Augusto Pinochet stepping down from power in 1990.
Victim from Pinochet's brutal kidnappings explains his experience and lasting effects of the dictator's rule.
Song for His Disappeared Love, a book-length poem, was originally written in Spanish by Raúl Zurita and then translated by Daniel Borzutzky to English. The poem depicts Zurita’s personal torment while being imprisoned on a ship during Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian overthrow of the Chilean government. Zurita’s work is formatted with a range of stanza structures and vivid imagery, effectively conveying how the severity of Pinochet’s dictatorship leads to a meaningless life and a universal sense of insanity.
Raúl Zurita
Song for His Disappeared Love
To prevent the spread of communism amidst the Cold War, the United States adopted the Truman Doctrine as a primary source of foreign policy. The doctrine increased American presence in South America, justifying the intervention as a protection of democratic principles. During the 1970s in Chile, democratic socialist president, Salvador Allende ruled spreading ideas that countered American capitalist values. Not fond of a socialist nation within the Western Hemisphere, the United States utilized the Truman Doctrine to sponsor a military coup d’etas on the Chilean government.
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Augusto Pinochet was placed in power in 1973 after Salvador Allende took his life during the overthrow of his government. Pinochet implemented a military dictatorship and imprisoned, tortured, and often killed any individual who spoke against his rule.
Those who were imprisoned were forced to live on the Chilean Navy ship known as the Esmeralda. Individuals were placed into separate cells or “niches” depending on their nationality. Over 30,000 people were tortured during their imprisonment on the Esmeralda while over 3,000 people were ultimately killed. Those who were killed would be buried in the Atacama Desert. This desert is the driest desert in the world; there is no humidity. This explains the repetition of “deserts of love” in Zurita’s poem.
Soon afterwards, in order to erase the evidence of their horrific crimes, the government dug up the victims' bodies and scattered them throughout the country using military airplanes.
This cycle continues until Pinochet’s rule ends in 1990 when he loses a referendum to remain in power.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Pictured on right border: Victims of Pinochet's rule that "disappeared"
RELATION TO HUMAN RIGHTS
Raúl Zurita’s Song for His Disappeared Love encapsulates the pandemonium and terror of Pinochet’s rule through a recount of his capture. The poet narrates the distressing events of his inhumane imprisonment, such as the beginning of the poem that describes “mangled people…pecked with small pox” and how his oppressors clipped Zurita’s shoulder with a bayonet (Zurita 8-9). These cruel acts startle the reader, as it is vividly expressed within the poem’s preface that Zurita’s work is a love story, yet is countered by the asperity of violence the poet survived.
Zurita employs the word “disappeared” repeatedly in different contexts to further develop this idea, mostly emphasizing how these prisoners have disappeared from their loved ones and hidden without a trace. Furthermore,
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Zurita uses the term “disappeared love” to describe the love that he once had for Chile and how he has fallen out of love with the nation as Augusto Pinochet transforms it into a living hell.
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The author also uses modes of personification of nature to mirror the drastic human rights violations, evident in the “niches” he creates of various societies within the Americas.
Illustrated by thirty cramped cells within the ship, each niche’s tragedy is explored deeply to continually reinforce the idea of separation between the victims of the torture experienced on the ship.
The devastation of each niche resembles that of humanity, evident as Zurita expresses how the Alamo forests
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“blazed, crum-/bled…Enormous airplanes destroyed them / touching their burning love…They cry, it says, they were / scalded. The flesh is ash: so it is written. The jungle is flesh…the jungles are burnt bodies”
The plea for help from the forrest embodies that of the Chilean citizens, who are left helpless as their loved ones disappear throughout the country’s terrain and they are robbed of their fundamental human rights.
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The poem also includes multimodal elements, with the inclusion of diagrams of the prison ship and the array of stanza formatting—from pages of back and forth dialogue to blocked stanzas that create a sense of confusion while reading, mimicking the lack of closure from those who have disappeared’s loved ones. Zurita makes such various stoical decisions to offer the reader the many implications of such human rights violations.
Pictured above: Zurita's drawing in Song for His Disapeared Love depicting the different countries that he categorizes into niches within the poem.
Pictured right: The Alamo Forests that Zurita uses as one of his many niches throughout his work.
STRUCTURE OF SONG FOR HIS DISAPPEARED LOVE
Raúl Zurita also employs different structures such as paragraphs, stanzas, dashed lists to place emphasis on the diverse cases of disregard for human rights and allows the reader to interpret a depiction of how torture and confinement lead to one’s insanity. Furthermore, the use of paragraphs implies a connection between each phrase as every sentence tells a cohesive story. For example, Zurita presents the reader with this paragraph offering the conditions of the ship:
“It was filled with hundreds of niches, one over the other, There is a country in / each one; they’re like boys, they’re dead.”
This structural decision with sequential sentences offers the reader the ability to understand that there is a continuous story being told. In this case, there is one voice speaking, thus there is still a sense of sanity present. Conversely, the use of dashed lines suggests that there is a separation present and each line and each one has its own narrative:
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“-I swerved all over and without moving from there I saw my parents.
-They are like God.
-But they don’t know their puppy is dying from love and blows in the old sheds.”
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Each sentence references the other, but the separation of text onto different lines is to enforce the distinction between Zurita’s dreamlike state and his reality.
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During this point of his capture, Zurita differentiates the voices to emphasize the turn towards insanity reflected by how the poem has become more fragmented.
Lastly, the use of stanzas creates a situation that can ultimately cause confusion to the reader. Zurita often places four stanzas together in a block formation, which initially, readers may be confused on how to read the stanzas as they can be read from left to right or top to bottom. Each stanza is independent, however, and can be read at the same time rather than one after another. With each stanza representing its own voice, Zurita creates a noisy environment with multiple voices speaking at once. This is when the poem reaches its peak of insanity. One can imagine the madness they would incur if they heard four to six voices all speaking at once. Towards the end of the poem, each page contains these erratic, polyphonic blocks of text that ultimately forces the reader to recognize how hysterical these inhumane conditions can make a person.
