{"id":123386,"date":"2018-03-26T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=123386"},"modified":"2018-03-30T12:02:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T16:02:40","slug":"pablo-nerudas-poetry-of-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/26\/pablo-nerudas-poetry-of-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Can Learn from Neruda\u2019s Poetry of Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I first embarked on writing a biography of Pablo Neruda over a decade ago, I wanted to explore the political power of poetry and its capacity to inspire social change. Neruda\u2019s social verse was an integral part of the humanity he expressed; even without pen in hand, he boldly inserted himself into direct action.<\/p>\n

I happened to finish the book\u2014Neruda: The Poet<\/em>\u2019s Calling<\/em><\/a>\u2014at the end of Trump\u2019s first hundred days in office. As a result, the questions that I\u2019d been exploring for years suddenly took on new urgency. As resistance<\/em>\u00a0increasingly becomes the operative word in our current political reality, what can one of the most important and iconic resistance poets of the past century offer us? What might he give us as we continue to shape the next chapter in our own cultural story? Some answers, or at least perspectives, can be found in the vivid details of Neruda\u2019s life and work.<\/p>\n

Neruda\u2019s legacy was directly shaped by the historical events in which he played a part. In his early youth, during Chile\u2019s revolutionary student movement, he played the role of an activist-writer, the voice of a young generation challenging the country\u2019s controlling aristocracy. In his final years, he vigorously defended Chile against U.S. intervention and, as ambassador to France, represented Salvador Allende\u2019s historic socialist government.\u00a0<\/strong>His relationship to readers and to his own writing was shaped by these periods of acute political crisis and authoritarianism.<\/p>\n

When the Cold War hit Chile in 1947, Gabriel\u00a0Gonz\u00e1lez Videla\u2014the country\u2019s devious, unpredictable president\u2014turned against Neruda and the others who had helped elect him. He enacted oppressive measures against workers and the left: he shut down the communist newspaper, jailed three hundred striking coal miners on an island of Patagonia, and sent labor leaders and other \u201csubversives\u201d to a concentration camp directed by a thirty-three-year-old army captain named Augusto Pinochet. Neruda, a senator at the time, denounced the situation, both through his writings and his actions. He took to the senate floor and raised his voice: \u201cNow even Congress is subject to censorship. You can\u2019t even talk now … There have been murders in the coal-mining region!\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez Videla would hear no more. He accused Neruda of treason and ordered his arrest, forcing him into exile.<\/p>\n

Neruda responded by developing an aesthetically and conceptually daring new poetic voice, which would narrate his monumental book\u00a0Canto General. <\/em>It recasts and reclaims the history of the Americas in a new way, as an epical, lyrical story of resistance. Fifty years later, in 2003, a construction engineer working on Santiago\u2019s metro told me that the importance of Canto General<\/em> is that it \u201cshows us the history of the Americas … [from] the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors.\u201d<\/p>\n

At no time was the relationship between Neruda\u2019s poetry and his experience of social upheaval so directly on display than at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Neruda arrived in Madrid in 1934, as a Chilean\u00a0consul,<\/em>\u00a0just before his thirtieth birthday. The Spanish monarch had finally fallen just three years earlier, and an idealistic, progressive spirit invigorated the writers and intellectuals, especially the poet and playwright Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, who Neruda had met the year before. Lorca was waiting at the train station for Neruda when he first arrived in Madrid.<\/p>\n

Neruda, emerging from the tortuous period of depression and isolation\u2014\u201cluminous solitude,\u201d as he described it\u2014that he underwent while serving in a series of consular posts in East Asia, was thirsty for this fraternity. His poetry became deeply introspective during that period, though he wasn\u2019t just focused on his inner life: while serving his consular posts, and off the written page, he actively participated in denigrating and subjugating women, native people of color, and the poor. Years later, in his memoirs, he even described raping a Tamil servant in Sri Lanka, adding a disturbing layer to his future legacy as an activist on behalf of the oppressed.<\/p>\n

When he arrived in Madrid, Neruda\u2019s spirits were invigorated by a thriving, exciting fellowship of activists and artists. But Spain\u2019s social and political situation was tense and complicated. As the historian Gabriel Jackson wrote, Spain in 1930 was \u201csimultaneously a moribund monarchy, a country of very uneven economic development, and a battleground of ardent political and intellectual crosscurrents.\u201d As Hitler and Mussolini gained power nearby, Spanish Fascists asserted themselves more directly and violently. The progressive government struggled to survive. Beginning in March, 1936, members of the Fascist group Falange rode ostentatiously through Madrid in squads of motorcars, wielding machine guns and firing at alleged Reds in working-class neighborhoods. By June, many members of the Communist, Socialist, and Anarchist parties were publicly promoting a revolution, while the right-wing press was instilling in the middle class a fear of a Communist state and promoting the idea that only a military coup could save Spain. Rumors of a Fascist revolution swirled, petrifying Lorca, who was gay and a leftist and had become increasingly outspoken in defense of the republic. He fled to his hometown of Granada, hoping his influential, conservative family would protect him.<\/p>\n

