Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part I

On a fundamental level, Parra’s antipoetry culminates at that point where parody and devotion coincide.

Chile and its writers are no strangers to the conjugation between revolution and poetry, having long applied the ardent and inciting potentials of well-elected words to fortify and give lyric to its people’s desires for social change. Amongst the most powerful letters of the country’s struggles, the language of Nicanor Parra possessed especially an indomitable power, with its colloquial, irreverent nature lending an imitable voice to the static nature of words. Though Parra passed in 2018, his verse continues to establish itself in the public expressions of dissent, most recently revealing their prescience in regard to the severe 2019–2020 protests. In the first part of this essay, Tim Benjamin puts the poet’s legacy in relation with the social fabric of both his time and ours. Stay with us for the second part, to be published tomorrow. 

I had already left Chile before the country’s 2019 uprising, but I was still living there when Nicanor Parra became a centenarian. The grand misanthrope of Chilean letters had conquered his personal century, and in a country known for wine, political troubles, and writers, there was considerable respect payed to the antipoet’s gesture toward immortality. TV and newspapers dedicated front-page space to a sort of celebratory pre-obituary, and on the night of, I went out for drinks with friends, who talked a little about Parra’s work but mostly about the idea that the old, disheveled fuck seemed to have made it to such a ripe old age just so he could take the piss out of death, like he’d done to poetry sixty years before. Death returned the favor a little under two years before the uprising, but as the introduction of Liz Werner’s overlooked 2004 “antitranslation” of his later work, Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great makes clear, Parra took his joke further than anyone before him.

He didn’t coin the term. At least two poets—Vicente Huidobro and the Peruvian Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián, who published a book titled Antipoemas in 1926—had used it before him. But the concept will forever be etched alongside his name in whatever circle of the literary pantheon he comes to occupy. Parra would pass away in 2018 at the very anti-climactic age of 103, just under two years before the country’s most significant political movement since the “NO” campaign rejected Pinochetismo in 1989. And despite—or maybe because—of his reputation as the antipoet, it seems safe to say that dying before the Revolution was the kind of providential malfeasance he would have at least tried to have some fun with. Indeed, Werner’s “How to Look Better & Feel Great,” chosen in apparently intimate collaboration with Parra, is one of those disembodied parodies that exist somewhere between a wink and a groan. But it also points the way toward the mentality of a country, which, despite the crackdowns and a global pandemic, has hung a definitive asterisk onto South America’s “economic miracle.”

Parra was born in 1914 in southern Chile to a bohemian father and a mother who shows up often in his poetry as the folksy sage “Clara Sandoval.” He was the brother of the legendary folk singer Violeta Parra, whose song, “La carta” was covered by Mon LaFerte during the uprising (The letter arrives to tell me / that in my country there’s no justice / the hungry ask for bread / the military gives them lead). He studied engineering at the University of Chile, physics at Brown, and cosmology at Oxford, which may or may not have contributed to the often sideways transgressions from formalism which defines much of his output—though Werner does emphasize Parra’s occasional use of an algebraic x and shorthand descriptions of relativity. He began publishing poetry marginally in 1938, but made his name in 1954 with the publication of Poems and Antipoems. As Werner’s introduction notes, one Chilean critic wrote that Parra’s book “Returned us . . . once again! [To the fact that] everything could be said in poetry.” Camus would make a similar point a couple of years later in The Rebel, claiming that an artist’s “rebellion against reality” affirms the same motivation as that of the revolt of the oppressed. Poems and Antipoems would go through multiple editions, and the 1967 English-language version would count among its translators Allen Ginsburg, who had joined Parra in an increasingly paranoid Havana two years earlier to give out the Casa de las Americas Prize.

Werner makes a somewhat strained connection between his educational credentials and the weirdly anarchic nature of his work. She uses the example of another Chilean literary critic who wrote that his antipoetry puts poetry itself on “the path of destruction.” I’ll bite: it is true that when physicists talk about antimatter colliding with matter, the result is mutual annihilation. And the secondary title—How to Look Better & Feel Great—of Werner’s Antipoems (notice “Poems and” has been dropped) seems so out of place, so strangely antithetical to the task at hand, as to seem like property that only serves to muddy our conception of the poetic cosmos. But it’s difficult to say what about Parra’s poetry leads to destruction, much less mutual annihilation. A deconstruction, perhaps, in the vein of E.E. Cummings’ radioactive phonemes, though even that designation feels forced. Werner’s translations of Parra’s previously unpublished work (many of which had been sitting in a personal notebook) lead, in fact, to one of those simple but difficult goals to which poetry—and all art, really—constantly strives: to be an honest reflection of the era that created it.

On a fundamental level, Parra’s antipoetry culminates at that point where parody and devotion coincide. Not quite a paradox upon a first reading, a further consideration drops one in a terrain in which nothing serious is taken very seriously, a kind of anti-ontology. Pynchon is America’s literary high priest in this regard; Parra was certainly Chile’s, if not South America’s. In the short term, the parodic aspect of this utopia has had a tendency to lead to irony—the anti-anti-ontology (is that spinning I hear?). But Parra, already middle-aged during the Pinochet dictatorship and witness to nearly a half century of movements—revolutionary and otherwise—undone by their own manifestation, knew also that devotion, concentrated in a single direction, can lead to zealotry. Far from a centrist, he states in “Declaration of Principles” that

I [am] a complete fanatic
believe me, I identify with nothing.

