Come See the Blood in the Streets

Abstract

Few public figures are more convincing than Pablo Neruda when it comes to substantiating the possible relevance of poetry to the study — and conduct — of global politics. Nobel laureate, political activist and international diplomat, Neruda and his poems epitomise the Zeitgeist of an epoch, the ups and downs of a century whose spirit has come to define the passage into the next millennium. Between his early assignment as honorary consul in the colonial Far East of the late 1920s and his role as Salvador Allende’s ambassador to France in the early 1970s, Neruda wrote some three dozen volumes of highly influential poems. His extraordinary writings are perhaps matched only by the persistence and the audacity of his political engagement. He stood at the forefront of the fight against fascism and imperialism and he battled relentlessly for social equality in his native Chile. He spoke about gaps between North and South, rich and poor, about how the United Fruit Co. ‘disembarks,/ravaging coffee and fruits/for its ships that spirit away/our submerged lands’ treasures/like serving trays’.1 While exposing the undersides of the international political economy, Neruda never lost sight of the least privileged. Indeed, his writings were all about heeding whispers that risk drowning in the roaring engines of high politics: Meanwhile, in the seaports’sugary abyss,Indians collapsed, buried in the morning mist:a body rolls down, a namelessthing, a fallen number,a bunch of lifeless fruitdumped in the rubbish heap.2