The Poet as Vanguard: Pablo Neruda and the Politics of the Global South

From Third World to New South

In a widely cited speech, in 2010 World Bank president Robert Zoellick pronounced the expression ‘Third World’ as dead. ⁶ This came with some delay. Strictly speaking, use of the term should have ceased more than 20 years ago, in November 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the end of the ‘Second World’, that of ‘actually existing socialism’. Without a Second World, is it possible to have a Third World? There is a lag between events and language, but, 20 years?

There are at least two reasons why the term ‘Third World’ had such a good run ever since Peter Worsley popularised it in 1964 with his now classic book The Third World: A Vital New Force in International Affairs. The expression captures well the condition of the post-colonial world in Africa, Asia and Latin America emerging at the time. Worsley, who held the first professorship in Sociology at the University of Manchester, spent part of Second World War in Africa and in India, and had first-hand knowledge of the changes taking place there. He did not like the ideological straitjacket imposed by the ideological divisions between East and West. He felt energised by what was happening in the South, as the colonial empires crumbled, and the Castros, Nehrus, Nkruhmas and Nyereres disposed of the debris left behind and embarked on the arduous task of nation-building. He was one of the very first Western social scientists to capture that what was happening there was giving new meaning to old movements like nationalism, populism and socialism.

The second reason is that no alternative term captured with the same precision and élan the true condition of the young nations. Other technocrats from the international financial institutions (IFIs) gave us, seriatim, a variety of terms—underdeveloped, developing, lower-income—each more anodyne than the other. Their blandness seemed to relegate the post-colonial nations to a mere footnote to the real History (with a capital H) being written in the First World.

The term ‘South’ was perhaps the one that came closest to substitute ‘Third World’. I still remember an excellent monthly magazine—alas, no longer in existence—published out of London in the 1980s and 1990s, entitled South, which took as its brief serious reporting on what happened in that part of the world—but perhaps because of its rather neutral, mere geographical connotation, never took on the way it should have. It also had the problem, as The Economist never ceased to remind us, that it left out, at least nominally, such heavyweights as China, India, Algeria and Egypt that happen to be located in the Northern Hemisphere. That is why the term ‘Global South’ took centre stage, and is in many ways the expression of choice these days, with its conceptual rather than strictly geographic umbrella. Its undisputed capital is New Delhi.

That said, the term ‘Global South’ does not do justice to the enormous changes that have taken place in the global political economy over the past two decades. Newly coined acronyms like BRICs, IBSA and BRICSAM reflect a whole new world that has been emerging before our eyes in the course of the past decade. What do they embody and where are they headed to? What should we make of them?

Truth is, the rise of China (since 1978) and India (since 1991) has led to the emergence of a very different setting from the one described by Worsley in his classic book. This has radically altered the terms of reference in which nation-states operate.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the new nations in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and to some extent the older ones in Latin America (seen by some as ‘the middle class of nations’, though never really fitting that somewhat pretentious category) were economically weak, highly dependent on trade and investment links with the North and resentful about the legacy of colonialism. Believing there was strength in numbers, they gathered in a vast array of entities, led by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Group of 77 at the United Nations. Speaking from weakness, they still banged on the table and engaged in the ‘diplomacy of the cahier des doléances’, with proposals like that of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), demanding massive transfers of resources from North to South. Though they sometimes found sympathetic ears up North (during the early years of the Carter administration in the US, and in documents like the Brandt Report), by and large they had little to back up their demands with (beyond their voting power in the United Nations General Assembly). They thus ended up empty-handed.

Over the past 20 years, and particularly over the past 10, this has changed. It is now a whole new ball game. With the rise of China and India, but also of Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and countries like Indonesia and Turkey, with fast-growing, large economies that speak from strength rather than weakness, the South does not ask for aid, but demands to be able to trade. It expects a greater voice at the IFIs, and a place at the high table of global governance. It wants access to Northern markets, and is able to hold out in terms of access to its own, if its demands are not met. In many ways, the lopsided relationship between China and the US, in which the latter, which has turned into the world’s largest debtor nation, has become largely beholden to the former, the world’s largest holder of US Treasury bills, is emblematic of this seismic change between North and South.

Moreover, Southern countries are no longer beholden to trade and investment ties with the North. They can also do that among themselves. Growth rates in many Asian nations are three times that of Western nations, while their debt-to-GDP ratios are often much lower than those of G8 members. Latin America emerged largely unscathed from the Great Recession of 2008–2009, one largely triggered by Wall Street, and whose most devastating repercussions were to be felt in Central and Eastern Europe.

