What my grandmother remembers best about the day that President Allende died is a sound like a hailstorm on the roof of her home. How she crawled out from the bathroom they were all hiding in so she could peek her head over the windowsill in the living room. When she recounted this, several miles deep into a traffic jam on the edge of Santiago, Chile, she laughed. I had no idea.
When she made it to the windows, she saw the machine gun shells clattering from the helicopters onto her roof and the street. She watched them blanket the ground. My grandmother was sixteen, then, living with her parents in a nice home two blocks away from Allende’s Santiago house, which was that day being firebombed. She had never heard a gunshot before. She had never heard a bomb fall. I imagine my life at sixteen, as it was, unfettered and indulgent, and then waking up to the sound of my world falling apart. So much noise it almost became silence. Head tilted, spellbound, watching soldiers standing on the roof of her neighbor’s home fire down into the house. (Said neighbor was a communist poet with two young children who had - blessedly - fled with her family a few hours prior. She eventually settled in France. Most like her were not so lucky.)
My grandmother remembers the explosions too. And all her mother’s screaming. The buzzing of the helicopters, which seemed now like they were just above the house. I asked her what she did after. What do you mean? she asked. After a few days I went back to school.
She thought for a moment. But the sound, she said. I can still hear it.
On CNN they play the same clip of Trump collapsing to the ground over and over again. A new man (an ex-secret service agent, a cop, and then what seems like a parade of randos) comes out every five minutes and says We’re not sure what happened and the anchor says Thank you so much for your insight. I watch him rise up out of the crouch of agents, bleeding from his ear, and I imagine his martyrdom written down in some ragged papyrus. I am mesmerized by the flag behind him as he rises. The fabric frames his face all blood-stained and defiant and there is no denying how much it looks like America. There is something about his path that feels predestined. A kind of evil so magnetic it pulls the rest of the world towards it like a black hole.
It feels like a strange year to be nineteen, but I guess it always is. The second Monday of my freshman year a lonely graduate student walked into the office of his advisor and shot him dead. The school was shut down, alarms sounding through the campus, and I remember while I sat locked in my classroom thinking then how awfully strange it was for college to begin like this. At 6 AM on the very last day of classes of my freshman year the police stormed the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on our quad, arresting thirty of my friends and classmates and injuring many more. That morning I listened from the bathroom of an adjacent building to the echoing and mournful sound of protestors chanting as the police approached. When I closed my eyes it almost sounded Gregorian, like a hymn. I ran out towards my friends in the twilight of dawn and saw the line of cops moving towards them in slow motion, and I remember thinking, this is all so strange.
My parents warned me about these things when I was very young - the police, the military, religious fundamentalism, all the things opposed, they said, to the basic expression of the human soul. There was a magnet on our fridge with a picture of Víctor Jara, the communist Chilean singer-songwriter assassinated a few days after the U.S.-backed coup that killed Allende. He’s looking off into the sky, as if he sees something no one else can. As if he’s already half-heavenly. It bears a strong similarity to Alberto Korda’s Guerrillero Heroico photograph of Che Guevara. Only Jara’s is gentler, more hopeful - he smiles like he sees something beautiful and distant. I don’t know how old I was when I learned what was done to him - a professor at a public university, like both of my parents. Rounded up with hundreds of his students and colleagues the day after the coup. Marched to a stadium being used as a detention camp, mocked, tortured, executed, dumped on the side of the road. I was informed with an intense sincerity that these were things that could happen at any moment. That your country could suddenly become something unrecognizable, utterly transfigured.
I don’t think that’s exactly what’s happening here and now. But I know that I was born in 2005, and as a child growing up during the Obama era in a solidly middle-class liberal enclave it sometimes felt as though history, with all of its conflict and grief, was over. We lived in a new world. There was a sense of weighty historical inevitability to Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing gay marriage in 2015, when I was ten years old. Neoliberalism had triumphed. The recession had passed and the future stretched out in front of us. When I heard of the Ferguson uprising in 2014 it was conveyed in a way that made it feel distant and hazy, like war, or bombs, or all the other cruel and terrible things that didn’t exist in my world. An American education - like the one I got - that deemphasizes cultural connections with the historical experience of other countries serves to totally dissociate the American self from the passage of time. Most history classes that we took as children had the specific intention of advancing a narrative of American exceptionalism that served not only to put us above the rest of the world but almost in a realm outside of it - the next stage of humanity. History, the past - or the current creation of future past - was something that existed in other countries, with their wars and bombs and dictators, with their reek of death and gunsmoke. History existed in the Middle East where Obama’s drones landed on wedding convoys and grandmothers in their backyards, where civilians died and seemed to hardly make a sound. We are a nation obsessed with the present and constantly neglectful of our collective and individual memories - let alone the memories of what we’ve done.
