo files. A hysterical phone call from the archivist set in motion a short chain of events that stopped the lunacy. I found myself on a hot July day, wearing my suit, in a large dumpster, salvaging those files. I felt something like an archaeologist, digging through trash to find the treasure. Or perhaps a forensic criminologist, discovering the details of a crime in the shapes of spilled manila folders.

We give a nod to our past, but we destroy it without thinking. And we pay for that. During my last two years before retirement, I watched my department, charged with making huge changes, repeat the same strategy that had wrecked the company’s reputation in the first place. No one understood the why – which meant understanding the past – because the past wasn’t considered important.

In Dark Times Filled with Light, the Argentinian poet Juan Gelman writes of loss far greater than a company’s archives. He writes of the loss of his son and pregnant daughter-in-law, arrested and then “disappeared” by the military regime that ruled the country for more than a decade (Pope Francis also came out of this experience). Gelman took the refuge of exile in Mexico, but his children, likes thousands of others, were never heard from again. Some were tortured and murdered, buried in forgotten graves. Some were dropped from airplanes over the open ocean.

In a collection of poems entitled Open Letter, published in 1980, Gelman wrote that he would never accept the death of his children, Marcelo and his pregnant wife Claudia, until he saw their bodies or their killers. Their baby was born, and given to friends of the junta. It took Gelman 30 years to find her. That was a past Gelman could not reinvent himself out of, a past that remained with him until he died, a past that will remain with his granddaughter and her children and grandchildren.

Crestfallen My Burning Soul

crestfallen my burning soul

dips a finger in your name / scrawls

your name in the night’s walls /

it’s no use / it bleeds dangerously /

soul to soul it looks at you / becomes a child /

opens its breast to take you in /

protect you / reunite you / undie you /

your little shoe stepping on the

world’s suffering softening it /

trampled brightness / undone water

this way you speak / crackle / burn / and love /

you give me your nevers just like a child

-       Juan Gelman, Open Letter, dedicated to his son Marcelo

At Tweetspeak Poetry today, the discussion is continuing about Dark Times Filled with Light. Please visitthe post and contribute if you’re so inclined.

Photograph: People suspected of being leftists being arrested by military troops in Argentina in the 1970s.

Stories and imagination in dark times

In the fall of 1986, I was in a master’s program at Washington University in St. Louis, and taking a seminar entitled “The Latin American Novel.” Up to that point, my experience with Latin American literature had been limited to 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which I read in college because it was a book to read in college (The Lord of the Rings trilogy was another one of those “books to read” at the time).

During that semester, we read (and I reread) 100 Years of Solitude; The War of the End of the World and The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa; The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes; Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig; and several others. We were fortunate in that both Fuentes and Vargas Llosa spoke on campus during that class.

My research paper for the class was an analysis of Vargas Llosa’s Conversations in the Cathedral,” which I actually had to stop reading after 100 pages and start over again, because I was lost. That turned out to be a good move; the second time around I figured out there was a complex embedded structure in the novel that made complete sense of what otherwise looked like chaos. It turned out to be one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had.

The class led to expand my reading of Latin American literature – more books by the same writers, other writers, and even poetry and non-fiction. A world I barely knew existed had opened up, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

I also started reviewing Spanish and Latin American fiction and non-fiction for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And the very first book I was assigned was by a North American, Lawrence Thornton. And the book was called Imagining Argentina.

From my class, I knew about los desaparecidos, the “disappeareds,” the thousands of Argentinians who had been arrested by the military regime in the 1970s. To disappear at that time was to be imprisoned and murdered. Pregnant women would be kept in prison until they delivered their babies, and then killed, their children given to members of the military and their friends.

The story in Imagining Argentina is about the head of the Children’s Theater. His wife is arrested and becomes one of the disappeareds. Strangely, he begins to dream, and each dream turns out to be what has happened to one of the disappeareds. Except he a dream about his own wife eludes him. He eventually joins with the “madres de los Cinco de Mayo,” or the mothers of the Cinco de Mayo, named for the plaza where the limitary dictatorship had their headquarters. Las madres is a true story – mothers whose adult children had disappeared began to walk arm-in-arm each day around the plaza, simply walking armin-arm and often carrying pictures of their disappeared children. Everyone, however, knew what was happening.

 

Imagining Argentina ultimately is about how stories and the imagination can prevail in the darkest of times. (It was also made into a movie in 2003 and starred Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson.)

One writer and poet who experienced this horror in Argentina is Juan Gelman (1930-2014). His son and pregnant daughter-in-law were two of los desaparecidos. He eventually learned that both had been murdered, but it took him 30 years to find his granddaughter.

Today and the next two or three weeks, Tweetspeak Poetry is hosting a book discussion about Gelman’s Dark Times Filled with Light, selected poems from 26 of his works. I’ve been reading Gelman’s poetry, and this is one of his poems from 1961:

The Art of Poetry

Of all trades, I’ve chosen one that isn’t mine.

Like a hard taskmaster

it makes me work day and night,

in pain, in love,

out in the rain, in dark times,

when tenderness or the soul opens its arms,

when illness weighs down my hands.

The grief of others, tears,

handkerchiefs raised in greeting,

promises in the middle of autumn or fire,

kisses of reunion or goodbye,

everything makes me work with words, with blood.

I’ve never been the owner of my ashes, my poems,

obscure faces write my verses like bullets firing at death.

Take a look at today’s post at Tweetspeak Poetry and consider joining the discussion.

Top photograph: A scene from the movie version of Imagining Argentina.