Tim Benjamin continues his exposition of the collaboration between revolution and poetics in the work of Chile’s notorious antipoet, Nicanor Parra. In Liz Werner’s witty translation of his verse in the brazenly titled Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, cynicism, humor, silences, and brutal critique manifest in turns; the deep truths are gathered and reckoned with in the spaces where they collide. Read the first part of this essay here.
Revolts have their actual front lines, of course, and in the case of Chile, these were the columns of students, artists, and veterans of the “Penguin” movements of the early 2000s advancing toward increasingly hostile, increasingly anxious walls of police and military forces employing tear gas and rubber bullets. Recently back in Santiago, after the plebiscite had already been decided, a Colombian friend of mine gave me a tour of the uprising’s hot spots, where he went each evening in solidarity with his adopted country’s awakening. He described scenes of shifting pockets of absolute chaos which had popped up here and there, before dispersing with the wafting, seemingly intentional clouds of tear gas and booms of deterrent rounds. Walking down Alameda Ave, he pointed out to me all the landmarks that were forced to close during the uprising. That afternoon, he and I attended one of the Friday protests, which have continued to this day; as we walked down an Alameda Ave closed off to traffic, I noticed the small crush of people lining the street, not doing much except being there—in conversation with friends, smoking, or staring south to where, before a small plaza, a scuffle began. It wasn’t long before the gas came in one expansive burst, and the people in front of the plaza began to disperse. We thought we were far enough away, but a breeze brought us the invisibly searing burn—and a series of Good Samaritans hopping to with spray bottles of sodium bicarbonate and lemon juice, offering temporary relief. “You get used to it,” my friend said, as we turned back toward Lastarria and its street vendors and mid-scale restaurants. “You build up a tolerance.” And for some reason, through the sandpaper-burn in our cheeks and eyelids, we laughed at this. I don’t know why. I couldn’t imagine getting “used to it.”
Somehow, though, the pain felt justified—the concrete consequence giving body to a concept which I was only partly cognizant of. But it wasn’t the kind of pain that gives legitimacy to criticisms of the government, whose force (normally) seeks justification even after the fact. In other words, it wasn’t a political pain, which is reserved, fair or not, for the majority who hang back from the clashes, repeating the language of revolt that the front line incarnates. After the country’s President, Sebastian Piñera, declared the country “at war” with itself, other friends I spoke with said they would work during the day and go directly to Santiago’s main square after getting off every night, and it was these rear-guard protests that increasingly took on an air of intense jubilation—veritable revolutionary parties in streets fogged in tear gas and the volleying booms of urban warfare, as if the certainty of the success of the cause was enough to start the celebrations a priori. The reaction of those in charge were typically evasive, or offensive. One government minister casually suggested that instead of revolting in the streets, people should wake up early to avoid the increase in public transportation fares; others suggested “alien agents” descending on the country to induce chaos, which social media and protest signage quickly meme-ified.
While lack of shame and self-awareness is the realized utopia of the modern politician, it seems the uprising’s jubilance shared in Parra’s strangely unpretentious counter-narrative to it. More than a few of his poems might work as semi-mystical memes; take the poem “No president’s statue escapes,” whose three verses follow from the title to form a simple, declarative meditation on history’s losing struggle with time: From those infallible pigeons / Clara Sandoval tells us. / Those pigeons know exactly what they’re doing. Both the pigeons and the topless protesters straddling these same statues are definitive symbols of the “certainty” mentioned above, both moving into that rare space where parody becomes something more eternal than mockery.
The country’s 1973 coup d’etat, which Christopher Hitchens said defined the left and the right in the States once the fumes of the Vietnam War had begun to dissipate, skipped over the parody and went straight to dictatorship, as most reactionary movements do. After Salvador Allende’s newly-elected socialist government nationalized the copper mines, purchased controlling shares of banks operating within the country, and expropriated land for public distribution, Nixon demanded that its economy scream for mercy. Once the La Moneda presidential palace was bombed (in a possibly meaningless historical irony, as it was once a mint), García Márquez wrote that Allende died ever true to his principals, “defending the whole moth-eaten paraphernalia of a shitty system.”
