The Kelefors

by Matt Kelemen

Look around a café or a meeting room or a subway car and find all the people over 40 years old. Then ask yourself this. How many of them have been imprisoned for their beliefs? Or had their mothers or uncles or grandmothers disappear forever? How many of them recently returned after long exiles, finally convinced that it was safe to come home? How many of them are the sons of army officers who ordered political prisoners to be tortured in dark jail cells? Or the daughters of soldiers who carried out those odious orders? Grim thoughts, I know. In the cafés and meeting rooms I inhabited in San Francisco, I didn’t think to ask the question (even though I’m sure I came across more than a few people in one or more of these categories).

But here, any given crowd in an elevator or a movie theater or a supermarket is filled with people who suffered losses and pain during seventeen years of military dictatorship, right alongside people who were party to those atrocities, maybe even committed them. What must it be like? What goes through your head? I put that question to an older friend who fled with his family in 1973 and came back after the return of democracy in 1990. Some of his acquaintances from college days invite him over to homes where portraits of Pinochet hang prominently. With them, he says, “I don’t talk about it.”

Of course, there are many who have talked about it. Some have dedicated their lives to seeking justice for the crimes of the Pinochet regime. They’ve written indelible songs and books. They’ve built a museum of memory; one visit there and you leave with the words “never again” on your tongue. They’ve brought military men to trial, trying in vain to put Pinochet himself behind bars. Others have focused on building a new society. They’ve won elections at all levels of government; the President was a political prisoner after the coup, as were some members of her cabinet. They’ve passed policies to rein in the free market and raise the standard of living for poor people, using education as a major lever for change. And they’ve been in power for all but four of the last twenty-five years. Their political coalition is aptly named the New Majority.

But now, the voices of the Right are rising again, telling the same story they told before overthrowing Allende. From behind the gates and electrified fences of their houses, they cheer when the police send surveillance balloons into the skies above their pristine exurbs (it’s a truly Orwellian sight to behold). From their corner offices, they complain that the government’s reforms — more rights for workers, more funding for education and health care — are depressing the economy that they had carefully built through decades of free market policies. It is resonant of the narrative that Pinochet and his minions propagandized to great effect: “The dangerous leftists are ruining our country and it is up to us to save Chile by any means necessary. If we have to cross some uncomfortable lines, it’s for the greater good. The alternative is too terrible to consider.” For those of means, it is a powerful and compelling narrative. But it is also a narrative of privilege, one that gives its listeners license to overlook terrible things that many Chileans have endured.

I have been thinking a lot about the narrative of privilege as I read the news from the States. Like the story of Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky who refuses “on God’s authority” to affix her name to legal documents allowing gay people to marry. To her fervent supporters, Kim Davis is a victim. The marriage laws changed and, all of a sudden, she is being told to do something that cuts against her core beliefs as a Christian. In response, the Right is apoplectic. Put aside all of the hucksters who are using her for their own ends — the politicians like Mike Huckabee who need a way to stay in the headlines and the lawyers at Liberty Counsel who need to gin up more clients — and focus instead on the true believers, those conservative Christians who truly think that Kim Davis is facing the worst form of discrimination. Are they bigots? Probably (some, certainly). But for some, maybe it’s just that they’ve always had the privilege to live in a system that preferences their beliefs. To be a Christian in America is to have government and businesses close on your sabbath; it is to have your prayers said before Friday night football games; and it is to have your religious holidays and customs secured in Federal law. Never mind that whole classes of people are denied rights and privileges because the laws are written in your favor. All of those people are simply invisible… until they are at your desk demanding their Supreme Court-endorsed right to get married.

And so it goes with the Right’s reaction to Black Lives Matter, the movement borne out of several high-profile killings of black people by police. The movement has made public some very disturbing facts about how black people experience law enforcement. Police are being shown as bad actors and our system of justice is being exposed as demonstrably unfair. And again, the Right is apoplectic, with commentators going to great lengths to blame the victims of police violence, deny that systemic racism exists, or shift the conversation away from race. When it comes to dealing with the police in America, it sure must be nice to believe, based on your personal experience with law enforcement as a white person, that the system works as intended to keep people safe and treat them fairly. Never mind that that’s simply not true for people of color. All of those people are simply invisible… until a video shows one of them getting shot in the back by a police officer.

