The Papanasam beach at Varkala has a blaze of parasols. Under the bright tropical sky, the sea stretches like a quivering mass of blue and sparkles.
Raul Zurita stands on the shore, the tremors of Parkinson’s raking his body every now and then. Suddenly he starts talking about another coast and another time, another sea that hid countless cadavers in its belly. He talks about his country and its gory history, Chile’s inheritance of terror and how the poet in him is ‘a son of violence’.
It was the sea that ate his first poems, the manuscript snatched from him and thrown into the frothy waters during Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Zurita, 23 then, too weak and too tortured to protest, watched it floating off.
He was one among the umpteen students whom the junta decided to lock inside the fold of a ship for several weeks. He says it was his first tryst with purgatory, a life of agony and unrest, hunger and torture.
“It was beyond dreadful,” he says as his wife Paulina translates for him.
One of the most prominent Latin American poets today, he says the fire in his writings sprang from the unspeakable horrors of that ship. “I have written from pain, but our duty is happiness. I have written from hatred, but our duty is love,” says the poet who was in Kerala to receive the Asan World Prize.
Outliving tyranny
Outliving tyranny is not an easy task, especially when you decide to brave it with intense, fearless poetry.
Zurita says he was totally unprepared for the Pinochet regime or how to deal with this most-deranged form of evil he had known.
“Living in the midst of dictatorship I imagined an array of poems that were erased at dawn.
It was my way of resisting insanity, my personal battle against pain and grief.” But for Zurita poetry was never painless, rather an indulgence bordering on self-destruction. Tired of the despotic nightmare, he once tried to blind himself with ammonia and on another occasion seared his flesh with a red-hot iron rod.
But Zurita says he was not inflicting pain, but merely trying to dull its intensity by ‘purging his body’.
“My poetry comes from a body that bends, trembles and stiffens under the throes of Parkinson’s. But I consider my disease beautiful, I have felt my difficulty in holding a piece of paper beautiful. I have written about pain I caused others and myself. Only the sick, the weak and the wounded are capable of creating masterpieces. I write from the depths of desperation and at the same time I feel a kind of strange rapture arising from my incapability of being happy,” he says.
It took him 14 years to complete his acclaimed trilogy Purgatorio and in between he founded the radical art collective CADA (Colectivo de Acción de Arte).
“It was a very risky affair. But it was necessary to talk about love, and to talk about love, you had to start from alphabets as none of the languages that existed was useful,” he says.
He loads into his poetry the leitmotifs of sky and sea, earth and desert as he feels they embody human passion. In 1982, through five aircraft, he wrote the fifteen sentences of the poem ‘The New Life’ over New York skies and later inscribed the words “no pain no fear” in Atacama Desert over more than two-and-a-half miles.
He calls writing his ‘private exercise of resurrection’. Recipient of Chilean National Prize for Literature, he adds art is the only hope in times of terror and repression.
The only law
“If art does not exist, violence would be the only regulation, the only law. Since it exists, crime is much more crime, murder is much more murder, the genocide is much more genocide.”
