Recall to Life: A Meditation and Remembrance
Power and Imaginaton (2002)
Power and Imagination
(2002)
When we forget, what we forget loses its present; absent a remembered presence it also loses its future. But very little is ever completely forgotten and lost, bits and pieces continue to exist in our understandings, behaviors, fears, longings; it is these fragments which can be recaptured by the imagination, imagination defined as recasting the old into something new and different, something which, even if partly thought of, has never been perceived. But what is imagined can become sterile, can drift into illusion, unless that reality is brought into being so it can be experienced, experience that may transform the thought but still keep faith with the desire behind the original idea. For such a transformation to happen, however, the physical, material, spiritual capability must exist to make the dream real along with the effort to bring the requisite changes into effect. Which last just so happens to be one of the definitions of power.
Therefore power need be given to the imagination if the dreams of what could be are ever to become what is; it is this to which the slogan, “all power to the imagination,” so identified with movements of 1968, speaks. It is a concept that ought to be recaptured from the margins of triviality in which it has been imprisoned in order to better challenge the resigned realism that lies within the alternative notion that what is always will be, the commonplace “truisms” that we live in a world bred of inequality, that no matter how much wealth abounds, some, many, will be born in hunger to lives of poverty; a world similarly bred in violence in which war is inevitable, peace at best an intermittent luxury. It is but a short step from these assertions of human society’s incapacities to the often-present if unstated conviction that genuine democracy—defined by popular participation in the direction and administration of government, of the economy—is a pipe dream and a recipe for inefficiency, totalitarianism, or both.
Assumptions by which we tell ourselves to settle for what is and give up dreaming, cousin to the belief that love is a childhood fairytale not to be taken seriously if one wants to avoid inevitable disappointment, they serve only to make the intolerable, tolerable. Excuses that close off what could be beautiful in life by running away to the comfort of familiar prisons paradoxically serve as shields to block the sight of our world’s tragedies. Floating through time willfully ignoring the danger of drowning in the ever-rising sea of tears and blood -- our own as well as that of others -- is to give up or give in because it becomes easier, safer to accept the unpleasant rather than to challenge and change, to risk the price that might have to be paid when suppressed dreams are allowed to live. Restricting the imagination to a tiny corner of nearly forgotten hopes due to the illusion of a pessimistic realism restricts us in both intimate and social relationships, making our imagination subject to the limits imposed by existing power.
Most of us do, most of the time, nonetheless, get by, living life as fully as possible within those allowed limits, but can’t eliminate a lingering dissatisfaction, the quiet desperation Thoreau once noted, passively waiting for the opportunity to allow their hopes to shed the skin of resignation, spread wings and fly. But when social pessimism becomes personal and that transformation ceases to exist even in the imagination, then hope may become despair; emotions denied expression turned within, accommodation to inequity swallowed, can only be taken so far before exploding upon itself or others.
Certainly this is an aspect of what lay behind the motivations of the intolerant cruelty in the acts of those who attacked New York City and Washington, DC on September 11 -- unable or unwilling to see the humanity of those killed for reasons of misplaced symbolism, those actions can also be seen as a triumph of the denial of imagination, bespeaking an inability to conceive a life of freedom in contrast to the oppression in which our post-Cold War “New World Order” locks the vast majority. Unable to envision a world of social justice and equality, the only answer to the veiled authoritarianism of neo-liberal economics and one-sided armed might exercised from afar becomes to those blinded by their hatreds the adoption of a visible authoritarianism that is no alternative at all—accommodating the lack of democratic and personal rights at the heart of our world’s despair by denying them even more blatantly. All that results: an intensification of what is rather than the creation of anything new. Powerless despite its violent explosions, nothing is thereby done to bind bleeding wounds or dry tearful eyes; such destructiveness only helps serve those who seek to legitimate the use of greater force to hold meaningful change at bay.