Sometimes the narrative of privilege is loud, ugly and absurd, including most things uttered by Donald Trump. Other times, it’s a deafening silence, like a year going by without anyone being accountable for the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice at the hands of a police officer. But mostly it’s mundane, quotidian, like the regular warnings I get to “watch my pockets” if I’m planning to go to downtown Santiago or to the Bayview in San Francisco. And that’s what makes it so insidious.

by Jeannette LaFors

Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973)

During our honeymoon in Chile (December 2000) Matt and I read many of Neruda’s love poems and toured two of his houses: “La Chascona” [tangled hair woman] in Santiago, and “La Sebastiana” in Valparaíso. We brought back a beautiful stained glass momento with his twelfth love poem from the collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), and we’ve treasured it ever since. Here it is:

“Para Mi Corazón”

Para mi corazón basta tu pecho,
para tu libertad bastan mis alas.
Desde mi boca llegará hasta el cielo
lo que estaba dormido sobre tu alma.

Es en ti la ilusión de cada día.
Llegas como el rocío a las corolas.
Socavas el horizonte con tu ausencia.
Eternamente en fuga como la ola.
He dicho que cantabas en el viento
como los pinos y como los mástiles.
Como ellos eres alta y taciturna.
Y entristeces de pronto, como un viaje.

Acogedora como un viejo camino.
Te pueblan ecos y voces nostálgicas.
Yo desperté y a veces emigran y huyen
pájaros que dormían en tu alma.

–Pablo Neruda

“For My Heart”

Your bosom is enough for my heart,
For your freedom my wings are enough.
From my mouth to heaven will arrive
What was asleep on your soul.

In you is the excitement of each day.
You arrive like dew on petals of the flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
You are eternally receding like a wave.

I have said that you sang in the wind
like the pines and like the masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn.
And you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

Cozy like an old road.
You are inhabited by nostalgic voices and echoes.
I awoke and sometimes birds migrate and flee
birds that slept in your soul.

–Pablo Neruda (translated)

So you can imagine that boarding a metro car on our first family excursion in Santiago and seeing the first stanza of this poem featured on the ceiling of our car gave me goosebumps and validated all the effort we’d made to move here.

In 1971, Neruda described that poetry must “achieve a balance between solitude and solidarity, between feeling and action, between intimacy of one’s self, the intimacy of mankind, and the revelation of nature.” His powerful and passionate work certainly does that.

“Your Laughter” (1972) is another favorite of mine. It starts with, “Take bread away from me, if you wish/ take air away, but/ do not take from me your laughter.” Through beautiful metaphors, Neruda conveys a man’s deep reliance on his beloved’s laugh and how his life is not complete without it. It could also be interpreted more politically – the defiant laughter of Neruda’s fellow citizens in the face of oppression sustains him through dark and oppressive times. Neruda died in 1973, just twelve days after the coup d’état. 

Gabriela Mistral (1889 – 1957)

Dylan, Adela and I recently attended their school’s annual “Recital de Lírica” featuring both students and faculty performing an array of poems and monologues, songs and dramatic sketches. We sat at a table with the family of one of Dylan’s classmates and ordered tea and dessert from a student waiter – literary café style.

One of my favorite pieces from the recital chronicled the life of Gabriela Mistral – an advocate for children, women, and the poor; and the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945). She was a teacher and school administrator in many places throughout Chile known also for organizing evening classes for adults who lacked formal education and promoting education for girls, “Instrúyase a la mujer, no hay nada en ella que la haga ser colocada en un lugar más bajo que el hombre. (Let women be educated, nothing in them requires that they be set in a place lower than men).” In addition to being a prolific poet and writer, she also helped Mexico with education reform in the 1920s and co-founded UNICEF. Her poetry themes include children, women, indigenous people, death, and despair; but she also wrote about the landscape and character of her native Chile.

“Dame La Mano”

Dame la mano y danzaremos;
dame la mano y me amarás.
Come una sola flor seremos,
come una flor, y nada más…

El mismo verso cantaremos,
al mismo paso bailarás.
Como una espiga ondularemos,
como una espiga, y nada más.