Thus began a near twenty-year agenda of disappearances, extrajudicial murder, and experimental neoliberal reforms created under a constitution written and instituted by a handful of politicians loyal to the regime, many of whom were still in positions of power as the November revolt kicked off. It created an economic system which many pundits viewed as a “miracle,” but which the economist Michael Ahn Paarlberg has gauged to be a series of booms and busts followed by a severe depression. The miracle happened after the dictator left office—when the poverty rate was at 40 percent—with a series of reforms put forth by center-left administrations. But the constitution that Pinochet put in place remained, and the society became progressively less equitable, with crumbling public education infrastructure and a national pension system which, since 1981, has seen on average only 16 percent of its contributions returned in the form of pension payments, and 80 percent injected into international finance markets. Hitchens may have been hinting at the ways in which the imperial project brings in the widest possible coalition, its negation sustaining its prevalence and vice versa; and though that project has long-since shifted to other regions of the world, parts of the U.S.’s cultural imperialism were certainly on display during and after Chile’s uprising, exemplified by the “Chilean Avengers” or in the recent bizarre protests which unfolded after pandemic restrictions had been lifted, conservative elements parading through Santiago’s richer areas draped in MAGA flags and the Stars & Bars. In any case, it may be that a country that revolts against itself (and not one that is, in a sense, taken from itself, as is the case with the Pinochet coup) must do so in the full self-knowledge, all of its triumphs, flaws, idiosyncrasies, and embarrassments.
For Parra, this seems prescient. “Chile is and will continue to be what it’s always been,” he said in a 2001 interview with El Mercurio, Chile’s largest daily newspaper. “A house of pu(e)tas”. The play on words is Parra at his improvisational best: both poets and whores—in a political sense, we can assume—depending on how the writer arranges a couple of letters. And in “Let’s cut the bullshit,” he gives his seemingly final take on democracy, a cousin to his pigeons-shitting-on-historical-monuments metaphor but shot through with a a kind of weary cynicism:
In Chile we never had democracy
and never will
They are all dictatorships, my dear friend
The only thing that we’re allowed
Is to elect
Between their dictatorship and ours
The key word being, of course, “allowed,” as if the true powers that be are only loaning out any one group’s grasp on power, and temporarily at that. But the real point is what you’re going to do about it once this truth, at least as Parra sees it, is exposed. “True seriousness is comical,” he said in another of these El Mercurio interviews, recognizing the vital contradiction he apparently believed his country was still reticent to embrace.
According to the collection’s Introduction, Parra could speak English, but only did so in order to recite Shakespeare in the original language. Werner’s translations are especially good in this respect, channeling Parra’s often difficult dialect into an English more suited to a doomsday street preacher than a sober meditation of the Bard’s work. Parra was especially taken with Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most millennial of tragic heroes, who pops in and out of his poetry at different stages. In “H according to N,” he writes that what inhibits the Prince from taking action Is his tragical knowledge / of the futility & folly of action / In a world out of joint / Knowledge kills action / Action requires the veil of illusion. Or so says Parra’s mother. Could the poet have anthropomorphized his own country to Shakespeare’s most famous tragic character? Is Chile Hamlet’s mother, rid of an honorable leader by internal usurpers? Allende the murdered father?
Or maybe Parra is himself Hamlet, paralyzed with doubt about the truth of things and his own role in doing something about it. Neruda’s genius at its angriest spoke of the worms and gnawing rats and mystically hellish tunnels of empire exploitation in his native land (his final book of poetry was bluntly titled Incitement to Nixoncide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution). Parra had less of the political convictions of Neruda, though one could say he was more sensitive to absolutism—he once told a journalist that he was a radical leftist at basically the same time everyone else was, but as he got older, he realized he was more of the libertarian bent. After his ill-advised tea with First Lady Nixon, a poem by Carlos Droguett implied he was ignorant both of poetry and of valor. Parra called Droguett mediocre as a writer and worse as a person, and wondered “Hasta cuándo van a seguir fregando la cachimba. Yo no soy derechista ni izquierdista, yo simplemente rompo con todo” (How long are they going to keep bothering me? I’m neither left nor right, I’ve simply broken with it all).
So it is that Antipoems ends (at least as far as the formal poetry is concerned) with the diffident two lines of “Final poem”:
I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear:
What I really meant to say is the following:
The three-quarter page of blank space that follows is perhaps his most strictly postmodern joke, as if half a century of antipoetry can be reduced to the Ecclesiastes verse about there being nothing new (to say) under the sun. But there’s also a prophetic aspect to it, Parra perhaps anticipating the day when the contradiction would be resolved. There is real hope now in Chile for the kind of historical reforms that other recent revolutions have not delivered. The plebiscite decided in October, a new constitution is yet to be written, although certain structural changes, such as greater multi-gender and indigenous representation in the National Congress, have begun to take shape. It’s still not clear if the uprising has completely severed the ties of the many still in government which maintain an affinity to the dictatorship, and are aiming to be delegates themselves. And in a country whose pandemic policies include barring large gatherings in the streets but keeping the malls open, can defeat still be snatched from the jaws of victory? In a more generous reading, one could say all that empty, ontologically open space of “Final poem” was the joke that only pined for its punchline. How to look better and feel great, indeed.
Tim Benjamin’s 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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