The greater use of force has been much in evidence, the wanton attack on the World Trade Center is, after all, but a small-scale replica of our government’s armed might, which destroys buildings and kills people on a much grander scale. Current Bush administration policy also demonstrates a similar, if greater, lack of imagination, unwilling to concede any way of living or other principle of organizing society or international relations other than those which currently prevail and lock into place divisions of rulers and ruled, haves and have-nots, victors and vanquished. The bombs our government has ordered dropped since September 11 are similar as well with the attacks on that day in their essential powerlessness—all the weapons in the world can’t disguise the failure of this any more than any of our other recent wars, to solve anything at all.
To avoid dealing with the hopelessness implied by the nature of its current policies, the administration hides a philosophy of unfeeling thoughtlessness in a denial of individuality; the faceless and nameless of Afghanistan or Iraq, whether seen as objects to be killed or to be given charity, are paralleled by the rapid shift in treating the lives lost on September 11 away from the personal sorrow felt to empty national symbol (or marketing opportunity). Contesting this reduction of life as lived to slogans means challenging the aforementioned realism of what is by restoring the possibilities upon which dreams live, the realism of what can be imagined and brought into being.
Doing this it may be helpful to look at and try to recapture some of those fragments of the past, not as myth the way 12th century Islam or 19th century rural America are misappropriated with flags of religion and nationalism draped over the complexity of the conflicts that defined those eras, but rather to look to see how people have at other times sought to overcome the limitations that social structures appeared to make permanent. Examining previous attempts to bring into being alternative ways in which we might live can help us today picture how we might wage such a struggle for tomorrow.
A beginning to that end may be taken by looking at a time shortly before September 11, but not that date in 2001 but rather in 1973. Many have noted the sad coincidence between last year’s terror and the terror of not-so-long-ago which marked the US-backed military coup in Chile. If, however, all we remember about those who died is the manner of their deaths and not the content of the lives they led, we give into the destructiveness of violence -- if all we remember about the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende is the brutality used to overthrow it, we concede too much to socialism’s opponents. The question we ought to ask is what was overthrown?
To answer simply, it represented an attempt to overcome injustice and poverty by a movement dedicated to expanding democracy in all aspects of life, building a socialism based on constitutional means relying on the participation and solidarity of Chile’s working people (and of people abroad). But a simple answer is not sufficient, fraught with the difficulty of reducing the years 1970 to 1973 to a single image, for to draw from that experience one lesson is to deny the reality of what was being built. Especially insofar as Popular Unity, the Chilean left in and out of government, spoke with a multiplicity of voices, understanding the scope, pace, and means of bringing about proposed changes in different terms. But then again, that is essential to what should be recalled, for in their diversity those supporting Allende were true to the goal of democratizing society and the economy, relying not on one leader, one organization, one “line,” but many. In consequence the impact of individual involvement in social activity became all the more important, public debate, discussion, political engagement, vital in practice, not just rhetoric.
Such involvement depended on people feeling free to speak their minds, act on their convictions, and have what they do make a difference in practice (this last all too lacking in our society), attributes of democracy that rely on civil liberties being respected. This Allende’s government did, promoting openness, refusing to coerce dissident voices within Popular Unity nor to suppress the speech, press, assembly, of opponents seeking his ouster. Refusing to be drawn into a policy of general repression, he also refused to draw a line to repress some and not others -- a line easy to draw in the abstract, impossible to maintain in practice, a process which once begun is hard to undo, a process which stifles creativity and personal engagement, reducing activism into ever narrower tests of loyalty.
Many anguished by the coup, recalling the tortured bodies alongside the crushed dreams, understandably wonder if the unwillingness to repress those who used public liberties to prepare a climate for the destruction of all liberty was a weakness, a factor in Popular Unity’s fall. Impossible to know for certain, though it does seem unlikely that such a path would have prevented the coup. More relevantly, it clearly would have been an admission that Allende’s foes were right, that fundamental change cannot be brought into being democratically, that social transformation which empowers those who have been without cannot also be a means to protect and extend individual rights. It would have been then—and would remain now—a sign of helplessness, a giving up of the possibility of giving power to the imagination, of recasting the old as something new, different, free.
