Speaking to the People

THE THING TO remember about Chile is that for a while at least, it seemed as though the poor people of the world could build a humane society--a country which they would own and where they could live freely--without needing to use violence and without a violent break with the past, and it seemed that the people who'd always held power might let them get away with it.

Even at the time, it was hard to get a feel for exactly what life in revolutionary Chile was like. American newspapers always gave far more play to marches by disgruntled middle-class housewives than to those of the people who'd elected Salvador Allende, and today, when only the soldiers can march and the people who elected Allende are silenced once more, the only news stories you can find tell about new waves of repression, coupled with new, albeit startlingly familiar boasts by the generals who rule Chile that the country is saved because the ships now run on time. But even if American newspapers had covered Chilean politics impartially from the beginning, it wouldn't be enough to understand what they were about, because life goes deeper than politics. And great historic revolutions, if they're really revolutions and not just epicycles, cut deeper than politics too, more widely and more piercingly.

Luckily, a few English-speaking commentators treat social change with understanding--David Kunzle, a British art historian who spoke and showed slides of Chilean art at Carpenter Center last week, was the most recent one in these parts--and it's possible to get from them at least a less distorted picture of some of the aspects of the Chilean revolution with which American newspapers never dealt.

For example, there were the Ramona Para brigades. Ramona Para was a Chilean worker killed during an earlier period of social unrest, and the brigades were groups of Communists, mostly workers, who went around painting murals in the cheapest paint they could buy because that way it cost them less and because they didn't care if the murals faded; the next day the murals would already be a day old and new ones could always be painted anyway. The five other parties in Allende's Popular Unity coalition had brigades of their own to paint murals, but the Communists did it most and best, perhaps because they cared more than the Socialists or maybe even the Christian Left about conciliating the middle class, about persuading everyone with a brain and pair of eyes in his head that Popular Unity meant unshackling the spirit as well as the body politic of Chile.

The murals the Communists painted shone with bright colors and sharp outlines, something like posters by Leger or Picasso. According to Kunzle, more than anything else, images of reconciliation, birth, and growth filled the murals, and images of children, because Popular Unity always stressed the past suffering and limitless future potentiality of children, born perhaps in rotting shantytowns but growing maturity with a government determined to abolish shantytowns for the future. The brigades painted murals on walls, on public buildings, outside municipal swimming pools, in a happy and sometimes even erotic style that owed something not just to Leger and Picasso and the professional artist who occasionally joined in because he supported Popular Unity, but also to the pop art and comic books of the United States.

Popular Unity published comic books of their own, too. For instance, there was Superkid, a foolish-looking but brave boy whose powers included flight, except for once in awhile when he faltered because he hadn't eaten enough fish. Traditionally, Chileans have looked unfavorably on fish, although many Chileans fish for a living, as they would almost have to in such a skinny country with such a long coastline. So Allende's government wanted people to respect fishing more and to eat more fish. One of its best posters showed a sunburned, sadlooking young man with a squarish head and a squarish skinny body staring quizzically at a huge square fish.

As soon as Superkid could fly again, he went off to beat up some of the shopkeepers he'd heard were hoarding food and causing the shortages that had middle-class housewives--and poor people, too, though under previous governments, before redistributive inflation through wage increases and price controls, many of them would have done without altogether--queueing up for meat and other goods or even not finding them at all. Superkid's friends tried to explain to him that it wasn't the small shopkeepers who were hoarding goods, and that he couldn't accomplish anything without everyone else's help, so he just flew off to beat up some of the big capitalists instead. It takes Superkid a long time to learn that individual action, even by someone as brave as he is, isn't enough to change things, but he finally goes back to school and the teacher sends him to the corner for being late.

Superkid isn't available in Chile any more, and the artists who joined the Ramona Para brigades because they believed art could speak to everyone will have to go back to speaking to a small, elite audience. In the days after September's coup soldiers went through Santiago whitewashing walls as well as burning books and killing people they disliked. One of the 6000 prisoners in the National Stadium after the coup was a pro-Popular Unity singer, a man named Jarra. An officer in the stadium took a hatchet and cut off Jarra's fingers, according to a purportedly eyewitness account Kunzle reads, and Jarra fell to the ground. The officer kicked him. "Now sing, you motherfucker," he said. Jarra stumbled to his feet, said, "Comrades, let's give the bastards what they want," and, beating time with what was left of his hands, began to sing a revolutionary song. The 6000 prisoners joined in, and the officer shot him dead.