How to Speak with the Dead? A Poet's Notebook

Abstract

And there they were, numbed in their millennial and captivating pain. They were there, inclined, dangling in an invisible net of suspended time. I approached them. I wanted to speak to them, but what could I ask them? How could I comfort them? With what right could I enter their lives, sealed by political violence? How to ask them what it means to be the mother of a disappeared? Of a political prisoner? Why should I see them cry? To be Latin American and of my generation, those born between 1945 and 1955, the so-called generation of disenchantment, implies being fully conscious of the dictatorships that invaded the Southern Hemisphere in a systematic way for almost twenty years. The role of the writer, which is wholly integrated in the political tasks of these countries, is of extreme importance and complexity. What does a dictatorship signify and how does one document its traces? Up to what point is it feasible to make poetry about the tortured body? Who can say it is authentic for a writer to be responsible for the political violence of a country? These questions are necessary and serve as continuous guidelines for those of us who write about the polemic of state terrorism, about its victims and its survivors. Throughout Latin America's literary history, since the nineteenth century, there has been a powerful alliance between the tasks of the writer and her political role. Beginning with the organization of the Latin American republics of the nineteenth century, the concepts of nation, modernity, and culture were established, politics and government became interchangeable concepts in society. Both the political identity and the artistic identity were established as true occupations of politicians, thus converting the men and women of letters into public figures. Such were the cases of Jose Martf in Cuba, Ch6 Guevara in Bolivia, R6mulo Gallegos, president of Venezuela, and Pablo Neruda, candidate to the presidency of Chile during the government of Salvador Allende.