By Gajaman Nona
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Last weekend a friend gave me a CD of songs by Victor Jara, a Chilean teacher, theatre director, poet and political activist. Â His album Manifesto reflects his struggle against an American-backed coup in 1973 which brought General Pinochet to power in Chile. Jara saw through the hollow refrain that Chile could only be saved through military authoritarianism. He sang,
“I do not want my country divided…there is room for all of us in this country”.
Jara was killed for his protest. His final poem was written in a stadium in Santiago, as he was held captive by the military along with 5,000 others. He laments:
“For them, blood is a medal; Killing is an act of heroism”.
The 1973 coup heralded an era of brutal repression and savage human rights violations. During General Pinochet’s regime, hundreds of members of Allende’s Popular Unity government were tortured and disappeared simply because they represented a new spirit of democracy. Many political activists of the 70s were creative and Chile saw a resurgence of popular theatre and song. Pinochet sought to end this. Although the military managed to confiscate most of Jara’s master recordings, his wife, Joan Jara, smuggled some of his music out so that even death could not silence Jara’s dreams.
Victor Jara celebrated life; the work of the peasants; the lyrics of songwriters and the beauty of chance – the rain in his daughter’s hair – and how nothing else mattered.
“I sing for the statements made by my honest guitar,
for its heart is of the earth and like the dove it goes flying.
My guitar is not for killers – greedy for money and power,
but for the people who labour so the future may flower”.
According to Paula Rodriguez a filmmaker who has explored Chile’s political demons, Pinochet’s house arrest in Britain in October 1998, when he was served with a Spanish arrest warrant charging him with torture and conspiracy was “the end of a process. Chileans could see how the world saw Pinochet and how they saw Chile”. In 2003, as part of a process of recovering from two decades of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the Chilean government paid homage to Jara, renaming the stadium where he was killed after him. The commemoration aimed to signal that impunity would never again be tolerated and that Chile had moved on.
Stephen Volk reminds us just how hard that process of moving on is, for any government. Volk examines how proclaimers of democracy such as the United States learnt from Pinochet how state power could be wielded to undermine those who question by using surveillance and anti-terror laws. The abuse of state power – whether this be secret renditions across Europe; censorship and invasion of privacy such as snatching SIMM cards or videotaping minority citizens in Colombo is a very dangerous trend.
It seems strange to listen to Jara’s lyrics today as killers seem all too common in the ordinary texture of life in Sri Lanka and yet there is very little space for protest. There is instead much talk of heroism and blood. In today’s world if you write about the celebration of death you can be assaulted in the capital in broad daylight. In this heroic world a citizen who just happens to be a minority can be detained impolitely for long hours. In this heroic world, the wail of ambulances from Ratmalana airport returning bodybags from the North interrupts still evenings.
Sri Lanka’s grief is not new. You can find tracts in the politics section of any major bookstore with titles like “War and Conflict”, “Ethnic Enmity”, “Scarred Minds”. But The Economist this week labels President Rajapakse as “The War President”. There has been a hardening of viewpoints in the last two years that only war is the solution. As in Chile in the 70s and 80s, impunity for rights abuses has accompanied the closing down of alternatives.
This closing down sees a reduction of identity to national and ethnic labels. Even an ordinary pedestrian has to place themselves in this identity struggle and enter a contract of implication as the security forces demand to see your ID and check if you are Sinhala or Tamil. Today identity is not various, it is imagined and reinforced by nationalists in search of cultural capital (both Buddhist and Tamil), and a state with majoritarian public culture.
This state wants criticism silenced. The trouble with war is that even its language sounds ugly. The plurality of the world gets reduced to stock phrases like “conflict affected”, “the enemies”, “seizure and destruction”. Black helicopters and war stories transform normal life into a ritual of masquerade.
What happened to the poets of old who described the scent of the earth? A friend once told me that he could get lost in the descriptions of erotic Sinhala poetry. The beauty of consummation summed up in descriptions of crystals melting in water.
Who wants to fight over land when an empty space can be more beautiful than an object? If we let ourselves, we could see the horizon stretching out beyond the gaze of the warmongers’ canvas.
Why can’t we follow Jara’s example and choose lyricism. There are many historic literary examples, like the description of the Boddhisatva’s birth as a hare:
“The dew-drops that drip – from the glorious petals
Appear pearls that slip – from the rosy finger-tips of girls”.
Jara says,
“Song is like the water that washes the stones, the wind that cleans us,
like the fire which joins us together and it lives within us to make us better people”.
We need to start looking for this fire within. What Jara stands for, along with many of the survivors of Chile’s past, is that there is value in believing in justice and freedom. Do not hunt out enemies or seek to destroy, we should notice the farmers perched in watch huts staying awake to keep elephants out. We could celebrate the wild flush of bougainvillea, the lightning striking the sea in the distance, luminous and electric. Genuflect to beauty not the merchants of death. I don’t want a medal of blood, do you?