The attempt to create a democratic, peaceful path to socialism in Chile was an attempt to give power to the imagination, to picture a world in which human values preceded those of property, and then taking steps to achieve it by building the solidarity and the individual participation of all members of society that pre-figured as means the ends sought. The Popular Unity government and the movement which gave birth to and sustained it never abandoned extra-parliamentary forms of mass activism, yet also never wavered from a commitment to work within existing structures—a combination which meant that commitment didn’t serve as an excuse to cease pressing for fundamental change and structural transformation. Devolving power to those long excluded is to make democracy real in daily life, and the belief that people can shape public institutions was at the core of what was fought for, to reassert popular sovereignty over the country’s natural resources on behalf of the goals of justice and equity.
The path taken was one that we should recall today because it stands in contrast to the current political void, which leads to the all-too-evident hopelessness and the militarization of politics resulting when privatization makes politics appear irrelevant to the quality of life. By fighting for change through participatory democratic means, the movement in Chile was forced to become always more expansive, more outward-looking, reaching out to people throughout the world. And by encouraging autonomous local participation in the midst of social and cultural upheavals that accompanied the challenge to inequality in society at large, it also allowed people to become more inward-looking, opened up the question of personal relationships, of how each chooses to live. All this in practice was more successful than our memory generally allows, Allende’s support deepened and grew despite the violence, dislocations, disruptions, caused by those inside and outside Chile who sought to defeat him and so in the end the plotters knew that he could never be defeated by votes or by an appeal to the public but only by what came: the tanks, guns, prison, exile, death of people, of dreams.
History can be read as a path of defeat for the hopes of the world’s poor, but such a reading is as one-sided as views picturing the path of humanity proceeding in a straight line of unimpeded progress. Popular Unity in Chile’s accomplishments were as real as its subsequent defeat, what its meaning over time becomes depends on what is made of its legacy. The fact of its short-lived success should be testament to the notion that longer more sustaining success on that road can be built in the future. And this can be, although not by blind copying, nor by romanticizing what was. The Chilean people, the activists in the movement, were real people with all the usual faults found everywhere, experiencing the normal tension in life with the added tension that accompanied that time of conflict and struggle. The failures, divisions, mistakes, and illusions that they suffered should also be remembered.
That legacy is what is contested today. The coup was aimed at destroying the material gains the Chilean people had made over the three years of Allende’s tenure in office, the decades of painfully won gains which preceded it, and the dreams of the future which had inspired such efforts -- to wipe out at one blow past, present, and future. Though far more subtly done, there is a way in which the years of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did the same ushering in our current climate where what cannot be created is all too visible and attempts at democratic change too easily accepting of self-abnegating compromise, leaving current inequalities untouched, trying too little, accomplishing less.
Witnessing this, many may give up in withdrawal to private life, others, like alchemists of old, seeking an elusive short cut to freedom that is all but guaranteed to fail. Lacking a voice which works for freedom through a struggle of solidarity and engagement, voices rise that can speak and act only through the anger of a few, becoming culpable in maintaining the system as is for the repression that follows in the wake of selfish violence cuts a wide swath, hitting most heavily on working people organizing and students questioning.
Peace, justice, work that is meaningful, leisure that is restful, a voice that is heard in deciding what happens close to home and far away, all goals we can imagine, but goals too many despair of ever finding. Our current president who treats the earth’s environment as cavalierly as he treats foreign lives, domestic liberties, or, for that matter, election results, is the embodiment of the result of such despair and represents what needs to be challenged if we are to find a way free out of our world’s current sorrows.
