The U.S. we lost

155 years from Martí’s anniversary

By Hilario Rosete Silva   
Picture: Courtesy of the interviewee

I reach the backyard
Where I spent the days I won’t be able to remember
There are beautiful smells that are blended together
And there are beautiful things –like the wind-
That come and talk

Poem: Los coros desterrados (Exiled Choruses)
CHRISTIAN FORMOSO
Poet and Chilean professor

Ampliar

CHECKERBOARD PLAN

—A string of concepts, figures and facts of sad memories bind us to the United States, Monroe Doctrine, Alliance for Progress, School of the Americas, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, Fukuyama and the end of History, Batista, Trujillo, Somoza, Pinochet, military invasions, economic blockades, foreign debts, civil wars, coup d’état... Fake consensus, the only thought and the false happiness of market hang over these connections, and neoliberalism proclaims its exclusive truth.  

These are the words of Oscar Barrientos Bradasic (1974), poet and narrator. His voice comes to us, singing and sonorous, from his home Punta Arenas, city and harbor located in the south of Chile, in the Strait of Magellan, one of the most southern cities of the world.

SURROUNDING DEVICES

—There is sad talk about the «back yard». Those who, like me, define themselves as anti-imperialist have seen a sword of Damocles in that country over our independence and cultural identity. To us, the future usually tastes of McDonald’s meet, while we listen to talk about «misleading ideology», an euphemism that denies and replace all progressive ideology by means of the supreme dogma of the International Monetary Fund.

Oscar Barrientos graduated as Spanish professor in the Southern University of Chile. He was awarded a master’s degree in Philosophy with mention in Hispanic Literature there. Then, he studied a doctor’s degree course in Education in the University of Salamanca (Spain). He became a member of the Mongoose Group and collaborated in the creation of the magazine Ciudad circular.

REDEEMERS OF NEW SARACENS

—Even so, the U.S. is the country of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Merton or Noam Chomsky; and in some occasion, the ideas of the French Revolution found its support there. It is the multicultural nation that, at least since the times of McCarthyism, expresses booming voices of disagreement and resistance. In amid this antagonism, there is a cultural tradition that unites us to the U.S.. At the very heart of this conflict, we, they and us, fight for a unitary language, free from the gap that has divided us. Denying this paradox would be a gratification.

Oscar acknowledges that today we are before an empire more powerful than Rome in its times; but he also admits that there is a U.S. that we lost, a U.S. that, as chance would have it, went far like a ghost ship, and it’s worth reuniting with it.

—I request the power to make reference, in a moment when people speak about future, to some examples from the past and reread the messages of American bygone redeeming spirits, that act as a link in our struggles, in both sides, for the transformation of the reality.

THERE IS NO OTHER CHOICE

—The first person I wish to talk about is Jack London, born in San Francisco, in January, 1876, just before the battle of Little Bighorn, in which the Indians devastated Custer’s column. He had so vital and infrequent jobs as sailor, seal hunter, journalist and gold prospector. The atmosphere of working-class agitation due to the crisis of 1893 made him read more the literature of Marx, Darwin, Spencer, Nietzsche. He felt that the rough surface of his homeland was being crossed by the plow of the class struggle. He called himself a revolutionary socialist, denouncer of the unjust acts committed by the industrial revolution:

—«If modern man’s producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, why then, in the United States today, are there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered and properly fed? Why then, in the United States today, are there three million child laborers? In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged».

THE IRON HEEL

—Today, London novel The Iron Heel (1907) is given a new validity. Its main character, Ernest Everhard, is a union leader who was captured and executed in 1932 for his participation in a working-class strike. The story –given by his wife- incites those who notice that piousness that blesses the crimes to reaction:

—«When have you protested to your capitalistic congregations at the working of children in the Southern cotton mills? Children, six and seven years of age, working every night at twelve-hour shifts? They never see the blessed sunshine. They die like flies. The dividends are paid out of their blood. And out of the dividends magnificent churches are built in New England, wherein your kind preaches pleasant platitudes to the sleek, full-bellied recipients of those dividends».

—Jack London names the oligarchy with the rash metaphor the «iron heel», a hammer that pushes men towards a primitive night masked with the illusion of progress. Its darts are headed towards the American totalitarianism that is intended to crush the workers’ emergence with capitalist military force...

