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Journalism of Courage
On September 23, 1973, poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda breathed his last at the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago, the capital of Chile. He had been suffering from prostate cancer and the cause of death was said to be heart collapse.
Except, not everybody believed this. The timing seemed off — Neruda, who was a Leftist politician and diplomat, had died less than two weeks after a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet overthrew the socialist government of Neruda’s friend and ally President Salvador Allende.
Furthermore, Neruda’s driver Manuel Araya had said that the poet had called him a few hours before his death, worried because he had been injected in the stomach while asleep.
This spurred multiple investigations over the years with Neruda’s exhumed remains tested by experts in several countries. On Wednesday, a report on the study of his exhumed remains was presented.
On February 14, Neruda’s nephew Rodolfo Reyes told Spanish news agency EFE that the forensic tests had found that the poet had been poisoned. The Associated Press has reported that “Reyes said forensic tests carried out in Danish and Canadian labs indicated a presence of a great quantity of Cloristridium botulinum, which is incompatible with human life. The powerful toxin can cause paralysis in the nervous system and death”.
The New York Times received a summary of the experts’ report on February 16 and found that it confirmed that the bacteria was in Neruda’s body when he died. What the experts have been unable to determine was whether the poet had the bacteria due to eating contaminated food or if he had been injected with it. Neither could they distinguish whether it was a toxic strain of the bacteria. “The findings once again leave open the question of whether Mr. Neruda was murdered,” says NYT.
To appreciate the enduring interest in Neruda’s death, it is necessary to understand who he was. Neruda was one of Latin America’s greatest poets, whose words such as “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” and “If suddenly / you forget me / do not look for me, / for I shall already have forgotten you” gave voice to imaginations far beyond the region where his poems were read in the original Spanish.
Belonging to a modest family, he had reportedly sold his belongings in order to publish his first book, ‘Twilight’. In 1924, when Neruda was only 20, he published ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’, his collection that made him famous. This collection would become controversial because Neruda was accused of plagiarising Rabindranath Tagore’s Tumi Sandhyar Meghamala in his ‘Poem 16’. He would state, in later editions of the collection, that Poem 16 was a paraphrase of Tagore.
In a long career as a poet, Neruda was exposed to the chaos of the world as well as different styles of poetry. He was a person who took on dictators and fascists in his life and works, all the while writing about whatever stirred him. His subjects were his country, exile, love, politics, conflicts, class struggles, the Spanish Civil War and ordinary objects, such as ‘Ode to My Socks’. His greatest work is considered to be Canto General (General Song), an epic history of the Americas in verse.
Neruda spent many years as a diplomat and was posted in countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Spain and France. While he was in Spain, Neruda was drawn into the Spanish Civil War, when he became a supporter of the Republicans and was removed from his position. The Republicans surrendered to the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco. Neruda, then, worked towards saving thousands of refugees who fled Franco’s regime.
Neruda’s final posting was as Ambassador to France, from which he resigned in 1972 due to ill health. He kept writing about politics. Neruda’s last poem, against Pinochet’s coup, is said to have been written about a week before his death.
In recent years, there has been a reassessment of Neruda’s legacy. In his memoir, ‘Confieso Que He Vivido’ (I Confess That I Have Lived), published posthumously in 1974, Neruda talked about raping a Tamil woman who worked as a househelp for him during his diplomatic posting in Ceylon or present-day Sri Lanka, in 1929. The woman had ignored his advances and Neruda writes about taking a strong grip on her wrist and leading her to his bedroom. “The encounter was like that of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive….She was right to despise me,” he writes.
Another major argument against him is that the poet abandoned his wife and specially-abled daughter. Such revelations have led to anger, especially during the #MeToo movement in 2018. In colleges of Chile, Neruda was out for misogyny. In 2018, a plan to rename Santiago’s airport after Neruda was dropped.
