“THE LIMITLESS VIOLENCE OF BEAUTY”: ON RAÚL ZURITA
[I wrote the following essay for the Swedish literary journal 10tal when in 2019 the journal introduced Raúl Zurita’s work to Swedish readers. I’m posting it here to celebrate Zurita being awarded a Griffin Lifetime Achievement Prize.]
1.
On September 12, 1973, soldiers came and arrested Raul Zurita in Santiago, Chile. A young husband and father as well as engineering student, the poet had been active in Marxist organizations supporting Salvador Allende, whose government the army – led by Augusto Pinochet – had just overthrown. Like many other leftists and Allende-supporters, Zurita was incarcerated and tortured for several weeks. Soldiers seized his poetry manuscript because they suspected it as some kind of subversive code, but when they realized it was “just poetry,” they threw it overboard. Zurita’s body was mutilated by the Pinochet coup, and his poetry was literally destroyed. It is out of this violence – both the army coup and the violence suffered by his body, as well as the erasure of his poetry – that Zurita’s post-coup poetry emerges.
From the first book he published, Purgatory (1979) to his most recent book Zurita (2011), Zurita has grappled with this violence. In the process, he has turned Chile and the Pinochet coup nearly mythic. Like his favorite poet Dante, who created his famous Divine Comedy out of the particulars of the political realities of Florence, Zurita has created a politically charged cosmology out of Chile. Or as he says in an interview with Daniel Borzutzky: “ What happens is real but it is presented as allegory.”[1] But it’s not a typical allegory, in that it doesn’t strive to abstract from the physical world; instead, it’s a physical allegory, that centers on violence and the human body. Zurita’s poetry is constantly accumulating mystical, iconic qualities while engaged with issues of violence in and against the body, the face, and the landscape of Chile. This insistence on the wounded body and the wounded landscape both gives rise to a sense of allegory and disrupts the allegory.
Unlike the kind of poems we have learned to expect from “the poetry of witness” – where the poem is subservient to a kind of documentation of injustice – Zurita’s poems are constantly striving to interact with political realities and injustices. In an interview with the US journal Prairie Schooner, he explains:
I felt that pain and death should be responded to with a poetry and an art that was as vast and strong as the violence that was exercised over us. To place in opposition the limitless violence of crime and the limitless violence of beauty, the extreme violence of power and the extreme violence of art, the violence of terror and the even stronger violence of all our poems. I never knew how to throw stones, but that was not our intifada. You can’t defeat a dictatorship with poetry, but without poetry, and this is no metaphor, humanity disappears, literally, in the next five minutes.[2]
This need for art that somehow in extremity equals the violence of the dictatorship has made Zurita’s poetry consistently inventive and excessive. Even as he has espoused a love of Poetry and Beauty, the need to “equal” the injustices exercised against people has asked him to constantly invent and reinvent poetry. In this he is something of a paradox: a traditionalist Dante-lover who is relentlessly avant-garde, a mystic whose focus is on the physical body, a poet of witness who writes visionary cosmologies.
2.
Having been released from imprisonment in 1973, Zurita’s first act as an artist was to heat up a knife and scar his own cheek. This act marks the beginning of his authorship. He has explained this act as being a kind of extreme application of the Christian rules to “turn the other cheek.” His first published book, Purgatory, begins with the aftermath of this act of self-mutilation:
my friends think
I’m a sick woman
because I burned my cheeks
Throughout his authorship, Zurita obsesses over images – and particularly the image of the face. Two pages later, the book reproduces Zurita’s id card along with two distinct texts. One says:
My name is Rachel
I’ve been in the same business
for many years. I’m in the
middle of my life.
–I lost my way
and God’s famously mysterious self-definition: EGO SUM QUI SUM. I am who I am. The image of a person becomes a source of excess. Against the state’s attempt to fix its subjects, poetry generates doubles, masks, dreams. The picture suggestes a bearded man but the caption claims the speaker is a woman. It is this volatility that gives poetry is political scope and charge. It is also what makes it mystical, even religious. But it makes a strict allegorical reading impossible: Throughout Purgatory and his other poems, this mobility characterizes faces, bodies, and the Chilean landscape.
3.