As in the Chile of 1970, this will mean, above all else, the active involvement of people in building their own alternative, in patient organizing on little issues, the immediate problems that fill the life of each of us, without ever allowing such concerns to become separated from the more fundamental challenge to how our society is structured, from how our deeper needs and aspirations can be met. In this there is only one means, a solidarity that extends from my neighbor with whom I may bicker to those across the sea whom I may never see. Therein lies the popular power able to withstand the custom, the divisions, the pressures, and the violence upon which the power of privilege and property rely. Uniting means and ends, we can give power to our imagination and bring back to life all our visions of how we might act to bring us closer to what should be, what can be.
Remembrances
(2023)
Prison thrives on creating a sense of powerlessness amongst those in the system’s grasp, cutting people off from experience outside a narrowly defined routine, compressing the physical space inhabited. I wrote the above while still at the Allenwood Federal prison (a “medium high” facility for those who don’t mind being categorized like laundry detergent or boxes of cereal).
I was in the prison library when a fellow prisoner (and fellow New Yorker) walked over and told me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. My first thought was that it was an accident – I recalled my mother having told me of a plane that crashed into the Empire State building in the late 1930s; as the account became more gruesome, I thought the stories I was hearing were exaggerated, not an uncommon feature of prison life. I was soon disabused of both ideas; the TV’s were on and we all watched in grim horror as the buildings went down, watched as people leapt from the flames into the abyss.
September 11, 2001, as it turned out, was one of the exceedingly rare days in which the impact of outside events temporarily broke down some of the normal barriers between guard and inmate. Allenwood is in western Pennsylvania, many of us imprisoned there were from New York or Washington DC, many of the guards were from Central Pennsylvania near where the third plane went down. There was confusion all around us; uncertainty as to what was happening, what would happen next, the “normal” uncertainty of a caged life briefly entering into an unknown dimension. For those of us locked up, it was a reminder of our distance from home and loved ones – we weren’t present at a moment when we should have been present, the difficulties reaching out to people compounded by our immobility. Although the World Trade Center was a symbol of capital, the Pentagon of military power, the reality is that corporate heads and military administrators rely on labor – many poor and working people, including family members and friends of Allenwood “residents”, worked in or around those buildings. And some of the guards were in a similar position. Whether momentary empathy, or simply distraction, for a day different rules applied with TV and phone time extended more than usual.
Of course, such didn’t last long – over the following days, all Pakistanis, anyone who in their free life was known to have been in or in contact with anyone from Pakistan, anyone who had been involved with or connected to someone in a bombing, were sent to isolation, held for some weeks, and interrogated by the FBI. The absurdity of such blind sweeps tells a lot about the blindness of excessive power – on the face of it, no one caught in that round up (and those which simultaneously took place in federal prisons across the country) was even remotely connected with what took place of September 11. Never having been involved with a bombing nor with Pakistan, I was spared that indignity. A few months later, after being transferred to Petersburg, Virginia (now in a “low” security prison), my payment came due: my letters were held for a week, sometimes more -- until they piled up to some number – then were delivered to me in a bundle. My outgoing mail went out normally, so it took a minute for us to figure out what was going on. In true prison style, there was no announcement, and neither I nor anyone in my family was notified. This went on for several months until the practice was stopped – also without notice or explanation. An absurdity that we later discovered was due to some order by then Attorney General John Ashcroft directed at people held on national security charges though the exact parameters of who and how many were impacted by the policy remains a mystery. A painful absurdity, I’ll add, that hurt not just me, but loved ones on the outside as it disrupted our means of staying in touch with each other’s lives -- clearly an intended purpose. Trivial harassment? Perhaps –but nothing seems or feels trivial to those inside.
