Friendly Street Poets

At the weekend the greatest mime artist the world has known since Chaplin died. His name is Marcel Marceau. Explaining his role in life to English-speakers, he said, ‘We think too much. We feel too little.’

It is with those words of his in mind, I now approach Eleven Poems, September 1973, by Juan Garrido Salgado, translated for English-speakers by Stuart Cooke and published by Picaro Press. Poetry has the power to take us to places we have never been, to feel what others feel, to leave our comfort zone behind, to enter the lives of others, to enter the essence – the essential in what makes us human, the quality of the human spirit.

When I first read this collection of poems and talked to Juan about them, I was full of where they had initially taken me. They had taken me to Guernica, to the painting by Picasso. In his silent evocation is that earlier betrayal of the democratic right of the people to elect their chosen government, when the Catholic Church, Nazi Germany, with the complicity of Stalin, decided to bomb the people of Guernica to get rid of a democratically-elected government of which they did not approve. And, as a result, Spain lived under the heel of the Fascist government of General Franco for decades. Fine, perhaps for the middle class and moneyed lot. Not so fine for others, one being the poet Garcia Lorca.

It took me to Henry Kissinger, that exponent of ‘realpolitik’. As a footnote to the poem ‘The National Stadium’, I read his words: ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its people.’ Those were the words of President Nixon’s ‘national security’ adviser. I went further and found other words of his: ‘It is the firm and continuing policy that [the democratically elected government of] Allende be overthrown by a coup … We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [United States Government] and American hands be well hidden.’. That was an October 1970 cable to CIA operatives in Chile from Henry Kissinger’s ‘Track Two’ group.

And that brought me home to the clandestine role of the CIA in undermining the first Federal Labor government since 1949. Whitlam’s government only lasted from 1972 – 1975. Free education – that was too much! Education for all. Priority Projects to lift the disadvantaged out of poverty. And the agreement with Vincent Lingiari, the recognition of Aboriginal ownership of their land. That was definitely too much! And no longer all the way with USA in Vietnam. That was absolutely too much.

It brought me home to the legislation passed by our Commonwealth government in the name of ‘national security’ which can deny the accused the right to know the evidence being presented against him or her. It brought me home to Richard Flannagan’s novel The Unknown Terrorist, a novel he felt he had to write to help us feel the weight of the injustice in this legislation. That first reading made me think of the film John Pilger has produced to try to wake us up – ‘The War Against Democracy.’

How dangerous that first reading was. It allowed me to wallow in my own concerns, safe from the reality of what it means to be living, giving birth, raising children in a country where the democratically-elected government is not approved by a powerful neighbour and can be subject to every kind of physical, psychological, economic and emotional intimidation. I was not with Juan. I was not in Santiago. I was not hearing or feeling those bombs falling or crouching in fear, wondering where they might fall. I was not hearing Salvador Allende’s terrible foretelling of his own assassination. I was not hearing ‘the voice made into a poem [that] liberates and entraps us,’ as the Editor-in-chief of La Hoja Verde wrote. I was not hearing the absence of ‘peace in the cemeteries’. And that determination ‘in the child of fear in the North’ to get back its
  ‘. . . long narrow playground
 where the transnationals [could] frolic freely
 in the free market ‘
Slowly I began to feel the enormity of that September 11th 1973 when in ‘Government House in Flames’
  Birds of steel
  stunted history,
  made their nest within eternal flames’

Intellectually, we know what is meant by the ‘burning of books’. It has happened in this last decade in the Northern Territory when a Principal, opposed to bi-cultural education for Aboriginal children, took all the material, bi-cultural books, developed by teachers convinced of its value, as well as related computer software to a rubbish tip to burn it.

But to feel what it was to have been one of ‘the buds of spring’, the youth of the land, idealistic, believing in free education, believing in the right and necessity to think through issues, to appraise policies, condemned, tortured because they dared to think’, that is so hard for us. We, non-Indigenous Australians, until recently so safe, so relaxed and comfortable – until climate change made itself felt – that exposure to the depths of cruelty, some of us have never felt.

And the danger is that we don’t feel it. We don’t hear
  ‘beneath the earth the screams made roots’, or see
  ‘In the streets
  the books smouldered like dry wood’

Unless you have worked in a school set alight by arsonists, you cannot know what that wilful attack on learning does to the hearts and minds of those engaged in that great endeavour. The smell stays with you for months.

Add to that, the ‘great democracy’, the American nation, the ‘Land of the Free’, using tax-payers’ money to train men in torture techniques to terrorize people into submission. Add all of that to ‘Made in USA’. This is what Kissinger and Nixon did to ensure that, under the military Dictator, General Pinochet, Chile returned to being a ‘long narrow playground where the transnationals [could] frolic freely in the free market’. And the price of that profit? Autocratic power of a military ruler who could say
  ‘Not a single leaf moves in this country if I do not move it.’

And he could have been brought home to face his crimes, face the mothers, the siblings, the disappeared but he was protected in London by legislative delays. Ironic – as always – the cruel, the dictatorial, when it suits them will use the opportunities in law that, in their own country, they would dismiss, undermine or ignore. Kissinger had said it ‘The illegal we can do right now; the unconstitutional will take a little longer” – and this is the man awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!

Poetry, I said, should be able to take us to the essence – the depth of the pain, so that we are changed and able to empathise with those ‘wounded birds’, recognize the depth of the betrayal, the capacity for barbarity and what the death of the poet meant – here Victor Jara. We need to feel the pain. We need to have the capacity to weep, to share the sorrow because we, who have not lived through the horror, do not feel deeply enough. We need to feel outrage that all those who speak of what is ‘practical and pragmatic’, can justify sleep deprivation, intellectually argue the case for torture – as is happening now here – and put out of their minds what it means to destroy beauty, youth, innocence.

Our failure to feel what it means will ensure that we continue to have a great albatross hung around our collective necks and we will be condemned to the nightmare ‘Death-in-Life’ – with no music, no love, no beauty. Ultimately we will allow ourselves to be ruled by those who rely on fear and greed to keep us in line. This is where Juan Garrido Salgado’s ‘Eleven poems, September 1973’., and Stuart Cooke’s translation, have taken me. I hope everyone who reads these soul-wrenching poems will have the courage to go where these poems might take them.

Erica Jolly