The first poem of Purgatory, “Sunday Morning,” follows suit: it’s a poem that takes the shape of a series of faces: the speaker is a “sainted woman” in one poem, is a “super star of Chile” (a fascinating transformation of Andy Warhol’s phrase for the subalterns he rendered iconic), he smashes his “sickening face,” he sees an angel, he sees Buddha, he cries in the bathroom, he appears as Joan of Arc (no doubt in Dreyer’s famously face-centric version of that icon’s story). Throughout the speaker seems to mainly inhabit a bathroom, to be looking into a bathroom mirror – seeing his/her face as it changes, as it avoids being “who it is.”
The collection moves out of this private space into the greater Chile. However, it’s not, as one might expect, a move into the polis of Santiago, but out into the Atacama desert, the desolate and vast desert where Pinochet’s henchmen would throw out leftists from planes in order to “disappear” them. This becomes one of the signature motifs for Zurita: over and over his poems take us to the Chilean landscape, and especially the Atacama desert. For Zurita, the Atacama desert offers its own strange collectivity, a collectivity of the mass grave, the wounded, dismembered, commingled, and killed:
“IV. Who would tell of the desert’s loneliness.
So that my form begins to touch your form and your form
that other form like that until all of Chile is nothing but
one form with open arms: a long form crowned with thorns”
As Anna Deeney Morales explains in her introduction to her translation of Zurita’s selected works, the “form” of this stanza – “fascha” in Spanish – has a “range interpretive possibilities.” Deeney Morales argues that fascha can refer to “an individual’s “aspect,” “aura,” “image or “look.””[3] That is to say the very word itself fuses art, face, body. The fusion of art and body forges a collectivity in the Atacama desert.
4.
In Zurita’s poetry, the Chilean landscape is not some kind of escape, some kind of pastoral idyll. Not only is it strewn with the dead; it has the kind of volatility as the human face and body. Atacama can be “pastoral” on one page and then the next, in Zurita’s second book Anteparadiso, the Chilean landscape becomes a mythical place of violence, a place not unlike Bob Dylan’s famous “Highway 61,” which Zurita rewrites in Anteparadisio:
It was already getting late when he took
hold of my shoulder and ordered:
“Go and kill me a son”
Come on – I grinned – you’re kidding,
right?
“Well, if you don’t want to that’s your
choice, but remember who I am, and then
don’t you complain”
Willing – I heard myself answer him – and
where do you want this killing done?
Then, as if it were the win howl that spoke,
He said:
“Far off, in those lost cordilleras of Chile”
As with Dylan’s mythical highway – “Where you want this killing done/out on highway 61” - Zuritas Codilloros is where all the sacrifices are made, where all violence takes place.
The religious cast of Zuritas landscape never leaves his poetry, nor does the purgagorialness. In his most recent book, Zurita, the entire Chilean landscape becomes a “country of planks” – a constantly shifting purgatory of bodies in prison camps. This includes not just the Atacama desert but also the seaside:
Mocha Island Prison
-Like amputated arms-
Like a scream the crowd kept moving through the corridor of the sea
Crossing through the broken barracks the endless piles of sticks like a long line of rubble pressing between the standing waves
While the Pacific Ocean appeared to fold atop the snowy mountains and the multitude stuck to those broken scaffolds the way the wind sticks as it crosses the mutilated waters
When the broken scaffolding of the coast sustained for one minute more the immense and dead sky of the barracks where all of Chile was falling And even the planks were crying as they felt collapsing on them the sea swells that broke them as if they were the tortured and the deeply moved gales of their children embraced them weeping kissing their amputated arms
In this poem the ocean becomes the mountains, the coast becomes a collapsing prison for “all of Chile,” the planks of the prison become the prisoners, “tortured” and with “amputated arms.” The wounded body and the landscape intersect in a way that suggests allegory but both landscape and bodies are so mobile, they cannot be pinned down to the kind of economy of meaning that an allegory demands.
5.
