Santiago: an sample and summary

Santiago is a dense city divided by invisible lines, unspoken rules
and silent scars. The relatively tiny city centre is a place in which
each microcosm blends into the next, before the different classes
sprawl out up to the Andes and down to the Sea.[Via the martime
mountains]

The middle and upper classes tend to the North East, Andean
foothills lifing the leafy, glass-buildinged suburbs out of the cities
smog. The poor tend towards the south west: each metro stop taking us
deeper into Chile’s poverty/indios divide, until the train tracks give
out and one carries off into the shanty towns by bus or on foot.

Whereas most of the ‘Centro’ is shunned by the well to do, the
Cine-arte Biografo in Lastarria is symbol of the centres’ tiny nucleus
of left-ist gentrification: Bellas Artes. Lastarria is polished bohemia for those
with cash, a paved pedestrian gateway that provides an entry to and
condenses most of Bellas Artes. Lastarria is a small venue of Parisian
influence with faded grandeur and red velvet sears roughened by use
and time. It is overpriced shops selling packaged street-culture,
whilst the real-deal is sold on the pavements outside. It is
bookstalls and wonderful bookshops crammed to the rafters with
condensed thought and dense prose in a country with an estimated 80%
functional illiteracy rate. It is Turkish coffee shops and free wifi
in a country where the national plague is Nescafe, and the internet is
quite recent and never a given.

It is a bubble of café culture squished between the six-lane traffic
artery 'Alameda' and the mercado central. Faded velvet seats and dusty
books; squished between the traffic roar and living hand to foot, each
10p sale at a time, whilst the tourists dine on overpriced oysters,
king crabs and scallops; as human rights protesters (and I was once
one of them) get teargassed outside.

A Greenish belt between Lastarria and Mercado central, lies the Parque
Forestal, neither park nor forest. It's a slightly forlorn stretch of
green and trees which runs from Plaza Baquedano to just before the
central market- around 1 km long by 200m wide at most. It does however
have joggers and dog-walkers and enough canoodling couples - on a
sunny day I'd say at least a couple per 2m2 – to be defined a de
facto park. Whilst generally unremarkable on a week day, on Sundays it
shows up some of Santiago's contradictions and tensions, and the
highly ritualistic ways in which they are expressed. On a Sunday, half
of the 'Parque', from the central metro station Baquedano to the
Bellas Artes musuem, is home to children and clowns and puppet shows
and candy floss men.

On the other side of the main road, however, it becomes an informal
flea market with students selling vegetarian burgers in amongst the
handmade jewellery and low-priced real-street clothing. The square
around the museum becomes an exhibition playground for jugglers,
acrobats, and drummers; all with a few beers going round and the
occasional whiff of weed in the air. It is generally full of middle to
lower class youths and it shows up the seams of youth counterculture
and the informal sector, albeit one that maybe dresses up (or down?)
mainly on the weekends. It is a ritualised place, and seems to be home
to ritualised confrontation with the authorities.

Sundays become buying 50p T-shirts in the pedestrian fleamarket
bohemia, whilst running away from the motorbiked police. Selling
original works of art at £1 a pop outside the gates of the national
art museum; police buses driving into the acrobats and over the
non-violent banners, as the stones, whistles and heckles fly on past.
Selling Photographs in Plaza De ArmasAGypsyTarot Reader in Plaza de ArmasArt Lessons in the Espejo Shanty TownLittle Girl and Ballon at a 'Right to non'violent protest' demonstration.
Mapuche dances at the Right to non-violent protest demonstration
Chess in Plaza de Armas
A magician in Plaza de Armas
Golden streets and a homeless man setting bench for the night in Plaza de Armas

Conceptualising torture? Chile and the torture truth commission

Context

 

And the trapeze I was sitting on- it was the executioners noose

And the white sands stretching long- they were sun-bleached-bones, loose

With the years of  forgetting-

Olvido perdono- all this- begetting

And the report is a map- 4000 k of torture and death

‘N they don’t give a crap- wine, eat and shop, laugh lest

Lest we should remember,

those-ssh. those-ssh- those facts of september

Don’t think, just be- a democracy made of cheap hotdogs, no books

Eighty percent illitera-cy[1]- gossip mags and saucy looks

most detained women sexually abused

Lives dreams words-  old flesh. now used

 

And lest we forget- we’ve all moved on, no-one cares

Family victims I ‘spect- still holding on- yet everyone  stares:

Look: the black and white photographs of the dead

Or stare at the glossy pictas of American teens instead

Communist conspiracies- why blame the military now

Oh n’ innocent kids-I see- 33 thousand lives- oh wow.

