Perspective is everything, some folks will tell you.
Depending on your perspective, they might be right.
I was under the impression in 1985 that I had an abundance. Of perspective, that is. I’d studied up in the months since my first trip to Argentina the year before. But one afternoon I saw the color drain from my friend Ruth’s face in a police station, and I realized I might still have very little.
Toward the end of my first trip, I visited a university campus with a friend who was an architecture student. One of the buildings was adorned with large banners stretching from floor to ceiling bearing long lists of names. Back on the subway, we asked the meaning of the banners. They were the names of the desparecidos, she told us. The school of architecture apparently had a sizable number of leftists among the students and faculty. “The former government disappeared them, ” she said.
Two months I had walked these streets and eaten in these homes and slept in these beds and I had never heard of such a thing. I’d been schooled in how to properly hold silverware, the right way to drink from the communal mate cup, to never carry an unwrapped package from a store on the street. But no one remembered to tell me about 30, 000 desaparecidos, a chapter in this country’s history that had supposedly closed mere months before my arrival? (Of course not, they would have said, had I been brazen enough to ask such a question aloud. We would expect you to have known.)
I did not know. But as a visitor to this beautiful country, at that time in history, I surely should have. And I would. When I returned home I ordered articles from my university library and even managed, in what feels now like some sort of miraculous feat in the pre-Internet age, to get my hands on a copy of Nunca Mas (Never Again), the report of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, a horrifying text detailing the brutal acts of the so-called National Reorganization Process, an effort undertaken by the military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983 to control subversive activities.
In much of contemporary literature and film, coming of age has to do with sexual awakening. It is not always so. My own was political, coming with the dawning that such terror was not sealed off as distant memory’s cautionary tale of a 1930s Nazi Germany, or hidden away behind curtains iron or brick in mythic regimes of Eastern Europe and the then-USSR.
Another May
when you went past my window may
with autumn on your back
and flashed signals with the light
of the last leaves
what was your message may?
why were you sad or in your sadness gentle?
i never found out but there was always
one man alone in the street among autumn’s golds
well I was the boy
at the window may
shielding my eyes
when you went past
and come to think of it
i must have been the man
—Juan Gelman (tr. Hardie St. Martin)
Coming of age is not a once-and-done proposition. If we’re lucky, we do it again and again. I aged a few years in the police station with Ruth that day on my return trip. Our presence there was under innocent enough circumstances. We were in the city of Resistencia, in the subtropical Chaco province in the far north of the country (known to local folks as the Interior). While we were preparing for an evening event in the plaza, one of our companions needed to use the restroom so we set off down the street looking for a cafe or public outhouse. Instead, we encountered a police officer. Our Argentine friends lowered their eyes and kept walking, assuming we would do the same, but my American friends stopped and asked him if he could help us out. He obliged, leading us into the station around the corner. Ruth and Liliana were stricken, but it was too late. Ann and Karen had already left with the officer. I was somewhere in the middle. We caught up and followed close behind.
Karen and Ann surely grew up the way I did, in white middle America, or perhaps Colorado or Pennsylvania. I never thought of the police as anyone other than Ed, our next door neighbor, a big, playful father of two who made our neighborhood feel even safer. When taught how to talk to the police as a child, I was encouraged to look at them as friends. I would be much older before I learned that even in my own country there were those who’d had to learn a different lesson, by necessity. And there in Resistencia that afternoon, even after having done my homework, it took some time for the abject terror experienced by my friends to sink in. When Karen and Ann were escorted to the restroom across the courtyard of the police station and Ruth, Liliana and I were ushered into the office of the police chief. We sat across from his desk for a good long time while he asked questions about our activities in the plaza he already knew the answer to.
Things They Don’t Know
dark times / filled with light / the sun
spreads sunlight over the city split
by sudden sirens / this police hunt goes on / night falls and we’ll
make love under this roof / our eighth
in one month / they know almost everything about us / except
this plaster ceiling we make love
under / and they also know nothing about
the rundown pine furniture under the last ceiling / or
about the window the night pounded on while you shone like the sun / or
about the beds or the floor where
we made love this month / with faces around us like the sun
spreading sunlight over this city
—Juan Gelman (tr. Hardie St. Martin)
Eventually, our friends returned happily enough from an uneventful trip to the restroom. For all we knew, this was no more than a friendly chat with a local official. And why wouldn’t it be? Ruth, on the other hand, was fixated on one of the chief’s subordinates who spent the entire time dialing a large black rotary phone and speaking in a whisper to whoever was (or wasn’t, we never really knew) on the other end, certain that arrangements were being made for our arrest and that we, like thousands over the previous decade, would not leave the building alive.
Surely she was overreacting. We told her so. But we’d done nothing, we protested.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve done nothing. The look on her face was withering. You’ll never understand.
