Resistance as a Transnational Construct: The Intellectual and Marginalization in Varas’s El correo de Bagdad

Sketches scattered around a small apartment in Bagdad unite the lights of nightclubs and high-class restaurants with the smoky candles used by fishermen along the Tigris River, and reveal dark silhouettes against the bonfires on the banks. One image appears repeatedly amidst these: a cadaver being pulled from the river. This image haunts their painter and robs him of sleep; it is a communist activist and leader of a teachers’ organization who was stabbed to death by agents of Abdel Karim Kassem’s government in Iraq (1958–1963) although this was officially denied (Varas 165–167). Huerqueo, a Chilean Mapuche artist-turned-militant with the 1960s Kurdish autonomy movement, is the protagonist of José Miguel Varas’s 1994 novel El correo de Bagdad. The sketches, with their contrasting images that depict class conflict and economic stratification, correspond to the novel’s structure: a collection of letters from the 1960s, interpreted through their reading and publication by a Chilean journalist recently returned home from exile. In this article, I examine the novel’s representations of citizenship and the role of the Latin American intellectual in order to reconsider notions of marginalization and resistance to international processes of social and economic exclusion.

José Miguel Varas’s works navigate the complexities of social transformation during the mid- to late twentieth century. Gregory J. Lobo states in his thorough analysis of Varas’s narrative, “El gran logro de Porái es mostrar esta contradicción sistémica [capitalista del subdesarrollo en Chile] sin agotarse en ella…La meta es hacerla intolerable, pero al fin…superable” (146). Chacón (1968), Lobo says, provides another take on this social struggle: “culmina la trayectoria trazada a lo largo de los anteriores libros de Varas, en tanto que articula claramente una política narrativa del nacionalismo rojo” (149) through the representation of violence, solidarity, and principles (149–150). El correo de Bagdad builds on these earlier themes as it examines the Chilean situation through the eyes of a journalist-narrator prior to Pinochet’s coup d’état and upon his return from exile, but it also takes the discussion of Cold War politics beyond Chile’s national borders. Although the limited scope of this article prevents detailing the histories of the nations and periods he covers (1960s Iraq and Czechoslovakia, 1973 Chile, and 1990s Chile), I provide an overview below to aid comprehension and acknowledge that even though there are similarities, the historical processes at play may not simply be conflated.

The novel has a complex structure, alternating primarily between three characters’ comments. An unnamed Chilean journalist is the novel’s narrator. Over the course of the novel, this journalist-narrator describes his experience of Pinochet’s golpe de estado in 1973, and his return from exile in the early 1990s to formerly middle-class family and friends that now struggle to make ends meet. Through the journalist-narrator, the reader soon learns of another character, Huerqueo, whose story becomes intertwined with his. Immediately prior to the golpe, the journalist’s editor gives him a volume of letters written by Huerqueo, a Chilean Mapuche artist living in Iraq in the 1960s, to his uncle-in-law Josef, a Czechoslovak Jewish professor in Czechoslovakia; Josef has made annotations on the letters and then sent them to the newspaper. Thus, the storyline follows the parallel accounts of the journalist-narrator, Huerqueo, and Josef through politically turbulent times in Chile, Iraq, and Czechoslovakia. Each story informs the others, since they all offer commentary on the social consequences of political and economic processes; Huerqueo’s life in Iraq begins to weave itself into the journalist’s experience of pre- and post-dictatorship Chile, and both contrast with Josef’s relatively comfortable life in communist Czechoslovakia. Like the sketches described above, each section provides a snapshot for the reader that, combined on the same canvas, create an image of transnational and transtemporal marginalization and resistance.

Huerqueo’s life and politicization described in his letters and Josef’s annotations provide a source of inspiration to the disillusioned journalist-narrator returning from...