Oscar could not hide his makings of an essayist, vocation that is supported by the five books that he published between 1998 and 2006 (four of narratives and one of poetry). But he did not pay much attention to this fact and continued forward with the American redeeming souls.

LEVIATHAN’S FURY

—Here is the American sailor; he’s got the sea in his look, ships and continents flow from his eyes; he is from New York, his name is Hermann Melville; he published Moby Dick in 1851, the story of a man obsessed with the idea of defeating a while whale.

Only with defeating a white whale?

—Of course not! Captain Ahab fights against the personification of evil, the Leviathan of the Jewish religion recorded on the wisdom books (Job 40, 25-31) and on prophetic books (Isaiah 27, 1). In the Puritan «predestination-nationalism», Moby Dick looks like a perfect assembly and, by opposition, Ahab’s rebelliousness adopts nuances of a divine teaching. Pequod crewmembers are from different latitudes, the crossbowman symbolizes the whole humanity. At times, the Melville novel becomes a symphonic poem of the tides, in an epic church in its attempt for surmount adverse circumstances that the Leviathan presages. Hobbes said that the Leviathan is a State established under the premise of the annulment of the other, with which he created a doctrine that later on would be rescued by certain exegetes of the political liberalism. Melville gives us a curious metaphor of the Leviathan nowadays, when we feel the death throes of that «emancipative» State that invades countries with the fury of an oceanic reptile on behalf of liberty and that «fight» so that more and more nations come to be stars of its flag...

DIFFERENCE OF CHARACTER

Oscar Barrientos was awarded the María Cristina Ursic prize of Poetry. He was awarded twice the scholarship for literary creation of the Fondo del Libro y la Lectura; and he was given an honorable mention and a Fernando Santiván prize of Valdivia municipality.

— The verses of Henry David Thoreau, another redeeming soul, carry the intrinsic roar of the original that brings about the obscurantism. He was born in Massachusetts, in 1817. He lived in the Walden Pond woods for around two years and made of this experience a binnacle of his findings. One of his writings reads the following:

—«Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, of shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be the worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

—The pioneer of the ecology said that nine tenths of erudition comes from being sensible on time, convinced that the environmental respect and the capitalism are incompatible: «...a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone».

DEVASTATION AND REALITY; CERTAINTY AND DOUBT

—The road of his revolutionary dream is surfaced with pacifism. The future brought him heirs like Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, emblems of the fight against intolerance, segregation and stupidity. Their ideas are respected by those who love land and by those who wish that freedom flags never stop flying. Their doctrines go beyond the epochs and link the north with the south with the concern for the care for the planet.

Oscar Barrientos’ neighbors state that he is one of the most «exceptional guy» that one can meet in Magellan and the Chilean Antarctic, a lucid man, of great cultural heritage, that has and passes on the gift of speech to his students of the Britain College of Punta Arena. He did his part with us too.

—The biography of Poe, our fourth hero, documents a catastrophic fate, a tragic nature that wanders between the first sign of failure of hopes. He was a man that ran away from ominous dreams and red death, allegory of the tuberculosis that killed all women he loved. He rejected the easy ways of life and embraced the center of the hurricane as a creed that cannot be waived. His opinions were accurate and full of the strange clarity that the height of the fall gives. He said that when a person seems to be fully sensible, it is the time for wearing the straitjacket.

—His poem The Raven gives us knowledge of an intense and heartrending life that got closer to the reality from the ruins of old abbeys. A man immerse in sad reflections is visited by a ghost bird, a sign of the Plutonian night. The bird alights on Pallas Athena bust and converts into the receptacle of the images in ruins, in the back of an abandoned soul of the ghosts of grief.

UTOPIAN COMMUNE

—«”Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! -  prophet still, if bird of devil! –Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted – On this home by horror haunted –tell me truly, I implore – is there – is there balm in Gilead? – tell me – tell me, I implore!”»
 
