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I returned
to literature, a vocation that had been incubating since high school,
when I resumed my studies in 1978, after a five-year interruption,
at the Austral University in Valdivia. It was there that I met Nelson
Schwenke and Marcelo Nilo. Nelson and I were classmates at the School
of Anthropology. Marcelo was a music student. I was 25; they were
21, 22.
Schwenke and Nilo were adolescents when they experienced the coup;
they were 13 and 14. They experienced it without a political consciousness.
In spite of our different life experiences and that small age difference
(which is more noticeable at that age), we were able to connect
on some levels. We agreed, for example, that we wanted to defend
freedom of expression and that we had to invent spaces to show our
art. Official spaces were forbidden to us. Between the option of
not doing anything (an option that many took, and legitimately)
and inventing alternative spaces, we chose the latter.
We could never perform out in the open, not on stages, not on television,
not on official radio stations. We had to build a large underground
network, supported by the Catholic Church, which gave us spaces
in its parishes, chapels, educational centers, schools. Within that
small margin of mobility the universities also played a very important
role. It was a risk because meetings or large gatherings could never
be controlled a hundred percent. Many times they’d cut off
the electricity during a performance, things like that. But even
without amplification or lights, the performance went on, a capella
and in the dark. We always had a response, almost mystical, from
our audiences: the youth, the students.
Most
of our poetry got to people through audiocassettes because of their
easy mobility, and to some degree, that dictated the style of our
work. The cassette carried our experience to the regions and provinces
far from Santiago and to the network formed by Chileans in exile
all over the world.
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Nelson
Schwenke, composer, lyricist, musician:
At
that time there was a penetration of Anglo music,
very distorting disco music, a total negation of folk
roots. We thought that kind of cultural imperialism
too brutal. It didn’t allow us to sing to the
city of Valdivia. We were Valdivians. Why couldn’t
we sing about the rain? So we talked about the rain,
but under the rain were feelings of people in the
middle of a difficult, adverse geographical context.
And people began to understand those messages, not
so much about rain, but certainly about the night
-- the dictatorship.
The university gave us spaces not realizing the consequences.
It even financed our first recitals, thinking it was
supporting just another university group. They didn’t
realize, nor did we, what those recitals meant in
the later organization of student centers. They were
innocently given out of a pressing need to express
ourselves, with no political consciousness. We were
very young. We did it because the university deprived
us of everything. We did it for our intellectual survival.
I am convinced that our generation was not conscious
of the importance that art had at the time. I think
we were like the men who painted their caves with
artistic images: they didn’t know what they were
doing, but knew it was necessary to do, to communicate.
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