On July 17, 1936 the Fascist general Francisco Franco led a military uprising, sparking the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini and Hitler supplied him with planes and weapons. The insurgents, known as the nationalists, advanced quickly toward Madrid, where Neruda and his friends were living. Those friends had recently formed the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals and were determined to wield their intellect and creativity in support of the Republic. They brought popular theater to the people\u2014plays from Cervantes to Lorca that espoused their ideology while invigorating culture in a demoralizing time. The Alliance also published a small magazine, written primarily for Republican soldiers. One member of a unit would read it out loud for those who were illiterate. The list of contributors was extraordinary, including Antonio Machado and Rafael Alberti.<\/p>\n

A month into the war, nationalists arrested Lorca. When asked what crime Lorca committed, the officer in charge answered, \u201cHe\u2019s done more damage with a pen than others have with a pistol.\u201d Three days later, Lorca and three other prisoners were shot beside a stand of olive trees.<\/p>\n

The news shook Neruda to the core. Beyond the horror of a friend\u2019s assassination, Lorca\u2019s death represented something more: Lorca was the embodiment of poetry; it was as if the Fascists had assassinated poetry itself. Neruda had reached a moment from which there was no turning back. His poetry had to shift outwardly; it had to act. No more melancholic verse, love poems dotted with red poppies, or metaphysical writing, all of which ignored the realities of rising Fascism. Bold, repeated words and clear, vivid images now served his purpose: to convey his pounding heart and to communicate the realities he was experiencing in a way that could be understood immediately by a wide audience.<\/p>\n

This is nowhere better exemplified than in his poem \u201cI Explain Some Things.\u201d The title alone conveys the poem\u2019s urgency to be heard and understood, as was evidenced when, on Martin Luther King Day this year, the writer Kwame Alexander read the poem on NPR:<\/p>\n

You will ask: And where are the lilacs?
\nAnd the metaphysics laced with poppies?
\nAnd the rain that often beat
\nhis words filling them with holes and birds?
\nI\u2019ll tell you everything that\u2019s happening with me.<\/p>\n

I lived in a neighborhood
\nof Madrid, with church bells,
\nwith clocks, with trees.
\n.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

My house was called
\nthe house of flowers, because everywhere
\ngeraniums were exploding: it was
\na beautiful house
\nwith dogs and little kids.<\/p>\n

.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

Federico, you remember,
\nfrom under the earth,
\ndo you remember my house with balconies on which
\nthe light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
\nHermano, hermano!<\/em>
\n\u00a0<\/em>
\nAnd one morning everything was burning<\/p>\n

.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

and ever since then fire,
\ngunpowder ever since,
\nand ever since then blood
\nBandits with airplanes and with Moors,
\nbandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
\nbandits with black friars making blessings,
\n… kept coming from the sky to kill children,
\nand through the streets the blood of the children
\nran simply, like children\u2019s blood.<\/p>\n

You will ask why his poetry
\ndoesn\u2019t speak to us of dreams, of the leaves,
\nof the great volcanoes of his native land?<\/p>\n

Come and see the blood in the streets,
\ncome and see
\nthe blood in the streets,
\ncome and see the blood
\nin the streets!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Neruda went on to write a total of twenty-one poems in reaction to the war, contained in his book Espa<\/em>\u00f1<\/em>a en el coraz<\/em>\u00f3<\/em>n <\/em>(Spain in the Heart<\/em>), which would form part of The Third Residence<\/em>. This poetry was meant to reach outside the cultured, intellectual readership of his prior, more hermetic books. Now, Neruda\u2019s poetry was printed by frontline soldiers who used\u00a0old clothing and, supposedly, an enemy flag to make the pulp. Republican soldiers set the type, printed the finished copies, and delivered them to those fighting. Poetry, in other words, was fuel for the resistance, and Neruda was only one part of a sweeping movement: so many poets had such deep impact on the Spanish Civil War that it has been called the \u201cPoets\u2019 War.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the Fascists\u2019 bombs fell over Madrid, Neruda moved to Paris, where he helped organize a monumental gathering of writers to express solidarity for the Republic. Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes were among the participants. Neruda also embarked on a number of activist publishing ventures in support of the Republican cause. Along with the British activist Nancy Cunard, he published The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People<\/em>. Cunard had a printing press in her house; Neruda helped set the type. The money from the sale of the magazine went to support the Republican soldiers battling Franco\u2019s troops. The funds raised were not significant, but the dedicated, unabashed support from contributors spoke volumes.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Chile\u2019s foreign minister said he \u201cdisapproved\u201d of Neruda\u2019s partisan activities in France. The poet was ordered home; he returned in October, 1937. Franco declared victory on April 1, 1939. His final offensives to capture Barcelona and all of Catalonia had forced over half a million Spanish refugees to flee across the Pyrenees into France, where they languished in camps, subject to starvation and disease. Neruda\u2019s friends in Paris wrote him of the situation, begging him to do something. The poet sought help from the newly elected leftist Chilean president, who appointed him as consul to Paris.<\/p>\n