—The bird, herald of lack, of the inexorable, of a past widespread over the veil of memories, will only say and repeat «Nevermore», and those words, genesis and epilogue, cross epochs and emerge, time and time again, from the escarpment of history. Those words are also the formula that summed up, in 1984, the wish of the Argentinian people of documenting the report set by Ernesto Sábato on the deaths and humiliations of the dictatorship. This «Nevermore» is a concentric wave that widens in the night of the times, from the romantic horror of existence to the incisive horror of tyranny.

Oscar Barrientos is able of quoting whole paragraphs of different authors, mainly of the Argentinian Jorge L. Borges. However, now he remembers Nathaniel Hawthorne, fifth and last redeeming spirit, important member of the utopian community of the Brook Farm, American collectivist farm the way the so called Tolstoy colonies.

—Nathaniel was born in Salem, land of witches and puritanism, place of gray skies where the fresh wind of the witchcraft tradition blew. His life was a constant tribute to beauty and critical thought. In his American Notebooks he include one of the most unique prose of the U.S.
 
—Borges, one of his hermeneutists, tell us about Nathaniel that he spent the days writing fantastic stories; at the time of twilight he liked to walk. That furtive lifestyle lasted twelve years. Some people see him as the inspiring master of Poe, the reporter of New England, and the romantic fabulist. His fictions condemned the false currency of the religious extremism, of the moral dressed with the degradation gown in the Scarlet Letter, work where a woman is stigmatized with the red spelling that symbolizes her sin to the eyes of an unjust society.

CONTINENTAL LANDING

—Nathaniel Hawthorne taught us that we cannot be enemies of the beauty, that the host of fantasy also support the battle of ideas. In the utopian community of Brook Farm, men felt that they were attending a social re-engineering and designed formulas for the distribution of richness and knowledge. They clan to their dreams up to the breaking of the sails of the Cervantine mill. The night school and the plow were indeed the emblems of that revolutionary purpose by essence. Today, we conceive that attempt as an orchestra of profound and touching senses that spreads over the epochs highlighting the meaning of its topics. The end was tragic: a fire swept the utopian community away. But we cannot deceive ourselves. The flames of that fire keep burning in our look like the fire that once inspired the first humans.

Oscar Barrientos’s inheritance includes two visits to Cuba and the knowledge of his culture. He usually spend some time with other writers from Magellan on long talks about the Pearl of the Antilles, spread with Chilean red wine and Cuban rum, threatened by long plays of Silvio Rodríguez and writings of José Martí.

—Nowadays, to Alma Mater, we have made a backward movement, and y give you the possibility of defeating an old paradigm. The bounds, in the sense of deceiving snare or trick that have separated us from the U.S. like breaks of unbeatable appearance are equal to the emergence of a new dialectic of significant plurality. The redeeming ghosts, those who got lost in the tides of time, braking the night trembling, are part of the great American people that continues to be defenseless in its iron jail. Jack London, Hermann Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others redeeming spirits, caress –like the cost waves– our main concerns and immediate dreams. It is our task that they continue to be present in our course, like men that also discerned the heart of our utopias.

WITH GOOD WILL

—By honoring the redeeming souls and the U.S. we lost and we should rescue, can we look at this work through José Martí’s eyes

—It won’t be difficult to find communicating vessels in these words and the Apostel’s ideas, a man who lived in the monster and touched the entails. Being Martí a beloved figure for Latin American people, anyone would be very pleased of revealing the link. He was the one who firstly sensed that we had lost the U.S.; Universalist by excellence, he was the first one that sensed the economic and military threat that the U.S. represented for our people of the America. Then, at the same time, according to the criteria aforementioned, he also suggested the analysis of some aspects of the people and the American culture through the critical thought and the illustrated rationality, aspects that he realized during his stay in that country. I will mention just two examples of both sides respectively: his eulogistic «Emerson», published in La Opinión Nacional de Caracas in 1882, «Brooklyn Bridge», published in The America of New York in 1883, his article to the journal La Nación of Buenos Aires, of November, 1889, and his speech «Madre América», pronounced later in Spanish American Literary Society before the Latin American delegates to the First Pan-American Conference. All these would be enough to begin and conclude that José Martí’s ideas were and will be essential at the moment of rescuing the U.S. we lost, and its is just to highlight this, by alien reasons to the will of our people.

Colaboración de: Yakelyn Hernández