-and the (copper-bought)  traffic

goes on,

down roads of cheap consumerism ,

 stretching long.

---

[1] Chile is estimated to have 80% functional illiteracy- people who don’t read  in their day-to-day lives.

 

Disjointed dissertation

The memorisation of his’try

Page seven, notes three to five

conceptualisation of  victory

Number eleven- check the line

The creation of the other-bad

Lira’s book- find the page?

lone abandoned mother-sad

have a look- the rapist’s wage

the enemy as disposable

the militry- a victim too?

the tensioning is notable

“apologies”- read it through

moral destruction of the other side

Neo-liberal- find defintion

Past as rupture-the eventual slide

J-O Tibral- The new edition

To  displacement of unsuitables?

Word-count in hyperdrive

 Replacement of  the juster rules

Don’t discount the number of lives

Democratising death and pain

Footnoting of other’s secrets

Militarising definition of sane

The memory box is always deepest.

Memory as secret box

Having worked on a dissertation about Chile's torture truth Commission- memory has a secret box.

Memory has a secret box.

 

The women read. And the typist typed.

Opening boxes - truth comes to light.

 

In opening the box of someone else

she found her locked. her younger self

 

In societies tortures done by the state

Her own wounds her secret ache

 

And as night left and morning fell

She typed her tears- a secret well

 

A pain she'd never known she’d had

Someone’s daughter, a likely lad

 

Writing those wrongs in secret ink

Writing other wrongs. The secret links

 

A secret writing of a secret wrong.

50 years of history. Long

 

If a wrong doesn’t make a right they say

then writing out  a wrong it may

 

open up  that  secret box.

Open it up and tell me, soft

 

The morning’s moon will sooth, you’ll see

With that secret becoming a part of me

write-up

Write up
And at the actors are following me-
need an author to write them down
Damn praxis of subjectivity-
greedy stories-each wantin’the crown

The truth, the right-
proof their mem’ry. triumphs all
Held up. to the light:
Hist’ry written. final call

to the dead: “we did it
we wrote our your wrongs
its was said, they admit it
we sang out your songs”

and the weight-it crushes
to write some’thing of use
and thus create- fitfull rushes
objective stories- the abuse

the pain .the suffering
democracy bursting at the stitches
the rain. the shuffling….
blood pours as they hunt those witches

To write the other side-
must get where its coming from
The stand between the lines-
The reasons its resting on

The fallacy . of neoliberal growth
The phallic-ly military belief in both
Women in the house- men (dead) in d’streets
Raping their spouse-‘s they beat’m.t’the-beats
Of the drummers’ drums – as these lives pass them by
Drip through bloodied hands- and the souls reach the sky

Each blow. a reactionary blast from the past
The tables they turned- at last at -last
Order this cancer - this belief there is change
Kill this pink panther- this Fidel-ist rage
Shooting all beards, all women in trousers
The devil reared- these red rabble rousers

Re-writing history with the blood they spill
Their press, their laws, the willing lost their will
To counter.to cry out.fear squeezin them down
Out of love they come back- slowing regaining ground
Limbo-ish wait for historians redemption
Broad sweeping statements- as I casually mention
How they Destroyed the other, polarised ripping apart
Of exceptional democracy- the loss of heart
As church called for the military- some order please
Steel cold bureaucracy- terrorising, by decrees

A polarised narrative of a polarised time
All black and white- no reason no rhyme
But what of the greys- the cracks -and slips
No space for the may-bes- lurches and dips

The murky wrongs of those fighting for freedom
Acid-scarred children- bombing- they lead on
To uncomfortable comparison- well the army killed more

A cleansed-up narrative- mere victims- the poor
Agentless ‘pueblo’-just forgot it did fight
Killers and victims- the wrong and the right

Agents of state- pushed to the edge
By feckless politics- the cold war’s thin wedge
freedom fighters- they be murderers too

we dont like this- thats consensus for you
losing the agency to legitimately fight
to the god of consensus-the compromised right
to lay down your weapons- pick up burgers instead
wi-fi and Nippon- cheap cars- and the dead?

well we bury ourselves- in coffins of glass
no fairytale prince- no at last at last
no kiss of redemption- just neoliberal judas
the state of exemption-now accepted view’as

the economy is seen as the military's gift
for the rich torture was an exceptional lift
as the glass ceiling was reinforced- a few flew by keep the poor divorced- from the stars in the sky.