There is, in other words, a New South that has emerged in this new century. It is already redrawing the boundaries and patterns of behaviour of the current international system. Yet, we still do not have an adequate language to express this new reality. Are we simply witnessing the replacement of some hegemons by others? Is it true, as Jorge Castaňeda has put it, that the BRICs are ‘not ready for prime time’, because they do not behave as North Americans and Europeans would like them to? Will, say, China and India simply replace the US as leading powers as we progress into what has been said will be the ‘Asian century’, or will they aim to bring up with them the ‘dispossessed of the Earth’ as they do so, doing their best that what was once referred to as ‘the Fifth World’, does not remain in that condition?

These are big questions, for which I don’t have any ready answers. My purpose in raising them, however, is to underline the degree to which it is not just analysis, but the very tools with which we undertake it, that is, words that are failing us. As the shape of the international landscape is shifting before our very eyes, we are often unable to capture what is happening by using a vocabulary that is mired in the past.

On the face of it, Neruda seems an unlikely candidate to be of help in this regard. The standard view of Neruda in some quarters is that of an unrepentant Stalinist, who wrote some interesting love poems in his youth, but was then the victim of ideology, which captured both his politics and his poetry, leading him astray. At a time when that ideology, that is, Marxism, has few takers, it would seem, at least at first sight, that there is little new that the Nerudian vocabulary can offer if we want to look at the twenty-first century with fresh eyes. Yet, this caricature—because that is what it is—does not do justice to Neruda’s enormous and multifaceted work. His membership in the Communist party is but one among many dimensions of an extraordinary life, ‘at once witness and participant in some of the major events of the 20^th century’, as The Washington Post Book World puts it.

Anachronistic or Contemporary?

It is in this context that we must re-examine Neruda’s language and his work, as well as his relevance (or lack thereof) for today’s South. Neruda himself was fully aware of the dangers that came with his direct, unvarnished style: Some people ask me that human affairs with names, surnames and laments not be dealt with in the pages of my books, not to give them space in my verses: they say poetry died here, some say I should not do it

Yet, he rejected such advice outright, out of his humanist convictions: With my lamp I search for those who fall: I soothe and close their wounds: those are the chores of the poet of the aviator and of the stonecutter: we should do something on this earth because we were born on this planet and we must arrange man’s society because we are neither birds nor dogs

His ‘Ode to Stalin’ is in many ways emblematic of the dangers he alludes to. No doubt, it would have been wiser for Neruda not to write it. Many fiction writers stay away from real names and actual events—they are not journalists, they say. Yet, Neruda’s poetic passion and his view of the role of the poet and of words themselves would not allow for such caution, for such prudence, The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth

As he saw it, …for human beings, not to speak is to die, [as] …cup and water and wine give rise to my song because the verb is the source and vivid life—it is blood, blood which expresses its substance and so ordains its own unwinding

More significant than Neruda’s misguided admiration for Josef Stalin is the broader perspective from which he wrote and sang. What makes him special is the extraordinary combination of humble origins (the son of a provincial railway worker, raised in a small town), born in a country finis terrae, who, defying all expectations, witnessed some of the key events of the twentieth century, and painted them with words so forceful and bright that they are still with us. This he did from a certain viewpoint—that of the downtrodden and the underprivileged, as he dwelt on the depths of injustice, poverty, inequality and oppression that are the hallmark of our world, then and now. To disqualify him, as Paz did, because of his membership in the Communist party is to embrace the opposite perspective—that of the North, rather than the South—and to adopt the view that the main cleavage in the world was (and in some ways is) between East and West rather than between North and South. It is the equivalent of attempting to disqualify Picasso’s work, according to some, the leading artist of the twentieth century, for the same reason.

Around the world, Neruda is often known as the ‘poet of the people’. He wrote for those without a voice, those who needed a speaker. In his own words, ‘my poetry has the quality of an organism—infantile when I was a boy, juvenile when I was young, desolate when I suffered, combative when I had to enter the social struggle’. ⁷

The latter viewpoint was given particular force by Neruda’s distinct style of writing. In response to a question about the symbolism of doves and guitar in an interview with the Paris Review, Neruda answered,

The dove signifies the dove and the guitar signifies a musical instrument called the guitar… When I see a dove, I call it a dove. The dove, whether it is present or not, has a form for me, either subjectively or objectively—but it doesn’t go beyond being a dove. (Gilbert 1971)

The directness with which he described the nature that surrounded him—Chile’s perhaps most distinct feature is its dramatic geography, from the driest desert in the north, to the icebergs-filled fjords and channels of Patagonia in the south—also expressed itself in his portrayal of society and history. He wrote what he saw, what he experienced, in his eloquent, magical way.

