Thursday, 8 January 2009

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.

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