September 11, 2023 • 16 mins
This special episode has been our own ritual to never forget what happened with literature in Chile since September 11th, 1973. It was recorded on September 11th, 2023, for us to grasp that previous moment of complete potentiality, and to manifest that fuerza into our lives and books.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
The Letter Podcast
(00:01):
Literary Mourning Ritual for Chile, 1973
This is a special episode of The Letter, a Podcast of Latin American literature and its performances in the United States. Hosted by yours truly, the writers Mónica-Ramón Ríos and Carlos Labbé, speaking to you from the neighborhood of Clinton Hill on the occupied Lenapehoking, now known as Brooklyn.
Here we are 50 years after the coup that ousted Salvador Allende and la Unidad Popular on the occupied land of the Mapuche, Aymara, Rapanui, Likan Antai, Quechua, Colla, Chango, Diaguita, Kawésqar and Yagán, now known as Chile. Four and a half decades since you and I were born into a dictatorship, and 33 years of commemorating the event that brought international attention to the cornered country of the Americas.
We know the facts, the history, the anniversary of the Chilean coup. The fall of arguably the first democratically elected marxist government in the world is a meaningful moment. It is when an extreme form of capitalism was implanted by using extreme violence against the will of millions of people who were in search for a more equitable way of living via a pacific social process. The thousands of people killed, tortured, and disappeared remain as a foundational trauma that defines Chile.
If fifty years later, the coup of September 11 in Chile is still at the core of national history, what are the aesthetics, the words able to express that wound? Is there a recognizable narrative, maybe a genre of the coup, to talk about this collective trauma? In short, is Chilean literature able to verbalize the horror, the perplexity, the survival, and the Stockholm Syndrome implied in the fact that this society kept existing and functioning over 50 years without closure or justice?
There was a previous event that brought international attention to Chile, and it was the democratic election of Socialist President Salvador Allende. It is also his asassination by the army, backed up by many factions of Chilean society and by the United States, the event that is commemorated today. Once the military dictatorship ended in 1990, we have seen the emergence of a culture that has enshrined Allende and others, but especially Allende, as an icon for the politics of memory.
Since the seventies, as September approached, the cultural establishment in Chile discussed informally what was always a new attempt for “the big book” of Allende, “the definitive” novel of the coup, “the last word” regarding the stories about La Unidad Popular. The attempts have been numerous, but never a book of realistic, mainstream, elitist fiction was able to hit the nerve. No Dorfman, no Skármeta, no Lafourcade, no Fontaine novel could retell the structures of feeling of 1973; no Parra, no Lihn, no Teillier, no Zurita could sing the song of 1973. And yes, the patriarcal overtones of this list of names are not just coincidence. And yes, there are many other authors, authorities, to be added to this list every year with a book that says on its jacket something like (00:07):
“the final account of Chile’s decisive days”.
The memory of the coup permeates Chilean society as a whole, and this is the challenge for literature. Particularly as we remember how, despite the Truth Commissions, the social democratic governments, and the insufficient justice, there are still many voices that have been forced to accept the fact that the bodies and stories of their loved ones will never be recovered. We have learned to live within a massively tortured population. As readers, we have learned to expect that the best of our literature is a work of sublimation of the lost narratives.
When the 30 and 40 years of the coup were commemorated, writers were publishing about their childhood under dictatorship. In 2023, we have seen a surge of that as well. The themes are mainly about the blindspots of these children to see and react to the injustices happening everywhere. Nevertheless, new distinctions have also emerged. There are books being written about how the violence of the coup and its following regime was felt, actually felt, and became ingrained in the population and within our language. Gladys González’s recent volume is part of that move, for example. Lemebel, Diamela, and Donoso, the Chilean baroque triad, is another example of the volcanic depth of this inescapable wound. But there are other writers who are now coming forward about their complicity––known or unknown––with the privileges granted to their parents and families via the dictatorship. It is another kind of wound, and the stories of the sons and daughters of the Chilean right are muffled via literary devices. But still one can read their provenance from military families or families of pacos, cops, that may sustain their current access to discursive power.
Let me tell you a little story. Yesterday, Sunday September 10, I went with an American lover to watch the newly restored version of Patricio Guzmán’s La batalla de Chile, The Battle of Chile at our neighborhood film theater, BAM. I saw many people I know, other Chileans, coming out from the previous screening. One of them was a school classmate. We used to practice field hockey together, me hating that afterschool practice maybe more than her, which never befitted my intellectual interests. This is another way to say she made me feel a little better during those afternoons. But when our eyes met in Brooklyn, knowing we had originally gotten acquainted at an American school in Chile, with a clear class mark and a clear political leaning towards the right, what I saw was shame and disavowment. She saw me, she recognized me, of course, but she pretended she did not see me, unable to acknowledge her place of origin, and the origin of her privileges. It was shame I saw in her eyes.