One reason Neruda wrote of and to the marginal in society is because he identified with them—for much of his life he was one of them. Born in Parral, a small town in Central Chile, he was taken, still a baby, to Temuco, in Chile’s deep south (‘from the dusty breast of my fatherland, I was taken, speechless, to the rains of Araucanía’ ⁸ ). The son of a railwayman, and baptised as Ricardo Eliezer Neftalí Reyes Basualto, he would be marked forever by the landscape and the surroundings of the country’s lake region, which he would often describe as Chile’s Far West. It was his upbringing there, surrounded by woods, rivers and lakes, and very different from that of a city boy, that would trigger his life-long fascination with Mother Nature in its manifold expressions. As he puts it himself, Nature there gave me a sort of drunkenness. I must have been ten years old, but was already a poet. I did not write verses, but I was attracted to birds, beetles, partridge’s eggs. ⁹

While still in his teens, he started publishing poetry, and by age 16, he took on the pseudonym Pablo Neruda to sign his work, which earned him many accolades and prizes.

From Chile’s deep south, and after overcoming many obstacles (his father would throw out his poetry literally out the window of their Temuco home), he managed to make it to Santiago, the capital, to start his university studies. At age 20, he published Twenty Poems of Love and a Desperate Song, the love poem that launched his literary career, and made him instantly into Chile’s most popular poet.

His years as a university student at the University of Chile’s Pedagógico (the Faculty of Education, known as a hotbed of radicalism) were also critical in shaping his political outlook, as students joined striking miners in demonstrations in downtown Santiago. As he puts it, It is from that moment on that, intermittently, politics joined my passion and my life. It is not possible to shut the door to the street in my poems, much as it is not possible to shut the door to love, to life, to joy or to sadness in the heart of a young poet ¹⁰

His rebelliousness and contrarian spirit was cast from early on. ¹¹ However, despite his early successes, Neruda had great difficulty in making ends meet. His memories of his college days are full of harebrained schemes on how to make some money, ultimately dropping out altogether of the University of Chile, where he was studying French, in keeping with his love of French poets like Rimbaud.

Eastern Sojourn

It was then that he would shake loose, for a second time, from his surrounding environment and place himself in a totally new and alien one. Much as his move from Temuco to Santiago had allowed him to exchange the depressing setting of provincial life in a small town in Chile’s deep south, for the somewhat more stimulating one of the country’s capital, with its bohemian—albeit small-bore—literary scene, and active student politics, he now looked to the wider world.

In some ways, his efforts to join the diplomatic service were a fuite en avance, a way of getting a job, any job, even if thousands of miles away from his beloved Chile. And one reason he succeeded in getting the position of consul ad honorarium in Rangoon is because there was not that much competition for it—as the name indicates, the job entailed no regular salary, only a commission when ships came by to collect Chile-bound merchandise, which was not very often. ¹²

His five years (1927–1932) in Asia—in Rangoon, Colombo, Batavia and Singapore—were thus not easy, with little money, all by himself, in unfamiliar surroundings. It was there that he wrote the bulk of what some consider to be one of his major works, Residence on Earth. As a newly arrived consul in Burma, Neruda was eager to learn about the local mores and customs, and keen to ‘absorb the spirit of the Orient and ancient way of life’ (Goodnough 1998, 41). Yet, from the start, British colonial officials and businessmen warned him about ‘crossing rigid class lines’ (ibid.). Living in Rangoon was a ‘living cosmorama of rapaciousness, oppressive colonialism, solitude’ (Bloom 1989, 75). He witnessed the stark social chasm and inequality of wealth and income between the British and the Burmese, and described it as two separate worlds that ‘never touched’, as ‘the natives were not allowed in the places reserved for the English, and the English lived away from the throbbing pulse of the country’.

Three words describe Neruda’s experience in Rangoon: poverty, boredom and solitude. As he puts it in a letter to his sister, ‘life in Rangoon is a terrible desert; I was not born to spend my life in such a hell’ (Olivares 2000, 106). Besides calling Rangoon a ‘hell’ on several occasions, due to the intolerable heat as well as the colonial oppression, he also witnessed the caste system, in which ‘they had classified the Indian population as if in a parallel coliseum of superimposed galleries, on whose top the gods sat’ (Olivares 2000, 84).