The music of Víctor Jara makes me weepy to listen to not only because of his brutal and lonely death but because in his compositions he did the essential task of capturing the feel of the Allende years, the hope and the energy, the imagining of a new world. Sound in particular has a way of lingering that the written word cannot match. It is passed down generationally, it is inherited, it is an oral legacy. I think the creation of this art serves to leave a record of the past that is in a way inherently anti-fascistic. It rejects the fascist instinct to erase memory, to scratch clean remembrances of the past, to bury any histories that indicate a diversity or blossoming of human thought. Mussolini states explicitly in his (ghostwritten) 1930 manifesto The Doctrine of Fascism that fascism “preserves what may be described as “the acquired facts” of history; it rejects all else.” To make music that is a true and reflective expression of the individual, the community, and the times is to refuse the “acquired facts” of history, to expand memory and therefore human solidarity. To study and create history is to force yourself to empathize with people distant from you - in space or time - and feel moved enough by them to use your scarce earthly time to draw them back from oblivion or erasure.
I watched the clip of the Trump shooting repeat on CNN with my mother for a long time. There was no new information. I felt nothing at all, except frustration - that we were watching this utterly lost election in silence and stillness, that things seemed to be collapsing all at once, that the “acquired facts” of history were already being written. The blood, his fist in the air, the American flag. So much charisma, and so much terror.
Things have felt rough for a long time now, but when the genocide in Gaza began I felt that a part of my body had fallen through. Like something in my chest had caved in. I had nightmares about my future children covered in blood and there were days the news and the videos confined me to bed in tears. I felt for the first time what Yeats meant when he said that the center cannot hold, but now I don’t even think that’s right either. Yesterday when Trump was shot and politicians decried political violence I thought of my friends and classmates I watched brutally beaten by our own campus police on the last day of classes. I had never seen someone’s head spill open with blood until that morning. I thought too of Gaza, and of Víctor Jara, and of the truth which is that history never ends, not for anyone anywhere, and of the peaceful America of my childhood which was never peaceful. The center has never held. Our history had not ceased and been brought back to life by the fascism of Trump - we had only ever exported it for a moment, tossed our violence over to other corners of the world, reveling in the fantasy of drawing it back. The Chilean coup d’état and ensuing totalitarian regime was in itself a cultural proxy war between the U.S. (after years of attempting to undermine Allende’s government internally) and the USSR (which had provided economic and military support to Allende during his presidency. Instead of fighting its battles on its ground - and therefore disturbing the comfortable myth of American detachment - the U.S. used the civilians of the Global South as outlets for the violence intrinsic to its ideology.
So this summer I keep going back to Víctor Jara and the sounds of dissident, ancestral Chile. Robert Neustadt writes in Chasqui that Venceremos (We will prevail), the anthem for Allende’s 1970 presidential campaign, “can be seen as a musical time capsule, un crisol de la historia - a reflection of the atmosphere and rhetoric of the Chilean socialist movement.” Allende himself said, after the success of Jara’s version of the song, that “there can be no revolutions without song.” This kind of music is all memory - old campesino strumming patterns, complex and narrative lyrics that often tell specific and detailed accounts of moments of fascist abuse and revolutionary fervor. In Zamba del Ché, for example, Jara describes the martyrdom of Che Guevara and Cuban resistance to colonial exploitation in reverent and lofty and yet utterly blunt terms. The painful destiny [of the worker] is hunger, misery, and suffering, says Jara, and captures quickly and achingly how imperial countries dominate and subjugate the working classes of the Global South. Despite the overwhelming grief it is in some way comforting to hear his voice, half a century away from me, and know that to him it also felt that the world was collapsing, and he sang not in spite of it but in recognition of it. If things go the way we know they will - the center falls out, the far right holds the White House, the “acquired facts” of history accepted and all else eliminated - I hope that there will be singing, and writing, and the frantic creation of art that will serve as a bridge to the next world, the world after all of this horror.
On the morning of the day he died, September 16, 1973, Víctor Jara asked another prisoner for pen and paper, and wrote down the lyrics to his final song - Estadio Chile, smuggled out by fellow detainees. Because of this final act of resistance, we now have living memory of his last days imprisoned. He describes violence and grief and consuming fear, and describes too (with unbelievable clarity) how his legacy will become a force, how the revolution never ceases, how something better lives on the other side of the violence, and how his song will keep it alive.
What I have felt and what I feel
will make blossom from this moment
of blood, a rifle.
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this is brilliant! i've often tried to remind myself that it's likely everybody has thought the world was ending while they were alive, especially while they were young. but it's an odd time to try and make a life for yourself. have you read amie cesaire's discourse on colonialism? this reminded me of some of the arguments he makes.
So beautiful I loved this Elisa