In Paris, Neruda secured an old cargo ship, the Winnipeg<\/em>, and organized an immensely ambitious transport of over two thousand refugees to freedom in Chile. The feat was lauded in headlines across the world. As recently as February 2018, Ariel Dorfman, alarmed by the strong anti-immigration sentiment behind Sebasti\u00e1n Pi\u00f1era\u2019s victory in Chile\u2019s presidential election, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times <\/em>on Neruda\u2019s legacy. While rising xenophobia and nativism isn\u2019t unique to Chile, Dorfman noted that its history holds a model of \u201chow to act when we are confronted with strangers seeking sanctuary.\u201d He recounted the experience of the Winnipeg <\/em>and ended the piece asking, \u201cWhere are the Nerudas of today?\u201d<\/p>\n

As we face our own era of rising authoritarianism and new sets of complexities and injustices to resist, the question remains: Does poetry have the power to effect change? We can write \u201cdrop poetry not bombs\u201d on fliers, but the hard truth is that one poem alone cannot protect dreamers from being deported or restrain an unfit president. And yet, Neruda illuminates how poetry\u2019s poignant nature\u2014its unique power of distillation\u2014can create change through a cumulative, collective effort: one by one, like gathering drops, each time a poem comes into contact with a person\u2019s consciousness\u2014whether read by a 1930\u2019s Spanish Republican soldier or heard on the radio or penned afresh\u2014it incites the possibility for a shift in perspective or an urge toward action. Poetry can energize, inform, and inspire. This alone won\u2019t stop bombs, but when taken together with all the direct actions of a social movement\u2014marches, relentless grassroots organizing, seven thousand shoes placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn\u2014Neruda has shown us how poetry can be an emotionally potent ingredient in the greater transformative efforts of resistance.<\/p>\n

The effectiveness of Neruda\u2019s poetry is proven by its endurance, how often people reach for and evoke his works as a tool to galvanize, to awaken, to sustain. In San Francisco, during the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Neruda\u2019s words were draped on banners over the streets: \u201cTyranny cuts off the head that sings, but the voice at the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and out of the darkness rises up through the mouth of the people.\u201d Nearly a decade later, the Egyptian art historian Bahia Shehab spray-painted Neruda\u2019s words on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring: \u201cYou can cut all the flowers, but you can\u2019t stop spring.\u201d Five years later, during the January 2017 Women\u2019s March, those same words of Neruda that had appeared in Cairo would grace posters bearing the original Spanish:\u201cPodr<\/em>\u00e1<\/em>n cortar todas las flores, pero no podr<\/em>\u00e1<\/em> detener la primavera.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Instances of social injustice, war, and the los of liberal democracy call us off the sidelines and into action. Neruda drastically adapted his poetry in response to crisis. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, he abandoned his desolate, introverted experimental poetry in favor of a decisive style, one that would compel others into action.<\/p>\n

Whether we\u2019re poets, teachers, readers, activists, or ordinary citizens who care about the world, we, too, can transform the way we express ourselves. In the era of social media, we don\u2019t need to make pulp out of flags to transmit our message to the troops of resistance. We can all speak. We can all be part of the dialogue. And poetry can be part of the collective way we, in Neruda’s words, \u201cexplain some things.\u201d From Neruda and others we can see how the act of expressing ourselves, and the act of hearing, are core components of resistance\u2014and of poetry\u2019s unique, enduring power.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mark Eisner is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Neruda: The Poets Calling.\u00a0He conceived, edited, and was one of the principle translators of\u00a0<\/em>The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. He is producing a documentary film on Neruda, with support from Latino Public Broadcasting. An initial version, narrated by Isabel Allende, won the Latin American Studies Association Award of Merit in Film.<\/em><\/p>\n

Translations from <\/em>The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems\u00a0by Pablo Neruda.<\/em>\u00a0Copyright<\/em>\u00a0(c) 2004 by City Lights Publishers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  When I first embarked on writing a biography of Pablo Neruda over a decade ago, I wanted to explore the political power of poetry and its capacity to inspire social change. Neruda\u2019s social verse was an integral part of the humanity he expressed; even without pen in hand, he boldly inserted himself into direct 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