During his first year in Burma, he composed a poem, Rangoon 1927, noting both the social inequality and the racial discrimination: In Rangoon it was late for me Everything had been done: a city of blood, dream and gold. The river that came down from the savage jungle to the hot city, to the streets filled with leper where there is a hotel for white people and a golden temple for golden people that was all that happened and didn’t happen Rangoon, wounded steps by the betel spittings from the Burmese virgins squeezing naked the silk… (Antología Fundamental, p. 417, translated by the author)

Neruda spoke neither English nor Burmese, and solitude became the favourite topic of his poetry at the time. He was miserable, which is reflected in Residence on Earth. Neruda’s longing for the Spanish language went so far as to ask his friend, the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, to send him a dictionary, as he feared ‘losing contact with my own language’. ¹³ Poetry thus served several purposes—to conserve his ties to his roots and the Spanish language, to express his observations of a seemingly cruel, pitiless world, and to escape from the harsh alienation and solitude of his surroundings.

In stark contrast to what is sometimes described as his carefree diplomatic life in the ‘exotic Orient’, Neruda’s years in Burma, enduring unbearable heat, observing the seamier side of British colonialism and feeling utterly ostracised, were among the most difficult in his life, something reflected in his poetry, and in his letters. As he puts it in one of them, Those intolerant Europeans were not interesting and, after all, I had not come to the Orient to spend my life with transient colonizers but rather with the ancient spirit of that world, with that large, hapless human family. (Feinstein 2004, 59)

In letters to Enandi, he describes his frequent desire ‘to throw yourself into the sea every five minutes’ (cited in Teitelboim 1991, 129), yet, there is little doubt that it gave him an appreciation of the ordeal of the oppressed. In his memoirs, he describes how the division between the worlds of the British and that of the Asians ‘ensured an inhuman isolation, a total ignorance of the values and lives of the Asians’ (Feinstein 2004, 67).

At the time, poetry on the Orient tended towards the exotic and mysterious, but Neruda was reluctant to be drawn into that approach: I am in no hurry to write about India and about Burma and Ceylon, because many things and origins seem to me veiled and many phenomena still unexplainable. Everything appears to be in ruins and tearing itself apart, but the truth is that strong elementary and living ties unite these appearances with almost secret and imperishable links. (cited in Dawes 2006, 106)

A fascinating issue is the ambivalence Neruda felt towards the Indian Congress movement—on the one hand, he couldn’t but sympathise with its objectives and goals. On the other, during his visit to the All India Congress Committee meeting in Calcutta in 1929, ‘the vast crowds only added to his developing feelings of alienation and loneliness’. Asked about his exposure to India, he replied, My stay there was an encounter I wasn’t prepared for. The splendor of that unfamiliar continent overwhelmed me, and yet I felt desperate, because my life and my solitude there were so long. Sometimes I seemed locked into an unending Technicolor picture, a marvelous movie, but one that I wasn’t allowed to leave. I never experienced the mysticism which guided so many South Americans and other foreigners in India… I was immensely moved by the sociological conditions—that immense unarmed nation, so defenseless, bound to its imperial yoke. Even the English culture, for which I had a great predilection, seemed hateful to me for being the instrument of the intellectual submission of so many Hindus at that time. I mixed with the rebellious young people of that continent; in spite of my consular post, I got to know all the revolutionaries—those in the great movement that eventually brought about independence. ¹⁴

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Neruda looks back on Asia as an almost necessary learning experience where he learns ‘through other people’ that ‘there is no insurmountable solitude’. Through his ‘solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence’, he is then able to ‘reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance…in this dance…there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny’.

‘Brown America’