For those abroad, there was nothing trivial about the U.S. government response. Power was exercised in the cruel, terror-laden invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, utterly horrific treatment was meted out by U.S. soldiers under CIA direction to people held in captivity at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and sites our imperial government maintains in all too many other countries that allegedly respect civil liberties and democratic processes. A common thread ran through this; treating people as objects, dividing the world into friends and enemies, enemies all the more magnified, the weaker they become. Maha Hilal, a cofounder of Justice for Muslims Collective, the child of immigrants, 18 and living in New York City when the Towers collapsed, recalls in her Innocent Until Proven Muslim, that she had a sense at the time that if the perpetrators were Muslim, her life and the life of her community would soon change for the worse. Those fears proved justified as repressive legislation and war abroad formed our government’s response marking an ideology of collective responsibility that flows from the deep wells of an imperial mindset that pretends David was the terrorist for using that slingshot, pretends that Goliath should be pitied, that Goliath’s “family” should have been allowed to wreak vengeance without mercy. It flows from the culture of American exceptionalism that makes the unacceptable not only acceptable, but a positive good. Examining Islamophobia, the “War on Terror,” in the aftermath of 9/11, she writes,
“Any and all harm to Muslims … is justified on the basis of the claimed superiority of America’s moral position, which rests largely on the characterization of Muslims as the faceless, menacing enemy confronting all that is good in the world. Underlying this entire circular structure is one fundamental fact about the maintenance of state power: to retain legitimacy, and therefore the consent of the governed, the government needs to create a monopoly on what is considered ‘acceptable’ violence. To do this it leverages its inherent position of discursive power to shape narrative so as to gain a monopoly on the underlying script about morality and ethics.”
And that discursive power has consequences felt by living, breathing, feeling human beings whose lives those in power, lacking the ability to imagine a reality other than what exists, neither can, nor desires to picture:
“Muslims and Muslim Americans have been dehumanized in the government’s story, reduced to the role of shadowy villain. A direct real-world result of this is that the post-9/11 legal and policy landscape has been characterized by the constant scapegoating, demonization, and criminalization of Muslims and Muslim Americans. Even the most egregious abuses on the part of the state have been presented by both the state and its allies as justified.”
This flowed from those accused to their family members. In Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror, Victoria Brittain documents the humanity of those locked up, imprisoned, tortured, without any reference to guilt or innocence, those two words losing meaning when the guilt or innocence of those who gave the order for indefinite detention, waterboarding all the tools of existing power remain unnamed, uncharged, or promoted to ever higher office. She quotes a public letter written by several detainees arrested in Britain in 2001:
“Why did no one ever speak to us? Why were we never asked a single question before being locked up as terrorists? We have never had a trial. We were found guilty without one. We are imprisoned indefinitely and probably forever. We have no idea why.”
Women who were accused of nothing, had to try and hold their families together, maintain contact and relations with their imprisoned husbands or sons, navigate a byzantine legal system designed to confuse, play a public role and engage with lawyers, the press, and authorities, while seeking to maintain a sense of identity amidst conflicting pressures of religion, secularization, national politics, which themselves were ever evolving and internally complex and differentiated. And all the while living in a “shadow world” of not knowing. Brittain quotes from the daughter of a detainee held at the Guantanamo Bay prison touches on the lived reality of repression:
“It’s not like a death, you don’t grieve, and then finish, because this is not in the past, in fact it’s not even in the back of my mind – it is always there … this is chronic, after nine years, and it is not going to end.”
The ideological and cultural weight of anti-Muslim and anti-Arabic sentiment that allowed (and still allows) indefinite detention to be largely unquestioned in the public sphere, gives the lie to the nominally rational and democratic civilization US and British military and police were allegedly protecting. Or rather, what they are protecting are given sets of relationships that define the proverbial “West,” relationships that have nothing to do with geography, everything to do with the totalizing ideology of capitalist society as it has evolved.
Any attempt to upset that order, therefore, becomes “disorder” and so is to be crushed – crushed here, crushed abroad. Perhaps all the more so when those at the bottom play by the rules of the system, win, create change therefore all the more feared and hated. As happened in Chile where the exercise of democratic rights was demonized once use of those rights was put to re-ordering power relations in society. At that point, pretense of public rights vanishes as tanks roll in, torture because the norm, the “rightful” order is returned.