The aesthetics of this kind of metaphysical rebellion are easy enough to recognize in the relative vacuum of poetry, whose meaning and even form can be messy but whose finality is indisputable in the product of a finished work. This is not the case, however, with political rebellion, written in successive bursts of victory and fallback (unless of course one accepts the total manipulative omniscience of elite puppet masters—Parra could have had some fun with QAnon). With the outcome ever uncertain, the final edit to which whether certain movements—including Chile’s 2019 uprising and subsequent plebiscite to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution—will come to deserve the right of being called “revolution”, is, of course, up to whichever’s ink holds out the longest.

As Camus points out, revolution and art are both “fabricators of universes,” and more to the point, universes that have yet to come into existence. But they are also eschatological: once either is finally instantiated, the cycle repeats itself over again. Not for nothing did Plato ban poets from his Republic; bureaucracy is at its crushingly finest when it enforces itself into repeatable tangibility. But if we’re going to stick, however tenuously, to the metaphorical offerings of cosmology, then we should ask whether or not these two universes can actually coexist on the same plane without one swallowing the other whole. The works of the artist and the revolutionary tend to put up with each other to a point, before one’s values clash with the other’s—Neruda targeted by the Cuban literati, for example; or Pedro Lemebel being shunned by Chile’s left for his homosexuality. But the general dream of the dialectic is always that reality is both one thing and another at the same time. Substitute whatever impossible contradiction you’d like, then resolve it, and it wakes up to something else—ideally, the final liberation.

Everything is permitted / absolute movement of freedom / that is, without leaving the cage, Parra writes in “Watch out for the gospel of the times,” the poem which begins the collection. It’s hard to know how ample, in Parra’s mind, the parameters of this cage are. We get a clue in the very next poem, “1979,” in which he describes a tear-gas fog / police officers armed to the teeth, and laments that the city is doomed to disappear / it’s the world, they tell me / don’t worry. One could argue that there might have been a certain kind of liberation—a resolution to the conundrum—in this final don’t worry if it had come from Parra’s voice, and not the they who mistake the cage for the space between its bars. Reading these first two poems of the collection, we’re tempted to follow Parra down that path of earnestness which can do nothing but double back upon itself. This initial seduction is either Parra’s or Werner’s, but in any case, it’s a setup: immediately we come upon “Apropos of Nothing,” in which Parra tells us that

for being compassionate—for being humble
the kick in the ass was double . . .
Luckily everything’s changed as much as it possibly could
now that I steal
. . . and eat for a hundred, instead of one.

The turn toward the impossible country is subtle, but it’s there. Still in the cage of the first poem, the final few lines of “Apropos of Nothing” replace the innocent struggle of Parra’s dictatorship-era world for a kind of gluttonous conformity. And if we’re feeling guilty about that, he offers a condolence, and a suggestion: I NEARLY screwed myself over being so sincere / optimism got me nothing but trouble; and later, DESTROY THIS PAPER after reading it / poetry is tailing you / and me too / it’s after all of us. This poses another problem: keep reading if you want, but there will be consequences. Then again, it’s too late anyway, you’re already in its grip. So why not give in?

Chile’s uprising brought this aspect of Parra’s utopia to life, or it seemed to, because my wife and I had to witness it second hand. From five thousand miles away, we led our lives, and in between, stayed glued to Youtube videos of Chilean news outlets and the unending posts and messages of our family and friends there. The Jokers and Pikachu-costumed middle-aged mothers dancing to the incantatory flames of trash fires along blocks of stripped buildings and defaced national monuments; the Spidermen climbing monuments, the “Pareman” (essentially a shirtless protester using a dismantled stop sign as a shield against the spray of the Chilean police’s water cannons); the topless feminist collectives mooning advancing rows of riot geared military. These all might be considered part of Parra’s front lines, and surely one of the uprising’s more fascinating aspects was the way in which parody seemed to play as important a role as rage: there were the lines of chalk protesters laid before police riot configurations, alluding to the drug scandal involving various Carabineros caught on tape doing lines of a white powder they claimed was menthol; or the memes of “Chilean Avengers” led by the guiding spirit “Negro Matapacos,” the deceased black lab made famous during previous student demonstrations for snarling at riot police advancing down Alameda Ave, Santiago’s main thoroughfare. Not to mention the homemade signs claiming “Chile: Venezuela without the tits and ass” after conservative media tried to claim the country was being “Venezuelized.” And perhaps the most meaningfully poetic refrains to come out of the marches, protesters shouting, “Not thirty pesos, thirty years!”, a reference both to the public transit fare increase which provoked the unrest, and the number of years since the dictatorship ended, without any real structural reform having followed its dissolution.

Tim Benjamins debut novel, Cilastina Bay, will be published in Spring 2021 by Pigfoot Books. He splits his time between Philadelphia and Santiago, Chile.

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