When I read new novels by Chilean authors who come from similar backgrounds or from a middle class who worked for the right’s project, but who now identify as left-leaning, I read the aesthetic mark of that disavowment. In the 1980s, neobaroque aesthetics was used by left leaning writers living under the pressures of the dictatorship to avoid censorship. Today, writers use the polished language of mainstream realism to avoid history, and the pressures exerted by hegemonic culture and the needs of the market.
This publication phenomenon, the events, exhibitions, and performances have taken over Chile this year of the 50 anniversary of the fascist coup that installed State capitalism as the definition of Chile and its culture, and it has crossed borders. It is in fact a designed strategy by the current government to support events that deal with the memory of dictatorship, including a film by Pablo Larraín that has populated the streets of Santiago with an actor performing Pinochet. The numerous events happening in New York City as we speak, related to the coup, all featuring the line “the US backed coup,” give us a key to the literature of Chile 1973 (00:12):
the memory of the coup and the subsequent dictatorship is the main tragedy that put Chile and its artistic production on the world map, as a collective force beyond individual figures.
It is also true that every new Chilean administration during the postdictatorship has positioned itself around this issue (many of which, I might add, did this while blocking the access to real justice for the disappeared and their families). But the mark of the coup goes beyond that and it is similar to the tragedies that mark other countries of the global south and their “political tragedies” that become a specific context from where to read our artistic production. Artistic practices become legible through a recourse to memory.
You mention the postdictatorship. And to make it clear for our listeners, the postdictadura is a concept that is used to describe not only the period after Pinochet handed the power over, but a period in which the legal power and economic structures of the capitalist dictatorship are, or were, still in place.
They are still in place, let us remember, via the constitution.
Today the narratives of the coup go from the acceptable repressed, from the collectively elusive, from the proliferation of the biographical archive in generational auto fiction, to the official history. It may be that half a century is too big a number, it might be a cabalistic effect implied in the number 50, but the display of this politics of memory by Boric’s administration suggests that now it is convenient to write a historic intervention claiming the trauma is over. There are several political gestures —most of them a bit too late— that suggest the necessity of the government to be remembered in history as the government that finished the old building of the Chilean library of memory.
The institutionalization of the literature of the coup might also show a need to deflect the attention of the problems that this government faces (00:17):
hunger, climate crisis, deep social unrest, lack of a collective narrative that justifies the mere existence of the National State itself. Most importantly
I prefer to say that the postdictatorship didn’t start in 1990, after Pinochet handed out his position as President to a democracy under the constitution written by his partisan lawyers.
Do not forget that the Unidad Popular government was going to call, on September 12th, 1973, for a referendum to approve a marxist Constitution based on the universal rights of workers and labor. But, going a little further in time, the story of Chilean postdictatorship started with the general demonstration that lead to the ousting of the dictator because of his unpopularity.
The postdictatorship can also be said to have finished with the 2019 revolt. If so, let’s read the rumor of all those voices in the street not as an underground current, but as the most persistent literature of the coup (00:20):
every single Chilean literary collective since Pinochet, from la Unión de Escritores Jóvenes in the seventies a la Novísima in the two thousands, from el CADA y Las Yeguas y la Tribu No in the sixties, seventies, and eighties to Sangría y La Faunita and la Red de Escritoras in the 2010s, are grafitis in the walls of the old building of the Chilean library of the coup, which comprises all the big names that every year publish “the best book about the Pinochet years”.
It is important to mention all of this to understand the multiple commemorations that are happening today in New York City and around the world. Many of them are sponsored by the closed walls of academia. Others, in the small communities of Chilean political and economic exiles.
After watching Patricio Guzmán’s Battle of Chile, I understand how different it was to watch it in those DVD’s we had when we were still in Chile. I understand it as a necessary ritual to divest the hegemonic powers of the narratives of memory and remind us how we inhabit the ethical call made by Lotty Rosenfeld and Diamela Eltit when they painted NUNCA+ in the streets of Chile in the eighties. Or how we have failed to do so, by again handing over memory to a marketable brand that allows Boric to dress up with Allende’s glasses without ever attempting what he attempted in the 1970s (00:23):
to end neocolonial rule and change the economic structure of a country with precarized masses in a world of monolithic capitalism at war with difference.
This special episode of The Letter Podcast has been our own ritual to never forget and to live in a place made of places with no violence, with no coup, with no dictator that presides by force our narratives, but made of many stories that sing the beauty of a land that welcomes everybody who correspond them back.