September 11, 1973, I was in the student union at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee talking with friends when we heard the news about the coup in Chile. There had been threats of violence, of a coup, ever since Salvador Allende had been elected president. Hope that this latest attempt to thwart the will of the people would be quickly put down, hope that the strength of Popular Unity’s million supporters would turn the tide on military reaction held sway ever so briefly, but the grim reality soon sank in. Allende dead, Victor Jara dead, Pablo Neruda dead, countless other men and women arrested, tortured, “disappeared,” as well -- nameless to us, named and known to their loved ones, friends, comrades, neighbors. And it was clear that this would not end swiftly, easily, painlessly, as thoughts of the defeat of the Spanish Republic came to my mind as I’m certain it was in the thoughts of so many others.
Thus this too was a day that lives in my memory too. I had followed closely the emergence of Popular Unity and Allende’s election, had attended forums and meetings in New York City and Milwaukee talking about the process of transformation then taking place. I heard Communist Party members and New Left radicals return from trips to Chile reporting on what was taking place; attended a Cuba-Chile-Puerto Rico solidarity exhibit and program held at the 1199 hospital workers union building in New York tying together struggles for socialism and independence in each. It was inspiring and it seemed to stand for the hopes many of us had that the radical movements of the late 1960s could become transformative and bring about the better world we pictured on the horizon. That was not to be. In a time of so many tragedies this stood out because it was so clearly designed to extinguish possibility, to lead people away from collective action, to push people, to push us, back into the container of limited dreams of narrowed hopes.
Either on September 11 or the next day there was a rally was held at the federal building in downtown Milwaukee – for no one amongst us had any doubt that the overthrow of Allende, and the brutality of repression that followed, was instigated and celebrated by our government, our military establishment. Former Socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler spoke, as did others, all of us trying to process the news as it was coming out. Solidarity rallies, concerts, petitions, confrontations, in the months and years thereafter, followed. So too, many of us tried to learn what happened, what could have been done differently, what could we do. It is a question that itself is still open as we search for ways and means to build and create. Many of my own choices – how I sought to participate in working for democracy and socialism at home, how I sought to oppose our government’s hostility to popular rights and justice abroad, grew slowly out of my attempts to make sense of what happened that day.
Shortly after moving to Washington DC in 1980s, I attended a memorial for Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffit who had been assassinated in 1976 by Chile’s secret police (with U.S. government connivance) not far from where I was then working. Coincidently, later that day I discovered at a local bookshop a volume of short novels written by Chilean exiles which I purchased quickly, read slowly, not wanting to rush through the pain being depicted. Re-reading them today, I am struck at the assertions of hope belied by overpowering despair. I find the same anger at the torture of prison, the alienation and sense of loss in exile, the courage of resistance, alongside a perhaps deeper insight of what the nexus between the two might mean – as this excerpt from a story set at the funeral of Neruda – days after the coup -- expresses:
“The boy had the sensation of stepping across a threshold into a strange territory, a voluntary prisoner of unforeseen facts which sent a shudder through him. … He remembered this was the poet’s city, but even though he was walking the same streets the poet once walked, he was starting to feel the abyss between love and the world and he knew that sooner or later the separation would come. Abandoned like the docks at twilight / It’s the hour of departure, oh abandoned one!
“He noticed his compañero had gone ahead to the next row, exchanging a few words with another person and then returned to his place with a hard, pensive look on his face. He fell into step without looking at him, with no need to talk, looking only for closeness, the new intimacy that could be felt in the group like a necessary discovery.
“I don’t have time for my own pain / nothing makes me suffer but these lives / that gave me their pure trust / and that a traitor turned under / into a dead hole, out of which / the rose will raise itself again.
“Were you at the poet’s house? They say they destroyed everything …
“No, I couldn’t look. But some other compañeros were there. The floor was flooded, the windows broken, his things trampled. As if they were trying to sink the house.