No block, when I rhyme

I'm currently writing up my dissertation on Chile's report about torture. Well, trying to.
The first section is about how when one reads the Valech report, one is overcome by how pervasive and massive this repression really was- beaches you love becomes the sea where that the disaparecidos were thrown into, deserts become mass graves, my 'trapeze'- Chile- becomes a much more complicated place.

The second half is about how I find it really hard to reconcile my feelings of duty to those who helped me along my way, and my intention to write a critical piece, that is of societal use. Perhaps it's the idea that an undergraduate dissertation can be of use, that is the problem. But what can one do but try.


Conceptualization

And the trapeze I was sitting on- it was the executioners noose
And the white sands stretching long- they were sun-bleached-bones, loose

With the years of forgetting

And the report is a map- 4000 k of torture and death
‘N they don’t give a crap- wine, eat and shop, laugh lest ...

...We remember

Don’t think, just be- a democracy made of cheap hotdogs, no books
Eighty percent illiteracy*- gossip mags and saucy looks

98% of detained women were sexually abused

And lest we forget- we’ve all moved on, no-one cares
Family victims I ‘spect- still holding on- yet everyone stares

Look- the ‘ familiares’ with the black and white

photographs of the dead

Communist conspiracies- why blame the military now
Oh n’ innocent kids-I see- 33 thousand lives- oh wow.

-and the (copper-bought) traffic
goes on,
down roads of cheap consumerism ,
stretching long.




Write up

And at the actors are following me-
need an author to write them down

Damn praxis of subjectivity-
greedy stories-each wants the crown

The truth, the right-
proof their mem’ry. triumphs all

Held up. to the light:
history written, final call

to the dead, “we did it
we wrote our your wrongs

its was said, they admit it
we sang out your songs”

and the weight-it crushes
to write some’thing of use

and thus create- fitfull rushes
objective stories- the abuse

[the pain .the suffering
democracy bursting at the stitches

lead rain- the shuffling
blood pours as they hunt those witches. ]**

[...]**provisional ending

.
TBC- I want this to be an epicpoem (in length)


*Chile is estimated to have 80% functional illiteracy- people who don’t read in their day-to-day lives.

writer's (B)lock.

Working on my dissertation about the Commission on torture, Chile 2003-2004.

Writer's block seems to send me to new heights of self doubt.

This is an extract from a leeter I wrote a friend.

It's interesting, as Chile really didn’t think torture was that important at all. If you look at the speech Lagos made, re: launching the torture commission, he dedicated about a sentence to the whole thing- blink and you miss it style.

What is difficult about my dissertation is that I'm trying to combine the subjective elements, with writing something that is objectively useful (or subjectively useful at the very least)

Reading the Valech report is so reminiscent of being taught history in Chile... 'this isn't interpretation, rather the facts'. My standard response is this: 'What this essay seeks to analyse is the very narrative created in the ‘balanced’, apolitical, supposedly non-interpretative representation of ‘fact’'

I'm becoming quite the trendy academic, with my references to discourse and the overlaps and incongruence between truth and memory, and the problems inherent in the historicisation of living memory...
It's all quite terrifying.

I feel I am doomed to repeat the same semi-postmodernist analyses about the construction of a dominant historical discourse and the contests between different actors to counter the hegemony of an 'official truth' and (in this analysis at least) a mercurio-santioned official history.

Thus my 'originality' stems from arguing that the ideological hegemony seems to have been some sort of compromise between the concertacion and leading interests (as represented by the mercurio).

My fate seems to be becoming a slightly revisionist historian whose greatest innovation was arguing what commonsense shouts out.