Te llama Rosa y yo Esperanza:
pero tu nombre olvidarás,
porque seremos una danza
en la colina, y nada más. . .

–Gabriela Mistral

“Give Me Your Hand”

Give me your hand and give me your love,
give me your hand and dance with me.
A single flower, and nothing more,
a single flower is all we’ll be.

Keeping time in the dance together,
you’ll be singing the song with me.
Grass in the wind, and nothing more,
grass in the wind is all we’ll be.

I’m called Hope and you’re called Rose:
but losing our names we’ll both go free,
a dance on the hills, and nothing more,
a dance on the hills is all we’ll be.

–Gabriela Mistral [Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin]

“Bosque Del Pino”

Ahora entremos el bosque.
Los árboles pasarán por su cara,
y les pararé y ofreceré,
pero no pueden doblarse abajo.
Los relojes de la noche sobre sus criaturas,
a excepción de los árboles del pino que nunca cambian:
los viejos resortes heridos que sueltan
bendijeron la goma, tardes eternas.
Si podrían, los árboles le levantarían
y le llevarían del valle al valle,
y usted pasaría del brazo al brazo,
niño que funciona de padre al padre.

–Gabriela Mistral

“Pine Forest”

Let us go now into the forest.
Trees will pass by your face,
and I will stop and offer you to them,
but they cannot bend down.
The night watches over its creatures,
except for the pine trees that never change:
the old wounded springs that spring
blessed gum, eternal afternoons.
If they could, the trees would lift you
and carry you from valley to valley,
and you would pass from arm to arm,
a child running
from father to father.

–Gabriela Mistral [Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin]

Nicanor Parra (1914 – )

While Pablo Neruda was a young student of Gabriela Mistral, Nicanor Parra was a devoted student of Pablo Neruda and a self-proclaimed “anti-poet”. He’s a remarkable human – an accomplished mathematician and physicist and part of the talented Parra family which includes actors, singers, and writers. I’m just getting started with some of Parra’s work, and read his speech honoring Pablo Neruda as he was invited to join the University of Chile in 1962. He starts out, “Hay dos maneras de refutar a Neruda:/ una es no leyéndolo, la otra es leyéndolo/ de mala fe. Yo he practicado ambas,/ pero ninguna me dio resultado.” (There are two ways to refute Neruda:/ one is by not reading him, the other is by reading/ him in bad faith. I have tried both,/ but neither has worked.) Parra’s work is biting and witty – and he insists that “translation is impossible . . .” and that, “the best thing would be for people to learn Spanish – (Lo major sería aprender el español).”

I share links to two Parra poems here (you can toggle between Spanish and English versions):

“Los Professores” (“The Teachers”) de Hojas de Parra (1985)
http://www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/english/antipoems/teachers.html
“The Teachers” from Antipoems: New and Selected (1985)

“Soliliquio del Individuo” de Poemas y Antipoemas (1954):
http://www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/antologia/indexpoemas.html
“Soliloquy of the Individual” from Poems and Antipoems (1985)

Isabel Allende (1942 – )

I am currently reading Isabel Allende’s memoir, Mi País Inventado (My Invented Country] (2004) in Spanish. She opens her book quoting Pablo Neruda’s verse from Canto General (1950), an epic poem describing their shared homeland:

Night, snow and sand compose the form
of my slender homeland,
all silence is contained within its length,
all foam issues from its seaswept beard,
all coal fills it with mysterious kisses.

Allende is the Chilean author I’ve known the longest. I read House of Spirits (1982) in high school for the first time, and again in 2000 while traveling in Chile. For our book club a few years ago Matt and I read Daughter of Fortune (1999). And now I am also reading Island Beneath the Sea (2009). Reading Mi País Inventado, I can hear Allende talking to me like she would if we were having coffee. True, I have to ask her to define words or phrases I don’t know – but after a pause we are right back to it. We laugh. We cry. She reveals who she is and I connect different stories from her life with the various characters and stories from her novels. I absorb the way she describes her Chile-U.S. connections, and marvel at her work ethic and writing rituals. Did you know Neruda told her in 1973 that she was a terrible journalist and ought to put her talents to good use in fiction instead?

And so connected are these mighty Chilean poets . . . they all fiercely love their country, and they each critique it — standing up against injustices and uplifting both the mundane and surreal.

