This has been a month of Santiago.\u00a0 I\u2019ve already been three times and intend to go a fourth before we head into June (yes time flies, no I don\u2019t want to put a number on the amount of time I have left).\u00a0 Twice were airport trips, to pick up and then drop off my boyfriend Brandon who just finished his study abroad in India.\u00a0 The other was a class field trip, on which Brandon got to come along.\u00a0 It was for my CIEE class, which is a history, film and literature course about Valpara\u00edso.\u00a0 Since we have talked a bit about Pablo Neruda, the iconic poet with a great affinity for Valpara\u00edso\u2019s ocean and way of life, we went to visit La Chascona, a home he built for his lover and future wife, Matilde Urrutia.\u00a0 In the afternoon we visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, devoted to the 1973 coup d\u2019etat and subsequent dictatorship under General Pinochet.<\/p>\n
There is a lot of background knowledge about Chilean history that I have picked up in my classes and just by living here, and so that combined with the language barrier made me into a sort of interpreter for Brandon.\u00a0 We were visiting Neruda\u2019s house because he was not just a poet, he was an activist and politician whose life was tied closely to the history of the country and whose death followed less than a month after the coup.\u00a0 We learned that his funeral turned into the first protest against the new regime, and we learned more about the Winnipeg, a boat in which Neruda helped transport 2,200 Spanish refugees from France to Valpara\u00edso.<\/p>\n
Neruda was communist, but regardless of one\u2019s political leaning, his outlook on poetry as an \u201cact of peace\u201d can inspire us all.\u00a0 Poetry, and other forms of art, are dangerous to dictators and are frequently the first things to be suppressed, censored, and burned.\u00a0 Especially during the first part of Pinochet\u2019s dictatorship, the country saw the assassination, kidnapping, and exile of some of its most famous artists and musicians.\u00a0 Discussions of art and politics are frequently inseparable.\u00a0 To me, this is an expression of the importance of artists, whether or not their work is political.\u00a0 We should never take our artists for granted, nor our own ability and freedom to create art.<\/p>\n
The Ramona Parra Brigade is a group of Chilean muralists who were forced underground with the beginning of Pinochet’s rule.\u00a0 As the began to paint once more, their slogan was “Contra la dictadura pintaremos hasta el cielo!” or, “We’ll paint against the dictatorship until we reach heaven!”\u00a0 It’s a sentiment that makes me want to pick up a paintbrush.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This has been a month of Santiago.\u00a0 I\u2019ve already been three times and intend to go a fourth before we head into June (yes time flies, no I don\u2019t want to put a number on the amount of time I … Continue reading