This special episode of The Letter Podcast was recorded on September 11th, 2023, para que nunca más, for us to live in that moment of complete potentiality, and to manifest the fuerza written into our lives and books.
The Letter Podcast
(00:01):
Literary Mourning Ritual for Chile, 1973
This is a special episode of The Letter, a Podcast of Latin American literature and its performances in the United States. Hosted by yours truly, the writers Mónica-Ramón Ríos and Carlos Labbé, speaking to you from the neighborhood of Clinton Hill on the occupied Lenapehoking, now known as Brooklyn.
Here we are 50 years after the coup that ousted Salvador Allende and la Unidad Popular on the occupied land of the Mapuche, Aymara, Rapanui, Likan Antai, Quechua, Colla, Chango, Diaguita, Kawésqar and Yagán, now known as Chile. Four and a half decades since you and I were born into a dictatorship, and 33 years of commemorating the event that brought international attention to the cornered country of the Americas.
We know the facts, the history, the anniversary of the Chilean coup. The fall of arguably the first democratically elected marxist government in the world is a meaningful moment. It is when an extreme form of capitalism was implanted by using extreme violence against the will of millions of people who were in search for a more equitable way of living via a pacific social process. The thousands of people killed, tortured, and disappeared remain as a foundational trauma that defines Chile.
If fifty years later, the coup of September 11 in Chile is still at the core of national history, what are the aesthetics, the words able to express that wound? Is there a recognizable narrative, maybe a genre of the coup, to talk about this collective trauma? In short, is Chilean literature able to verbalize the horror, the perplexity, the survival, and the Stockholm Syndrome implied in the fact that this society kept existing and functioning over 50 years without closure or justice?
There was a previous event that brought international attention to Chile, and it was the democratic election of Socialist President Salvador Allende. It is also his asassination by the army, backed up by many factions of Chilean society and by the United States, the event that is commemorated today. Once the military dictatorship ended in 1990, we have seen the emergence of a culture that has enshrined Allende and others, but especially Allende, as an icon for the politics of memory.
Since the seventies, as September approached, the cultural establishment in Chile discussed informally what was always a new attempt for “the big book” of Allende, “the definitive” novel of the coup, “the last word” regarding the stories about La Unidad Popular. The attempts have been numerous, but never a book of realistic, mainstream, elitist fiction was able to hit the nerve. No Dorfman, no Skármeta, no Lafourcade, no Fontaine novel could retell the structures of feeling of 1973; no Parra, no Lihn, no Teillier, no Zurita could sing the song of 1973. And yes, the patriarcal overtones of this list of names are not just coincidence. And yes, there are many other authors, authorities, to be added to this list every year with a book that says on its jacket something like (00:07):
“the final account of Chile’s decisive days”.
The memory of the coup permeates Chilean society as a whole, and this is the challenge for literature. Particularly as we remember how, despite the Truth Commissions, the social democratic governments, and the insufficient justice, there are still many voices that have been forced to accept the fact that the bodies and stories of their loved ones will never be recovered. We have learned to live within a massively tortured population. As readers, we have learned to expect that the best of our literature is a work of sublimation of the lost narratives.
When the 30 and 40 years of the coup were commemorated, writers were publishing about their childhood under dictatorship. In 2023, we have seen a surge of that as well. The themes are mainly about the blindspots of these children to see and react to the injustices happening everywhere. Nevertheless, new distinctions have also emerged. There are books being written about how the violence of the coup and its following regime was felt, actually felt, and became ingrained in the population and within our language. Gladys González’s recent volume is part of that move, for example. Lemebel, Diamela, and Donoso, the Chilean baroque triad, is another example of the volcanic depth of this inescapable wound. But there are other writers who are now coming forward about their complicity––known or unknown––with the privileges granted to their parents and families via the dictatorship. It is another kind of wound, and the stories of the sons and daughters of the Chilean right are muffled via literary devices. But still one can read their provenance from military families or families of pacos, cops, that may sustain their current access to discursive power.
Let me tell you a little story. Yesterday, Sunday September 10, I went with an American lover to watch the newly restored version of Patricio Guzmán’s La batalla de Chile, The Battle of Chile at our neighborhood film theater, BAM. I saw many people I know, other Chileans, coming out from the previous screening. One of them was a school classmate. We used to practice field hockey together, me hating that afterschool practice maybe more than her, which never befitted my intellectual interests. This is another way to say she made me feel a little better during those afternoons. But when our eyes met in Brooklyn, knowing we had originally gotten acquainted at an American school in Chile, with a clear class mark and a clear political leaning towards the right, what I saw was shame and disavowment. She saw me, she recognized me, of course, but she pretended she did not see me, unable to acknowledge her place of origin, and the origin of her privileges. It was shame I saw in her eyes.
