The Country Between Us, and: Santiago Poems (review)

124 the minnesota review Carolyn Forche, The Country Between Us. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. 59 pp. Cloth, $11.50; paper, $5.95. James Scully, Santiago Poems. Willimantic, Ct.: Curbstone Press, 1982 (2nd edition). 31 pp. Paper, $3.50. In 1977, friends of Claribel Alegría, the exiled Central American poet whose work Carolyn Forche had earlier begun to translate (and which is now available from the University of Pittsburgh Press under the title Flowersfrom the Vokano), invited Forche to El Salvador to "observe and document the worsening conditions." During extended visits there, she worked as a journalist and human rights investigator. Four years before, in midOctober 1973, James Scully arrived in Chile, via Mexico and Peru, and lived in downtown Santiago until the end of July 1974. By the time of Scully's arrival in Chile, the Pinochet-led junta had, of course, already crushed the demcoratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, and repression was well under way. In the streets of Santiago there was "not a soul left in sight"; "the greengrocer's on Merced/is shuttered up," and What few people are left are newspapers the wind blows over and over. ("Toque de Queda") Those who had to venture from their homes scurried back as quickly and as carefully as possible to whatever safety those homes could provide. Book burnings, purges, and large-scale executions provide the opening context for Santiago Poems. Even among those who had most opposed the Allende government, Pinochet's army was soon seen as army of occupation. In "Mummies" ("momio," or "mummy ," is common Chilean slang for "rightist"), Scully provides an ironic panorama of the devastation from the rightists' point of view: Because we attacked our factories (because they were manned by workers) we couldnt do an honest day's work. . . Because, at the State Technical University, professors refused to leave their desks we learned nothing by killing them but taught some students a lesson not one remembers. . . and when the National Stadium raised its colors as a concentration camp torture like soccer became a national sport. . . Because we fished odds and ends of bodies from the Mapocho. . . —bread lines withered, abundance came back on us In the style to which we had been accustomed again, we were free to live on our own flesh and blood. Though conditions favorable to the oligarchy and the transnational had been rein- 125 reviews troduced and "dreams of paradise" nightmarishly shattered, Scully insists on addressing reality without mythology or sentimentality: "If we had wings, roots, petals/we would not be men." That he presents the exploited in the wide range of their complexity is one of the strengths of the present collection. He has praise for the "high-spirited, enduring" men and women who resisted in their various ways, but he reminds us that, paralleling the decimated physical landscape, the dominant human emotion was that of fear, a fear leading to acquiescence : LISTEN THERE'S BLOOD, BUT BLOOD ISNT THE WORST THING ON EARTH what is, is people suffering their silence like sheep— who had only aspired to suffer as human beings ("Fascist Pastoral") And then there are those like Quena, who, with a daughter tortured and a son shot to death, has been broken to the extent that she . . .wants less than ever to be tossed and turned on dreams of paradise. ("Chain Smoking") (It is significant that "Quena" is also the name of the Chilean flute, the instrument symbolic of Chilean folk culture.) The last two poems in the collection, "Isa Mar" and "Guerrilla," are more introspective than the majority that precede them, as though the initial numbness had worn off, permitting a calmer perspective for observation and recollection than the previous months had allowed. Isabel Letelier is the subject of "Isa Mar," an extended, largely ruminative poem of praise and appreciation. And in "Guerrilla," there is a hint of guarded hopefulness despite the frustrations encountered by the active remnants of the left, now the rudiments of an organized resistance, as they attempt to cut through the atmosphere of fear, to win over again, in the hope of eventually reestablishing an environment "where life throbs and is shameless." Santiago Poems is not a...