Much as in Asia Neruda became acutely aware of his ‘otherness’, his return to Chile in 1932, while not necessarily solving his eternal economic problems (being made a ‘librarian in a library which didn’t exist, with a salary that also hardly exists’ [Feinstein 2004, 84]). A posting to Buenos Aires in 1933 provided welcome relief, and he felt very much at ease in the great metropolis on the Río de la Plata, though not for long, as he was quickly transferred to Madrid, where he soon witnessed the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. It is in these years that his sympathy for the oppressed started to express itself in a direct communication with the people. As so many of his generation, the Spanish Civil War left a deep mark on him, redefining his mission as a poet and as a human being. ¹⁵ Upon returning to Chile in 1937, he began to give poetry readings to working class audiences across the country. In particular, his readings to the Santiago porters’ union became, according to Neruda himself, ‘the most important event in my literary career’ (Feinstein 2004, 132). It was at this moment that Neruda found his calling to be the voice for the ordinary man. While standing in front of the members of the porters’ union, who emanated the ‘Chilean silence…the heaviest silence in the world’, he read from his collection España en el Corazón. At the end, the union leader stood up, and, according to Neruda, ….got up, leaning with his large hands on his chair, looked at me and said: ‘Comrade Pablo, we are a totally forgotten people. And I can tell you that we have never been so greatly moved. We would like to say to you…’ And he broke down in tears, his body trembling with the sobs. Many of those around him were also crying. I felt a knot form in my throat. (Feinstein 2004)

From then on, Neruda felt a bond, a sense of empathy, a need to represent the common man and committed himself to making the working class ‘his readers, not the intellectuals’ in order ‘to reach out to ordinary people’; he now ‘wrote for them’ (ibid.).

Shortly thereafter, in 1940, he began his Canto General, his ode to Latin America—its history, its geography, its injustices. It started as an ode to Chile: Night, snow and sand give shape to my narrow fatherland all the silence is to be found in its long line all the foam comes out of its marine beard all the coal fills it with mysterious bags

Chile’s odd geography had always enchanted Neruda, and this is especially true of his beloved South. Yet, suddenly, he started to paint Chile within the broader canvas of the Americas. His next diplomatic posting, to Mexico, allowed him to fuse seamlessly his professional and literary undertakings. In Mexico City, often described as Latin America’s cultural capital, and in association with fellow artists, such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Neruda thrives, articulating and elaborating his poetic take on subjects, such as, colonialism, imperialism, underdevelopment and, perhaps most significantly, the meaning of Latin American identity (whose very existence is increasingly questioned today by the same who would have us believe Neruda’s ‘political’ works should be banished from our reading lists).

As a poet and as a writer, Neruda was a witness, someone who testifies to the injustices he sees. But far from being the pamphleteer he is often accused of being, he wrote from the heart with such brio that his verses and cadences resonate to this day. He was fascinated by Mexican culture, a country he saw as ‘the last of the magic countries, because of its age and its history’ and frowned upon the ‘false image of the Mexican in sombrero’. He considers Mexico as ‘the touchstone of America’ and praises it for having ‘carved’ the ‘solar calendar of Ancient America, the node of irradiation, wisdom and mystery’. Not surprisingly, his Canto General de América has been described as the poetic equivalent of the murales painted by Rivera and Siqueiros, given its force, colour and epic character. But the Canto is not just a description of the New World’s vast expanses. It is also a call for action, We write for a continent in which everything is being made, and, above all, in which we want to make everything. Our peoples are only now learning their professions and their trade, or at least recovering them. Our old stonecutters, sculptors and potters were almost exterminated by the Conquista. Our cities need to be built. We need houses and schools, hospitals and trains. We want to have everything. We are nations made up of simple folk, that are learning to build and to read. It is for those people that we write. ¹⁶

Neruda travelled to Panama, Colombia, Peru and the US while assembling material for the Canto General. His portrayal of the Americas showed lands of great diversity and striking natural beauty, yet oppressed by censorship, violence and discrimination, as he tried ‘to fill with words the vast empty spaces of South America’, I am here to tell the story. From the peace of the buffalo to the pummeled sands of the land’s end, in the accumulated spray of the antartic light

And in an almost encyclopaedic effort, in some ways so contrary to the poetic craft, he goes on to describe rivers and birds (‘the condor, murderous king, solitary monk of the sky, black talisman of the snow, hurricane of falconry’) mountains and volcanoes, countries and dictators. His most impassioned pleas go for the tragic fate of the Amerindians—most eloquently in his ‘Heights of Macchu Picchu’, Come to my very being, to my own dawn, into crowned solitudes. The fallen kingdom survives us all this while. And on this dial the condor’s shadow cruises as ravenous as would a pirate ship.

He also took on that classic Latin American figure—the dictator. While imbibing the natural beauty of Guatemala, the most striking of all countries on the Central American Isthmus, he also became acquainted with the horrors of the Jorge Ubico dictatorship, where ‘walls had ears’, and four machine guns were aimed at Neruda without his knowledge, at a public reading of his poetry.