When I read new novels by Chilean authors who come from similar backgrounds or from a middle class who worked for the right’s project, but who now identify as left-leaning, I read the aesthetic mark of that disavowment. In the 1980s, neobaroque aesthetics was used by left leaning writers living under the pressures of the dictatorship to avoid censorship. Today, writers use the polished language of mainstream realism to avoid history, and the pressures exerted by hegemonic culture and the needs of the market.
This publication phenomenon, the events, exhibitions, and performances have taken over Chile this year of the 50 anniversary of the fascist coup that installed State capitalism as the definition of Chile and its culture, and it has crossed borders. It is in fact a designed strategy by the current government to support events that deal with the memory of dictatorship, including a film by Pablo Larraín that has populated the streets of Santiago with an actor performing Pinochet. The numerous events happening in New York City as we speak, related to the coup, all featuring the line “the US backed coup,” give us a key to the literature of Chile 1973 (00:12):
the memory of the coup and the subsequent dictatorship is the main tragedy that put Chile and its artistic production on the world map, as a collective force beyond individual figures.
It is also true that every new Chilean administration during the postdictatorship has positioned itself around this issue (many of which, I might add, did this while blocking the access to real justice for the disappeared and their families). But the mark of the coup goes beyond that and it is similar to the tragedies that mark other countries of the global south and their “political tragedies” that become a specific context from where to read our artistic production. Artistic practices become legible through a recourse to memory.
You mention the postdictatorship. And to make it clear for our listeners, the postdictadura is a concept that is used to describe not only the period after Pinochet handed the power over, but a period in which the legal power and economic structures of the capitalist dictatorship are, or were, still in place.
They are still in place, let us remember, via the constitution.
Today the narratives of the coup go from the acceptable repressed, from the collectively elusive, from the proliferation of the biographical archive in generational auto fiction, to the official history. It may be that half a century is too big a number, it might be a cabalistic effect implied in the number 50, but the display of this politics of memory by Boric’s administration suggests that now it is convenient to write a historic intervention claiming the trauma is over. There are several political gestures —most of them a bit too late— that suggest the necessity of the government to be remembered in history as the government that finished the old building of the Chilean library of memory.
The institutionalization of the literature of the coup might also show a need to deflect the attention of the problems that this government faces (00:17):
hunger, climate crisis, deep social unrest, lack of a collective narrative that justifies the mere existence of the National State itself. Most importantly
I prefer to say that the postdictatorship didn’t start in 1990, after Pinochet handed out his position as President to a democracy under the constitution written by his partisan lawyers.
Do not forget that the Unidad Popular government was going to call, on September 12th, 1973, for a referendum to approve a marxist Constitution based on the universal rights of workers and labor. But, going a little further in time, the story of Chilean postdictatorship started with the general demonstration that lead to the ousting of the dictator because of his unpopularity.
The postdictatorship can also be said to have finished with the 2019 revolt. If so, let’s read the rumor of all those voices in the street not as an underground current, but as the most persistent literature of the coup (00:20):
every single Chilean literary collective since Pinochet, from la Unión de Escritores Jóvenes in the seventies a la Novísima in the two thousands, from el CADA y Las Yeguas y la Tribu No in the sixties, seventies, and eighties to Sangría y La Faunita and la Red de Escritoras in the 2010s, are grafitis in the walls of the old building of the Chilean library of the coup, which comprises all the big names that every year publish “the best book about the Pinochet years”.
It is important to mention all of this to understand the multiple commemorations that are happening today in New York City and around the world. Many of them are sponsored by the closed walls of academia. Others, in the small communities of Chilean political and economic exiles.
After watching Patricio Guzmán’s Battle of Chile, I understand how different it was to watch it in those DVD’s we had when we were still in Chile. I understand it as a necessary ritual to divest the hegemonic powers of the narratives of memory and remind us how we inhabit the ethical call made by Lotty Rosenfeld and Diamela Eltit when they painted NUNCA+ in the streets of Chile in the eighties. Or how we have failed to do so, by again handing over memory to a marketable brand that allows Boric to dress up with Allende’s glasses without ever attempting what he attempted in the 1970s (00:23):
to end neocolonial rule and change the economic structure of a country with precarized masses in a world of monolithic capitalism at war with difference.
This special episode of The Letter Podcast has been our own ritual to never forget and to live in a place made of places with no violence, with no coup, with no dictator that presides by force our narratives, but made of many stories that sing the beauty of a land that welcomes everybody who correspond them back.
This special episode of The Letter Podcast was recorded on September 11th, 2023, para que nunca más, for us to live in that moment of complete potentiality, and to manifest the fuerza written into our lives and books.
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