Although Zurita’s obsession with Dante might suggest that he’s a traditionalist, his work is relentlessly experimental, especially when it comes to the urge to fuse life, art, body, lanscape. Since his self-laceration he has constantly been pushing his poetry in various direction, staging the fusion of art and the body, politics and landscapes in a myriad of ways. In the late 70s, he was part of a performance art group called CADA (Colectivo Actiones de Art), formed with the artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, and the novelist Diamela Eltit (his sometime romantic partner, to whom he dedicated Purgatory). This group staged politically charged “happenings” in Santiago – for example hijacking milk trucks to protest the lack of nutrition for the poor children of Santiago – to sensationally denounce Pinochet’s capitalist dictatorship. Many of their happenings centered on the body and its capacity for disruption, as when Zurita masturbated in front of a painting by Juan Davila, rupturing the non-bodily gallery space.
In most of Zurita’s happenings -as in his poems – the body becomes the site of art and collectivity. The Chilean cultural critic Nelly Richard has written that Zurita invokes “the primitive tradition of communcal sacrifice and the ritual exorcism of violence”:
“Their [Zurita and Eltit’s] various mortifications of the body signaled a type of subjectivity on sacrifice or martyrdom: Raul Zurita burned his face (1975) or attempted to blind himself (1980), Diamela Eltit cut and burned herself and then turned up at a brothel where she read part of her novel (1980). By inflicting these emblems of the wounded body upon themselves, Zurita and Eltit appealed to the pain as a way of approaching that borderline between individual and collective experience: their self-punishment merges with an “us” that both redeemer and redeemed.” (210-211)[4]
Richard’s quote illuminated the religious connotations of Zurita’s obsessive treatment of the wounded and tortured body. This religious element is also present in the many sensational actions he has conducted that focuses more on the landscape than the body. For example, he has written a poem in the land of the Atacama desert: “Neither pain nor fear.” This politically charged version of the “earth works” of the 1960s (such as Robert Smithson’s famous “Spiral Getty” in Utah) memorializes the executions of the disappeared.
In the early 1980s, he famously used airplanes to “skywrite” the poem “NEW LIFE” in the sky above New York City:
MY GOD IS HUNGER MY GOD IS CHICANO
MY GOD IS SNOW MY GOD IS CANCER
MY GOD IS NO MY GOD IS EMPTINESS
MY GOD IS REGRET MY GOD IS WOUND
MY GOD IS CARION MY GOD IS GHETTO
MY GOD IS PARADISE MY GOD IS PAIN
MY GOD IS PAMPA MY GOD IS
MY LOVE OF GOD
This poem really brings out the instability and the core of Zurita’s mystical vision (and one which was parodied by Roberto Bolano in his famous novella Distant Star, where Bolano transforms the Marxist Zurita into fascist killer Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who is similarly obsessed with wounded and tortured bodies but from the opposite perspective). God is both “love” and “cancer.” The poem is written in the sky, but it’s focus is still on the body.In the interview with Handal, Zurita explains: “The writings in the sky and in the desert are my most intimate poems, those that are most deeply engraved in me.” They may seem like they are the most spectacular, but they are the most intimate: “engraved” in him.
7.
For 40 years, Zurita has been perhaps the most influential Latin American poet, relentlessly exploring the art and politics of the body and the body in landscape. The poems have made the particulars of his life -and his body – almost mythical, but the body and the landscape – scarred, wounded, physical – has disrupted any such easy reading. Instead Zurita has created his own visionary Chile like a stage for the wounded body to purge the modern world.
It may seem irrational to spend a whole life writing about the Chilean coup, of expanding it to be an allegory for all kinds of atrocities – the genocide of Native Americans, the destruction of the environment – but as Naomi Klein showed in her provocative book Shock Doctrine, the Chilean coup was a kind of prototype for all kinds of radical “shocks” that would overturn political and economic structures around the world in the ensuing decades. And as in Klein’s book, it’s torture that is the start of everything.
[1] Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/03/today-or-a-million-years-ago-an-interview-with-raul-zurita
[2] Prairie Schooner website. Interview with Nathalie Handal (trans. David Shook). https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/excerpt/paradise-zurita-interview-raúl-zurita
[3] Sky Below: Selected Works. Translated from Spanish with an introduction by Anna Deeny Morales.
[4] “Margins and Institutions: Performances of the Chilean Avanzada.” Nelly Richard. From Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas. Edited by Coco Fusco.