Reading the New York Times this morning I
found myself in Chile. I am defrosting a sixteen-pound turkey which the local
market biked over yesterday. Tomorrow is
Thanksgiving and I don’t usually think much about buying-American. But two years ago, I’d also secured a bird
that turned out to be from the southern cone.
I was surprised, at the last minute to find their innards weren’t there
inside. You need the neck, the heart,
the liver to make your gravy. I think I
even remember telling the owner of the store: “Chilean turkeys are no good.”
And the next year,
last year, we had a U.S. bird. It had
guts. I was happy with that. There’s a nice bald gent at the market who
knew I’d be needing one and he set me up with a preorder a few weeks back. “I’ll take the biggest one you got.” But when I insisted that the bird be a Yankee
doodle dandy he threw up his hands.
“Only birds from Chile this year.”
“Really?” And before I could ask
“what’s up with that?” we both smiled and nodded our heads, and said “trade
war” as if on cue.
The New York Times,
however was not talking about trade war, nor about turkeys in this
article. Rather it was an expose on a
strikingly handsome Chilean folk singer: Victor Jara. I began to read the article and wondered how
it was I’d never heard of this gentleman.
Every country it seems, or certainly dozens have some figure who was the Bob Dylan of (insert your country of choice) Russia’s Dylan. The Dylan of the Philippines. If the Czech Republic had a Dylan figure it
was . . . Quickly though it was clear
that this was more than simply another such article.
Victor Jara was one
of many young people rounded up after Pinochet, with help from the Nixon administration
toppled the elected government of Salvador Allende. Jara was imprisoned in the stadium and
segregated out, interrogated and shot, twice in the head, forty-four times
elsewhere. His wife, a British born Joan
Jara received word from someone who had seen him in the morgue.
The video provided,
describes how eight members of the Chilean military have only now been brought
to justice for the crime while the commander of unit there at the stadium, who
denies any involvement in the murder, lives today in Florida. Ms. Jara in particular, provides a loving,
sober, somber account of her husband’s music, his
life, and what it was it was sacrificed for.
I sent the link off to a best friend immediately asking: “how is it we
never heard of him?”
I spent the day
then, listening to Mr. Jara’s music. I
wasn’t sure I’d enjoy beyond the first toes’ wetting but he’s wonderful,
sparse, surprising, anchored with a martyr’s gravity. Biking in the early morning, shopping for
Thanksgiving groceries in the afternoon chopping parsley and cilantro in the
evening, I couldn’t get enough.
Deciphering glimpses of lucidity from the Spanish I could decipher,
thought I understood the meaning of a song titled: “El Derecho a Vivir En
Paz.” “Derecho” the right. Certainly, this was an ironic song about the
right wing who , wont be in peace until they have destroyed society or killed
all of the opposition!
Rather, the “right”
in Spanish, like in English has both the directional significance as well as the
idea of entitlement. I have the “right”
to free speech and freedom of assembly and, in this song at least, the right to
live in peace. It is a song about Ho Chi
Minh and the struggle from that time in Vietnam.
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/el-derecho-de-vivir-en-paz-right-live-peace.html
The Right To Live In Peace
The right to live
poet Ho Chi Minh,
who struck from
Vietnam
all of humanity.
No cannon will wipe
out
the furrow of your
rice paddy.
The right to live
in peace.
Indochina is the
place
beyond the wide
sea,
where they ruin the
flower
with genocide and
napalm.
The moon is an
explosion
that blows out all
the clamor.
The right to live
in peace.
Uncle Ho, our song
is fire of pure
love,
it's a dovecote
dove,
olive from an olive
grove.
It is the universal
song
chain that will
triumph,
the right to live
in peace.
Wednesday, 11/20/18
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