On the Americas, Neruda is both liberating and empowering: yes, the Spanish conquistadores did their best to destroy the pre-Columbian civilisations; yes, dictators of various stripes may be oppressing them right now. But there is a way out, and in due course the people will write their own history and recapture their own Latin American identity. At a time when Bolivian president Evo Morales has become the first Amerindian elected head of state in South America, history is being rewritten in the Americas, much along the lines Neruda envisioned.

Neruda is especially eloquent on the relations between Mexicans and Chileans, the nationals of the countries at the two extremes of the continent, As Mexicans and Chileans, we meet only in our roots, and that’s where we should look for each other—in our roots’ hunger and dissatisfaction, in the search for bread and truth, in our same needs, our same anxieties—yes in earth, in our origins, and in our earthly struggle in where we mix all our brothers, With our slaves of hunger, with all the poor of the world. ¹⁷

In his travels around the continent, he also came across the despoliations of big business, particularly that of US corporations, memorably immortalised in his verses on United Fruit—a company so infamous it had to change its name, United Fruit reserved for itself the juiciest the central seaboard of my land America’s sweet waist. It rebaptized its lands the ‘Banana Republics’, upon the restless heroes who conquered renown freedom, and flags, it established the comic opera: it alienated self-destiny regaled Ceasar’s crowns. unsheathed envy, drew the dictatorship of flies: Trujillo flies, Tacho flies, Carias flies, Martínez flies, Ubico flies, flies soaked in humble blood and jam, drunk flies that drone over the common graves, circus flies, clever flies versed in tyranny. Among the bloodthirsty flies the Fruit Co. disembarks, ravaging coffee and fruits for its ships that spirit away our submerged land’s treasures like serving trays.

The parallels between the role of companies, such as United Fruit, in Central America and that of British companies in Burma are not difficult to see, and Neruda did not miss them. Be it in Asia, in Mexico, in Central America or in his native Chile, where visiting the homes of some miners in northern Chile, at Humberstone, Neruda described how his ‘heart is still shuddering with the memory of the poverty of those camps’, believing that he had ‘come into contact with the poorest, most desperate people in the whole of Chile’ (Feinstein 2004, 180).

As he struggled with the seemingly inchoate material of the many centuries of history of the vast continent, Neruda does not cease to be amazed by it all, …there is no anti-poetic material when it comes to our realities. The most obscure facts of our peoples must be brought to light. The stories of our plants and our flowers must be, for the first time, told and sang to. Our volcanoes and our rivers have been left in the empty spaces of texts. Their fire and their fertility must be brought to the world by our poets. We are the chroniclers of a delayed birth. Delayed by feudalism, by backwardness, by hunger. But this is not just a matter of preserving our culture, but to sustain it with all our strength, to nurture it and to make it flourish. ¹⁸

Driven by the passion of such experiences, Neruda attempts to create a Latin American identity based on shared experience. He points to the ‘shared roots’ of countries as distant and as different as Chile and Mexico. He searches for a national culture based not on imported mores from Europe and from the US, but on the roots and origins of ‘brown America’. As Comprone puts it, Neruda goes ‘past mere postcolonial critique of the imperialistic designs of Western Europe and North America and emphasizes the forging of a new Latin American self-consciousness through a poetic praxis’ (Comprone 2008, 33).

By Way of Conclusion

Far from being an anachronistic relic of the Cold War, Neruda’s work shines as brightly today as it did half a century ago, be it in Chile, in India or in the US. At a time when Asia, and particularly the two Asian giants, that is, China and India, have come into their own, leading some to say that this will be the Asian century, and Latin America, undergoing a boom of its own, is partnering with Asian nations to forge a better future for its people, Neruda’s insights into Asia’s awakening and ‘our America’s’ destiny resonates. Rather than a throwback to an irrelevant past, Neruda’s work opens a window to the future. His Eastern sojourn, difficult as it was, personally and professionally, allowed him to understand the suffering and the predicament of colonial peoples everywhere. He captured the underlying force of India’s millenarian civilisation and the enormous energy and creative potential to be unlocked once unshackled from the colonial yoke. These realisations, in turn, made it possible for him to see the Americas in a different light—not as a mere European outpost in the Western Hemisphere, as many of his contemporaries did, but one with its own pre-Columbian roots and an identity markedly different from the Old World.

At a time when both Asian and Latin American leaders and peoples, who know so little of each other, struggle to come to terms with the fact that goods and capital flows across the Pacific are bringing both regions closer than ever before, we can do worse than read and re-read Pablo Neruda.