I circle back to each of the windows that Neruda, Mistral, Parra, and Allende have opened wide, enjoying the brilliant views of a stunning, complex, healing, and alluring country that I am blessed to get to know.

*****

Adela’s thoughts about literature as a window into Chilean life: At school we did a project on the Mapuche in Chile and the Spanish colonists. We learned a lot about them and Chilean history. I learned so much about the Machupe. For example, I learned about their festivals, and who their gods were, and why they did what they did. I also learned about the punishments they received from the Spanish and how they resisted against the Spanish rule.

Dylan’s thoughts about literature as a window into Chilean life: La Memoria (the museum) gave me a deeper look into Chilean history and culture. And at Literacy Night (an event at our school), I heard many poems and saw a a few performances about what it is like to be Chilean.

Matt’s thoughts on literature as a window into Chilean life: For me, it’s always been Eduardo Galeano (Uruguayan, but pan-Latino in his writing). He’s inspiring: “Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every color. Some people’s flames are so still they don’t even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking, and if you approach you shine in the fire.” He’s biting: “El subdesarrollo no es una etapa del desarrollo. Es su consecuencia.” And he pays poetic homage to the beautiful game better than anyone: “And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.”

 

by Adela Kelemen

Have you ever been new? From a different continent!? Well being new for some people is REALLY hard. Like me. But here, in Santiago, it was easier than I thought it would be. The people in Santiago are very kind.

The kids in my class were so excited that a new girl from California was here. And my teachers were also very warm and loving. The kids at my school have so much personality. I was invited to one of the girls’ birthday party and everyone was acting crazy and funny, unlike at school where they all acted disciplined and serious. Well, mostly serious.

But I did not just notice this at school. One of the women on our apartment floor who, when we first met her, was also very kind to us. She told us about how she had only been here for about 3 months in our apartment building. Also,the people who we rented from before (in our temporary apartment that we stayed in for our first 4 weeks) were like her. They were also very kind to us and they even invited us to their house for dinner.

One thing I really like about my new school is it has so many opportunities to do things we enjoy. I signed up for a cooking class, glass painting class and I joined the swim team for my school. We also did this project about the Chilean colonial times that we presented to the second graders. I was in this group that studied the art from the colonial times. We studied the art of the pottery and what the symbols and colors meant on the flag. It was really fun. I just hope I can do something like that again.

At school, I also learned a few new games that some kids play.  There is one game that is like hot potato, were you pass around a jacket or book or whatever someone has. But instead of stopping when the music ends, someone is in the middle of the circle and they slowly stand up and raise their arms to clap. When the person in the middle claps, the person who is holding the thing that everyone is passing around is out. All the people I have met so far have been so kind and welcoming and I hope it stays that way.

Matt’s thoughts on being new: Yeah, it’s different here. We eat at 10pm instead of 7pm. We greet people with a kiss on the cheek rather than a handshake. Etc. Etc. But, we still eat and we still greet. So, what’s really new? Paying for the kids to go to school. That’s new… and pretty weird. Being expected to conduct my work in a different language. That’s new… and pretty daunting. And of course, there are new friends to make… and that’s pretty great.

Dylan’s thoughts on being new: In my own life being new feels good. At school, on my first day I arrived at the campus and went to find the middle school principal James Tucker. There was an assembly that day and he showed me to my home room teacher. She is very nice and greeted me warmly. Then we walked together to find a few kids that where to be my “mentors.” When we found them, they introduced themselves, and then showed me to the group of seats in the auditorium where my new class was sitting just as the assembly was starting. The point of all this is that I had made new friends instantly and I think that it will be a great experience even though I am a different kid in a new school.

Jeannette’s thoughts on being new: I grew up frequently being the “new kid” in class. Now I’m getting schooled in how Chilean parents — namely the mamas — support their children and socialize with one another in a private school context. Dylan and Adela haven’t been in private school since they graduated from pre-school. Last week I went to a gathering of ten moms from Dylan’s 7th grade section, hosted by one of the room mothers. We started at 9pm. We left just before midnight. On a school night. We drank champagne and ate gourmet food. Did I mention it was a school night? And while I had the gist on most topics of conversation, I definitely got lost plenty of times. Feeling a bit like the new kid again.