If Gently
if waves from someone who threw himself into the sea
came to mind gently / what about our brothers who were
in-earthed? / do leaves sprout from their fingers? /
saplings / autumns soundlessly losing their leaves? / silently
our brothers talk about the time when
they were twothree inches away from death / they smile
remembering / even now feeling their relief
as if they hadn’t died / as if
paco were still brilliant and rodolfo were looking
up all the lost thoughts he’d always carried
slung over his shoulder / or rodolfo (forever) digging through his bitterness
had just pulled out of the ace of spades / he turned his mouth to the wind /
inhaled life / lives / saw with his own eyes the angel of death /
but now they’re talking about when
things worked out / nobody killed / nobody got killed / they
outwitted the enemy making up for some general humiliation /
with brave actions / with dreams / and all the time
their companions lying there / wordless /
flesh falling from their bones on a january night /
quiet at last / so terribly alone / without kisses
—Juan Gelman (tr. Hardie St. Martin)
We’re reading the poetry of Juan Gelman together, from the collection Dark Times Filled With Light. Join us in the comments with your thoughts on the three poems featured this week. Next week we’ll consider a trio of poems that reflect on the way Gelman, a prolific poet, viewed the power (and perhaps impotence) of poetry itself. If you have the book, you may wish to read “Facts, ” “Time Schedules” and “The Art of Poetry” in preparation.
Read the Dark Times Filled with Light book club announcement post
Photo by Lisa Weichel, Creative Commons via Flickr. Poems by Juan Gelman, translated by Hardie St. Martin, reprinted with permission of the publisher. Post by LW Lindquist.
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Glynn says
We live in a culture in which history is what happened 15 minutes ago. Latin American culture sees the past as the present as the future. Or, put another way, the past is always with you, shaping both the present and the future. Our culture allowed you (theoretically) to leave your past behind and move west. Until we ran out of west.
The challenge is to understand the past but not let it trap you. But I don’t know how to avoid the trap when, as Gelman experienced, your children are “disappeared” by the government. In his experience, it wasn’t a trap. It was more like a prison sentence, or a doctor’s diagnosis of terminal illness. You might overcome it, you might survive it, but you can never leave it behind you.
The fear your friend experienced at the police station is an example of how the past shapes the present, and , in fact, becomes the present.
Glynn says
Here are some of my thoughts after reading about a third of “Dark Times Filled with Light.” http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2017/01/stories-and-imagination-in-dark-times.html?m=0
Will Willingham says
Glynn, you’re right. We have a difficult time with a longer view of history, and I think we are often prone to brush aside history not just because it doesn’t fit our preferred narrative (though we clearly do that too) but also when it is just too difficult for us to acknowledge.
The idea of not letting history trap a person is important. I think for my friends, it was also a matter of not just the most immediate history, but also the awareness that was embedded that this particular era was not completely a blip, but was the culmination of a lot of years of back and forth with the various powers there. Gelman’s poetry bears this out, where he is talking about so many of the same themes (though it comes across differently, surely, in the later years) in his poems in the 50s and 60s as well.
(I love that poem you featured in your post. We’re going to look at it here next week too.)
Maureen says
You’ve chosen such fine poems to illustrate this first post, LW. I’ve come to love Gelman’s work. How he create beauty from such tragic circumstances of life! The poems are as much addressed to those lost as they are metaphors for a beloved country lost – a lengthy elegy whose end is yet unknown for too many.
Even in the presence of the “angel of death”, there is beauty – “autumn’s golds”, “the sun / spreading sunlight over this city”, “dreams”. Dreams and hope. . . and especially memory, without which we could look neither back nor ahead.
Will Willingham says
I don’t quite know how to describe his poems. In his introduction to the Unthinkable Tenderness collection, Eduardo Galeano says “Juan has committed the crime of marrying justice to beauty.” I will say the poems are beautiful, and then I have to ask myself if I think that is true, because the poems can be hard, even harsh, sometimes graphic and violent. But I keep coming back to that, the beauty of it. Even hard, harsh, graphic beauty.
Maureen says
I know the quote from Galeano. I think it can be applied to many of the very best of Latin and South American poets.
That concept of “marrying justice to beauty” is addressed in the Bible, in visual art and photography (think of the fine art photography from 9/11), in film, by philosophers such as Plato, and by numerous writers (think, Dante). Harvard’s Elaine Scarry wrote a book on the subject, ‘On Beauty and Being Just’. One of her points is that by being able to discern beauty, we are better equipped to see injustice. Whether one agrees or not, her approach to the subject is fascinating.
The book dates to the late ’80s but was reprinted in 2001:
http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Being-Just-Elaine-Scarry/dp/0691089590/
Megan Willome says
Thank you, LW. I just listened to Junot Diaz’s “The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” much of which is set in the Dominican Republic, and the themes there and here and in your time in Argentina echo.