“In you the wars and flights piled up / From you the songbirds; wings went up / from tomb to tomb you still flamed upand sang / Standing like a sailor at the prow of a ship.
“It's a leave taking all right, but it’s also a demonstration,” his compañero whispered, “the first demonstration after the coup.
“When the hangman imprisoned the judges / so they could condemn my heart, my determined swarm/ the people opened their vast labyrinth / the cellar where their loves were sleeping / and there they kept a close watch over me / until the arrival of the light and air.”
New Beginnings
(September 11, 2023)
“Recalled to Life” is a phrase from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the signal for Dr. Manette’s freedom, which finally comes after 18-years in the Bastille. Dr. Manette, however, is never fully freed from his imprisonment, the madness which took hold during his long years of isolation never far from the surface of his character, old wounds never fully healed, always in danger of being re-opened by current swirls of oppressions, of vengeance and revenge.
Manette steps out, steps forward, loses his way. Ultimately he is unable to understand the new present, unable to act because unable to imagine a different future when his past statements are used against him. Unable to find the power to convert dreams into possibility he reverts to the stupor of his years in chains. Prison’s purpose is thus revealed – to “disappear” people from the world they inhabited, the people they knew, from their own sense of being. Disappear them – and their loved ones. For removing people from the life of society also means removing family members who must cope in a world shown to be hostile and unforgiving. In the process, people lose power over the smaller aspects of their daily life, and with that, the danger of losing the ability to imagine recapturing such power – to ensure that existing structures of power remain unchallenged. Such the purpose of torture – for it is rarely about gaining information, it is always about destroying human beings, instilling fear in others, inhibiting the ability to act outside proscribed limits. Imaginative dreams can then turn into nightmares.
Chile from 1970 until 1973 exemplified the process of building transformative change through a popular movement that remained creative, alive, engaged as it walked a tightrope pushing forward, holding back, trying constantly to overcome the obstacles littered everywhere. Such a movement could only be possible where the belief in social justice, in socialism, has developed deep roots. The violence that accompanied the suppression of that hope aimed not only at instilling fear but also at disorientation, confusion, grief, to create a world of uncertainty, to turn dreams into nightmares. How do you imagine the life of those being tortured, how do you imagine what goes through the mind of those doing the torturing – and how do you imagine a future alternative to the one being lived, find the ability, exercise the power, needed to change what is to what could be?
In 1984 one of Chile’s torturers, Andrés Valenzuela, a soldier no longer able to live with himself, walked to a magazine editorial office and, in graphic detail, spoke about what he had observed, what he had done and to whom – the grim details of his account, the precision of each operation from arrest to death and the horror in-between paints a picture of the nature of terror as a system from arrest to execution. Nona Fernández, in a work that is part novel, part memoir, part reportage, looks back at that testimony, at the lives the torturers snuffed out. Her book is aptly named, The Twilight Zone, referring to the TV show that looked beneath the surface of reality to see what loneliness, longings, fears, lay underneath. Writing with extraordinary empathy mixed with a sense of horror and pain, she lays bare the process that turned
Chilean citizens into outsiders, into “prisoners of war,” in their own country, the process that stripped the humanity of those charged with doing the torturing and killing as she tries to get inside the thoughts of “the man who tortured,”
“I cried slowly, secretly, so that no one would notice.
Some time later I felt grief, a knot in my throat.
Some time later I was able to control my tears.
Some time later I stopped crying.
Whether I wanted to or not, I had gotten used to it.
In the end I felt nothing.
I had become someone else.
Someone who gets up and goes to be with the smell of death.”
Alongside that she recreates the moment of arrest, the banal details of a day in the life of someone making breakfast for children, riding the bus, pulled out of the bus, taken to a secret prison, a sequence repeated with variations again and again, touching on wider circles of family members, communities, society at large. Those arrested were, to be sure, targeted, yet there was a randomness in the execution that aimed to put everyone on notice to not question, to not look back. The goal was to try to wipe out of consciousness the hope for a just world that had inspired Chile’s working people for decades if not longer, people who glimpsed their social yearnings being realized during those three years of the Popular Unity government.
