| Saturday, May 2, 2009 10:39PM | | | | Images of Defiance | Posted By: Lyn Miller-Lachmann
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| Tags: defiance, human rights, Tienanmen Square, Liu Xiaobo, Sergio Ramirez, World Voices | Beneath a projection of the lone man standing in front of three Chinese tanks near Tienanmen Square, eleven readers and dozens of listeners came together at Joe's Pub to hear selections that spoke of resistance to oppression in all its forms. None referred specifically to the Chinese man, and absent (but present in everyone's mind) was China's prominent dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, held incomunicado since last December.
Deji Olukotun, who I noticed blogging in a corner, has already posted his highlights of the event, "Defiance: The Spirit of '89." My highlight was hearing Sergio Ramírez narrate the century of massacres in his beloved Latin America, from the 1928 slaughter of Colombian workers striking against the United Fruit Company up to the Dirty War in Argentina, with stops at the Izalco volcano in El Salvador (1932), the Massacre River between the Dominican Republic and Haiti (1937), and Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City (1968). Ramírez then told the story of his first days as a law student at the Universidad de León, in Nicaragua--while still a teenager he witnessed the murder of two of his best friends by Somoza's National Guard. That moment changed Ramírez forever, as he decided to devote the rest of his life to the struggle for justice. And with the image of his slaughtered friends in our minds, Ramírez read Pablo Neruda's poem "Los enemigos," with its haunting, repeated call for justice, "Pido castigo."
I began my three-day sojourn at the World Voices Festival with the bilingual reading of Ramírez's A Thousand Deaths Plus One, and the theme of photographs that contain within themselves an untold past, present, and future. I now end with the image of Ramírez himself standing underneath the photo of the unnamed Chinese man who for that brief moment stopped the tanks and gave us the image none of us will ever forget. | | | |
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The Massacres in Literature
The Latin American massacres to which Sergio Ramírez referred are the subjects of notable literary works. Here are a just a few:
1928--killing of farmworkers during a strike against the United Fruit Company in Colombia: Gabriel García Márquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude.
1932--massacre of Salvadoran peasants at the foot of the Izalco volcano: Claribel Alegria, Ashes of Izalco.
1937--massacre of Haitian guest workers in the Dominican Republic: Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones; René Philoctète, Massacre River.
1968--murder of students and bystanders in the Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City: Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico.
1976--the onset of the Dirty War in Argentina, in which 30,000 people "disappeared": Alicia Partnoy, The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina; Nora Strejilevich, A Single, Numberless Death; Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases.
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