Abstract
Bad news for the engineers of horror: the death machine produces life. Every part is perfect, shining and in place, the cogs have been oiled and checked, the instructions from the most experienced and reputed international experts have been carried out to the letter. And yet, more alive than ever, there is the human soul, quivering. Isolated, tortured men, at grips with the daily treatment of destruction, retort by creating. A person who can write the following has not been broken, nor had his heartbeat stifled:
Sometimes it rains and I love you sometimes the sun appears and I love you prison is sometimes always I love you.
These poems are anonymous. Their authors are prisoners in the Penal de Libertad (Freedom Prison, as a betrayal of language would have it), the main prison for political offenders in Uruguay. They were written on cigarette papers and have found their way out through the bars and thick walls of the concentration camp. Since they are the work of prisoners, they perfectly portray the situation of a country which itself is one huge prison:
A fellow inmate said if we put aside orders regulations if we overlook uniforms bars if we don’t count officers and their stool-pigeons a fellow inmate said and I believe him here in this great prison we are prisoners.
The prison is everyone’s home. Is there anyone who hasn’t had the right to speak abolished? A recent order by the Uruguayan dictatorship’s National Public Relations Board forbids anyone under the rank of general in the armed forces from expressing a political opinion. All the country’s inhabitants are hostages on parole, with no rights beyond breathing and obeying. Simply to collect a trade union subscription is seen as an incitement to crime and is punishable by six years’ imprisonment. At the point where, in the score of the national anthem, the chorus should shout out ‘Tyrants, tremble!’, the music has now been made soft so that the singers are forced to whisper the phrase. Anyone who did dare to sing out loudly would be heading straight for the electric torture prod and jail.
Anyone who dared to sing would be heading straight for torture
Uruguay has proportionately the largest budget for repression in the world. This profligacy by the military and police could perhaps be explained by the fact that the government, according to a recent armed forces document published by the national university, considers that we are in the midst of the third world war against international subversion. In fact, the military in my country are waging a very different kind of war. For the Uruguayan armed forces, who now act as the political party representing the multinational corporations, the enemy is the people itself:
Green but mutters green but talks green but interrogates green but tortures.
Uruguayan political prisoners can only speak by telephone to the rare visitors they are allowed, and they are forbidden to look round, wink, to walk either more quickly or more slowly than normal, and for some strange reason are forbidden to draw fish, pregnant women and worms. They also have to pay an average of $500 per annum for their lodging, as though the prison were a hotel. There are frequent attempts at suicide in the punishment cells, and equally frequent simulated firing squads. But these poems do not complain. They are not soiled with self-pity. They are written out of dignity rather than misery:
To have a quick word with the bee in its buzzing flight to tell the ant to hurry with the bread for his lady wife to contemplate the spider admire the beauty of its amazing feet and beg it to climb more slowly up its web all these are ways of resisting. Out of dignity, fought for and rescued each day: Today they took off my hood How can I cry now just at this very moment I so feel like crying? Where would I hide my tears now? Now they have taken off the hood. Defeat for the inquisitors and the executioners. Popular culture can’t be contained by any prison, Can’t be kept out by any customs barrier, can’t be killed by any bullet: Why on earth does the sergeant whistle Viglietti why on earth does the corporal hum the Olimarefios why on earth does the private sing Zitarrosa how come they’ve so much shit in their heads?
In classical Chinese opera, the emperor beheads any messenger who brings bad news. Our true national culture was bringing bad news for those in power when the military, knife clenched between the teeth, flung themselves into the attack against centres of learning, publishers, newspapers, theatres, art galleries, carnival dancing and popular celebrations. This was the highest tribute ever paid to Uruguayan culture, for what is one to think of a culture that could stay free in a society in chains? Censorship, prison, exile, were waiting for the guilty. The dictatorship punishes anyone who believes that the country should not be a prison or an old people’s home. In the end, books are banned in just the same way as meetings.
These poems by political prisoners are the work of precisely this ‘common man’, who is not content to consume the sparse or non-existent permitted culture, but who is capable of creating it for himself. The people’s creative energy never dies, although it may sometimes appear to be asleep; nor does it figure among the lists of possessions of those who own the country and the official culture, which praises death and pays homage to fear. In the darkness of his cell, man is searching for symbols of identity, signs of life. ❒