Will Willingham says
Oh, I loved Oscar Wao. 🙂
Laura Lynn Brown says
When I opened the book, the first poem I saw was “Another May,” and the first line I saw was
why were you sad or in your sadness gentle?
I wonder. What is the little boy watching at the window? Is it simply the month of May? (It took me a moment to remember that May would be in the fall in the Southern Hemisphere.) And why is he shielding his eyes? Is it from some unbearable light? It makes me think of Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall”: “are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” And of E.E. Cummings’ poem “who are you, little i” too.
I love the end, how the speaker can finally can introduce, identify himself to May — “I was the boy” — and also identify with the man.
And I love the gentle defiance in “Things They Don’t Know.” One thing we know: eight roofs, eight abodes, in one month. Don’t know why. On the run, probably. And yet he pays attention to them, dignifies them with the details of noticing, makes the reader his intimate by sharing some of them. Ardor for life is not diminished by the unsettledness. And so much sun in that poem!
Your story brings back memories of a brief visit to Quito, Ecuador, in 2004. I had studied up on the Galapagos Islands before my trip there, but I knew next to nothing about the country or the two cities where we would stay overnight on the bookends of that trip.
In the pharmacy where we went in search of ibuprofen, there was a security guy with a pistol (what we sometimes call a rent-a-cop, though ours are usually unarmed), and outside McDonald’s was a soldier with a rifle. You don’t see that every day. Though I didn’t know it until later, their Congress was trying to impeach the president. The guide on our bus tour of the city didn’t mention that, although when we rode past the presidential palace he did mention that the president was currently staying elsewhere.
My strongest memory is of the children in the main square, the Plaza de la Independencia, who knew enough English to beg from the tourists or offer to shine our shoes, even our non-shinable sneakers or hiking boots. “Take my picture!” they’d say with a smile when we pointed our cameras. “I have no money,” they’d say forlornly after we had taken their images. We were told they lived in an orphanage run by the Catholic church, and they swarmed us a literal stone’s throw from the opulent cathedral that was, as I recall, being regilded inside.
Will Willingham says
I love that detail in “Things They Don’t Know” as well. I read that poem as being about surveillance, and so those little intimacies that can be withheld from the ever-seeing are so very precious.
On my flight down one year we had to land in Bolivia for bad weather ahead or some such thing. I don’t totally recall. It was small, fairly primitive as airports go. We deplaned and since we did not have Bolivian visas, were instructed to stay inside the airport building, which was teeming with artisans selling things and the occasional animal. A couple of days after we arrived in Buenos Aires we learned there had been a coup attempt in Bolivia within hours of when we left and everything had been on lockdown. One just doesn’t ever really know what’s going on down the block. 🙂
Laura Lynn Brown says
Maybe we need to make a collective Things We Didn’t Know poem.
Sandra Heska King says
Thanks, Laura. I didn’t make the connection between Argentina’s seasons. I would have never thought to think of that. Now May carrying autumn on its back makes sense.
Will Willingham says
I had thought about the seasons back when I first read that, and then didn’t really have a way to work it into the context of this piece, so I’m glad Laura mentioned it.
Those two summers I spent there meant I had 5 winters in a row. I think I am still sun-deficient from it now. 😉
Maureen says
This exhibit was some years ago but I found a few images of how artists interpreted the subject of ‘the disappeared’. Some may find it of interest:
http://www.ndmoa.com/past-2009-the-disappeared
Will Willingham says
Thanks for this link, Maureen. “Fighting amnesia.” What a way to put it.
Sandra Heska King says
I knew nothing about this time in Argentina’s history. So I’m being enlightened–and feeling your friend’s fear.
There’s beauty in Gelman’s poems–a finding of light, and yet it somehow just doesn’t seem right for the sun to shine and light to fall and making love in the midst of such darkness. Yet how does one survive without finding and noticing the light?
I found these two pieces about Gelman that helped me know him better:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/juan-gelman-poet-whose-search-for-his-disappeared-granddaughter-made-him-a-symbol-of-human-rights-in-9062532.html
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/juan-gelmans-dark-times-filled-with-light
And then several stories about the disappeared and the The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Hard reading.
There’s a large Argentinian population here in South Florida.
Will Willingham says
Hard, yes. But so important. I think the proximity of the events (both geographically, that this was in the Americas, and also the proximity of time, that it wasn’t something that happened decades ago but that it was all very fresh, is what made this such an important awakening for me. That these friends of mine had endured this time. We talked of it very, very little, and even then it wasn’t until ten years later. It was just too hard for them (and still felt very unsafe).
Here’s another piece on Gelman I liked. http://www.themillions.com/2016/11/this-is-a-story-with-a-happy-ending-on-the-life-of-juan-gelman.html