Yet while much was destroyed, aspirations persisted. Those people named by the torturer, named in Fernandez’ book, were Communists, Socialists, members of the revolutionary left, individuals of conscience independent of parties or movements, all playing a role in keeping a dream alive, yet like the cat who always comes back, ensured that fascism’s victory would not be the final word, that a nightmare wasn’t the final answer to the dream. As she recalls,
“we didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.”
Resistance never abated, bounds of human empathy and community could not be wholly broken, historical memory not wholly erased, the sea of blood could not be the final word, the horizon beyond remained still beckoning with hope. In the years that followed, resistance took all forms, from holding onto and passing along knowledge of what was, to rebuilding unions and political parties of the left, from holding conversations in small groups, from actions by individuals, to armed actions aimed at those in power, to mass demonstrations, to creating new organizations and movements, rebuilding a fragile unity even with those where sharp oppositions remain. Ultimately, young people took to the streets in numbers that could not be overcome, creating new possibilities, challenging the system installed by Pinochet that outlasted him. Recounting protests of the 1980s that were to recur again and again, Fernández writes:
“We were kids. Not even fifteen. An army of kiddie aliens with painted-on charcoal mustaches, Lilliputians taking over the streets and the schools, shouting in shrill voices, clamoring, demanding the right to an independent student union, calling for school fees to be lowered, for our detained friends to be released, for the tyrant to be removed, for democracy to return, for the world to be more reasonable, for the future to arrive with no dark rooms, no screaming, no rats.”
Eventually the weight of resistance proved victorious and a new popular government was elected in Chile that sits in office today, seeking to undo the damage done in the past, seeking a new way forward in circumstances far from easy. The road ahead is and will be rocky, the path forward never direct; those who profit from poverty never willing to fade away in the quiet of the night. Yet the fact that the striving that gave birth to the Popular Unity government has been reborn with is a tribute to those who never gave up or gave in. The dream lives on.
As I write, I think about all those I have known blacklisted or locked up, those who lost jobs or hope after broken strikes or lockouts, those struggling to make ends meet after release from prison or after a lifetime of work, those searching for a foothold in a life of exile. We can take heed as we confront the everyday injustices and inequities of capitalism in our imperial citadel without losing sight of the immediate need to confront and prevent incipient fascism in our own land by not losing confidence and trust in the people whose labor makes our world possible.
Doing so we recall to life words Allende directed to us back in 1971:
“I invite the North American reader to overcome all prejudice and listen to us with an open mind. To fully grasp what Chilean socialism proposes … the true character of our people, whose aspirations, so often passed over or betrayed, are manifestly just. … Reformism in Chile has not been able to eradicate the endemic evil of a society which has permitted a life of leisure for a few and deprivation for the majority. … We believe in the justness of popular aspirations, for we identify with the peasant, bowed down by his task of providing our daily bread; with the worker who gives us the wealth he has created with his hands; with the white-collar worker, the soldier, the intellectual, the student, and all those who have the inalienable right to enjoy the wealth they produce by their effort and sacrifice.”
Sources:
Maha Hilal, Innocent Until Proven Muslim, Broadleaf Books, Minneapolis, 2021. Quotes are from p. 28 and p. 29.
Victoria Brittain, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror, Pluto Press, London, 2013, p 52.
Juan Armando Epple, Of Flights and Abidings (translated from Spanish by Stephen Kessler), from Chilean Writers in Exile: Short Novels edited by Fernando Alegria, The Crossings Press, Trumansburg, NY, 1982 pp 42 – 43.
Nona Fernández, The Twilight Zone (translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer), Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, 2016, p 213, p 105 and p 173.
Regis Debray, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende, Vintage Books, New York, 1971, pp 164-165.