What is surfaced in our world?
That is the miraculous quality of Guzmán’s film. The fragments of bone, the fragments of memory, returning. The giving of space and time and attention to people who have been completely marginalised in their country. One of the women talks of how they are treated as pariahs for their insistence on finding the traces of their relatives, their insistence on justice. A world where values have been turned upside down. We meet a former architect who stayed sane in the concentration camp in the desert by drawing everything, and by looking at the stars. He paces his apartment before our eyes, counting the steps aloud, recreating the process by which he memorised the details of his imprisonment – how he’d measure every room, every distance between buildings, and then, at night, he’d draw incredibly precise plans. Once finished, he’d tear them into pieces, hide them and destroy them the following day. But the action of drawing had already meant that they were committed to memory; he had already outwitted his jailers, and on his release, was able to recreate, to the last metre, every foul detail of the concentration camp and the buildings used for torture. And when these were published, the regime was baffled at how accurate the details were. Perhaps they didn’t understand the power of human memory.
I have never before witnessed a camera used with such tenderness.2 The space that each person is given, silences and hesitations allowed. Humanity allowed. The roaring of the wind through the desert as they tell their stories. And how these testimonies seed and grow in us, long after the film has finished.
*
A few months ago I switched the radio on. A journalist was describing being in New York a decade before – the day before 11 September 2001. The volatility of the markets at the time. Another BBC correspondent told of the killing of an Afghan warlord on this same day, which, in retrospect, might have suggested that something was up … Yet another programme about the tenth anniversary of the Twin Towers, that terrible day. I snapped the radio off, wearied by such repetition. I was relieved to be here in the stone cottage by the sea, away from TV and the Internet and the blanket coverage of such an anniversary. I tried to locate my impatience. It was not to do with people speaking of their grief and loss. Of unbearable pain. Curiously, this is bearable, even necessary, to hear. It reminds us of love. It takes us away from abstraction and to the reality of each individual death of each individual mother, father, sister, brother, daughter and son. After all, this is exactly what the Guzmán film does, and does so poignantly. So that can’t be the problem. ‘What is surfaced in our world?’ That’s the nagging voice in my head, that’s my discomfort. The vast disparity between the cultural visibility of what happened in New York with the attack on the Twin Towers and the cultural invisibility of what happened in Chile twenty-eight years before. On exactly the same day – Tuesday 11 September.
*
The first refugee I ever met was Chilean. It was winter 1983–4, the height of the Miners’ Strike. Even in Cambridge the strike was all around you – every day activists from University Left would collect money for the miners in buckets throughout the city centre, the yellow badges saying ‘Support the Miners’ were everywhere, there were food and clothing collections, and of course many packed meetings and rallies. But the one I remember most vividly had no speakers from the NUM or the Labour Party. Ayesha, my punk friend, took me to a Miners Benefit Night of music, film and poetry, organised by the Chilean refugee community in a church hall near the Tech. I was intensely moved that these people who had suffered so much themselves were now organising for the British miners – their compañeros. Thirty years on, some of the details of that night are hazy – the titles of the films we watched, or the poetry we heard – but I do remember Chilean music and dancing and the intensity in that room, which was overwhelming. And one particular encounter has stayed with me.
In a gap between the music I got talking to a shortish man, perhaps in his early thirties, with a mop of dark, curly hair and eyes that darted rapidly, nervously. He spoke with a feverish need to communicate. Francisco was his name, a doctor from Santiago, who’d been at medical school at the time of the Pinochet coup. He patiently told me about what had happened in September 1973, gave me an abbreviated history lesson about Salvador Allende, his election in 1970, the remarkable socialist programme that he’d brought in, and his growing popularity with the people, despite American-sponsored strikes. He also introduced me to the name of Victor Jara, and told me of his haunting voice, his songs that were also poetry. He thrust a book with a picture of Jara into my hands. The face of a gentle man. He looked like Leonard Cohen’s younger brother. He read me a translation of one of his songs – a reworking of the prayer ‘Our Father’ for the working man and woman. It was called ‘La plegaria a un labrador’ (‘Prayer to a Farmer’):
Stand up, look at the mountains
Source of the wind, the sun, the water
You, who change the course of rivers,
Who, with the seed, sow the flight of your soul,
Stand up, look at your hands,
Give your hand to your brother so you can grow.
We’ll go together, united by blood,
Today is the day
We can make the future.
Deliver us from the master
Who keeps us in misery.
The kingdom of justice and equality come.
Blow, like the wind blows
The wild flowers of the mountain pass …
Clean the barrel of my gun like fire
Stand up, look at your hands,
Give your hand to your brother so you can grow.
We’ll go together, united by blood,
Now and in the hour of our death.
Amen.
And then Francisco told me of Jara’s brutal murder, following days of torture after the coup. And that the soldiers had first broken his fingers – knowing the power of his music, knowing that his hands were a weapon, the soldiers had mutilated his fingers first. This detail has always stayed with me. He then described being in Santiago on that day – 11 September 1973, people looking up incredulously as military jets (supplied by the British, as he told me) dive-bombed the Moneda Palace repeatedly, where President Allende was meeting with his ministers. Plumes of smoke above the city, trucks of soldiers, people in shock, powerless to deal with this attack. And how Allende, when he realised what was happening, started to speak to the people via a radio link. And he just kept speaking, knowing he and his comrades were soon going to die.
As we finished our conversation, Francisco pressed into my hand a square piece of paper with these words written on it: the last words of Salvador Allende, to the Chilean people, as the Moneda Palace was being bombed that day:
This is the last time I shall be able to speak to you … I will repay with my life the loyalty of the people. I am certain that the seeds we have sown in the conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans cannot be completely eradicated. Neither crime nor force are strong enough to hold back the process of social change. History belongs to us, because it is made by the people.
Over the last thirty years, I’ve copied this out many times, given the words to students, read them out at events, and still carry them with me on a battered square of red paper in a corner of my wallet. The words urgently communicate that, just as Victor Jara’s voice can never be silenced, Allende’s vision can never vanish, because both are built of hope, and hope is inextinguishable. It still burns today as I’m writing this, on the news I hear that young Chileans are occupying the universities to fight for their rights to free education and self-expression.