New Deserts of Chile: Raúl Zurita’s Atacama Forms

During the seventeen years of the Pinochet dictatorship, thousands of Chileans were detained and, for many, executed and buried in the Atacama Desert. Daniel Borzutzky approaches this murderous history of the desert through the poetry of Raúl Zurita, whose words (at times, inscribed in the very land) honored those who died resisting the military rule. All translations from Spanish are by Daniel Borzutzky, unless otherwise indicated.

As I try to honor my invitation to write about deserts in Raúl Zurita’s poetry, I am overcome by excess. Everywhere in his oeuvre there are deserts. From his work written in the 1970s and 80s through his poetry of the last few years, the desert appears as pasture; mutable landscape in the sky or sea; receptacle for discarded bodies; prison and torture site; script on which he famously engraved into the earth the poem “Ni Pena, Ni Miedo” (“No Shame Nor Fear”), a poem so vast it can only be seen in its entirety from the sky; utopian ideal; locus of regeneration; nationalist fantasy; and fascist horror show.

Zurita was born in 1950 in Chile and has spent his life there. He grew up in Santiago and moved to the port city of Valparaiso to study engineering, a degree he never completed. On September 11, 1973, he and many of his classmates were arrested on the day of the military coup. He spent six weeks in brutal conditions on a military ship overcrowded with prisoners. Since 1973, he has written, with an indefatigable focus, about the myriad ways the Pinochet dictatorship destroyed Chilean society, and how this destruction is interlaced with transhistorical and transnational systems of violence and economics. Remarkably, and at great personal danger, he did this work during the seventeen years of dictatorship, and into the endless and still ongoing “transition” from dictatorship to democracy.

In overthrowing Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist president in the Americas, the Pinochet dictatorship, with the assistance of the Nixon administration, radically transformed Chilean society into a country of terror. Arresting, torturing, murdering, and disappearing countless Chileans, the Pinochet dictatorship created a state ruled by fascism and authoritarianism. At the same time, these fascistic tactics were used to transform Chile into the testing ground for the newly-formed, neoliberal ideas created by Milton Friedman and the so-called Chicago Boys, a cohort of economists from the University of Chicago. In fact, a generation of conservative Chilean economists, through an international recruitment program sponsored by the U.S. State Department, were trained at the University of Chicago. When the coup took place, they quickly produced Pinochet’s economic plan and took up important posts in his government. Through the de-nationalization of natural resources, the privatization of public education and healthcare, the decimation of labor unions and community social networks, and the redistribution of wealth from the working class to the wealthy, the dictatorship sought to rid the country of the “cancer” of communism and to replace it with authoritarian neoliberalism. The Chicago Boys preached that a government that provided welfare benefits and social services was evil; and that the free market must be unregulated so that individual freedoms can flourish through competition and meritocracy. However, their economic policies were largely failures: the free market did not create the more equal society the Chicago Boys envisioned. Rather, it amplified poverty, and instituted failed systems of privatized education and healthcare. And it needed murderous authoritarianism to keep these policies in place. Even after the transition to democracy in 1990, Pinochet’s economic programs have remained. Anger about the failed neoliberal model led to the massive Chilean street protests of 2019 and the unsuccessful referendum to adopt a new constitution in 2022. 

Returning to the years of the dictatorship, one of Zurita’s most powerful books is Canto a su amor desaparecido (Song for His Disappeared Love), published in Chile in 1985, in the heart of the dictatorship years. The book consists of one visually and performatively experimental poem that dared to say out loud what everyone in the country knew, yet could not say publicly: that the dictatorship was torturing, murdering, and disappearing Chileans, that the dictatorship had created architectures of murder, disappearance, and torture; and that the military was frequently dumping Chileans into mass graves, or tossing them from airplanes into, as the poem’s refrain reminds us, “the rocks, the sea and the mountains.” In 1985, long before Chileans could speak openly about their reality, Zurita understood that these atrocities needed to be articulated if the country were ever to heal.

To paraphrase something Zurita once told me in an interview, the desert, the rocks, the sea, and the mountains were much kinder to the murdered bodies than the government who obliterated them. The landscape enclosed them, preventing them from disappearing again. 

This moment from Song for His Disappeared Love says it better than ever I could. The speaker is in a prison camp, narrating his torture and survival:

—I looked for you in the darkness but the little beauties could see nothing beneath

—the bandage on your eyes.

—I saw the Virgin, I saw Satan and Mr. K. 

—Everything was dry in front of the concrete niches.

—The lieutenant said “let’s go,” but I searched and cried for my boy….

—Damnit, said the Lieutenant, we’re going to bleed a bit.

—My girl died, my boy died, they all disappeared.

Deserts of love. 

In the preface to the English translation by Anna Deeny of his debut book Purgatorio (originally published in 1979), Zurita describes his fusion of poetry and landscape like so:

 “It seemed to me then that the great imprints of human passion, of our suffering, as well as a strange perpetuity and survival, are reflected in the landscape. None of the poetic forms I knew, nothing, could help express this. From there, I think, emerged the need to use other registers, such as mathematics…or visual forms or documents.”

            THE DESERT OF ATACAMA IV

i.   The Desert of Atacama is nothing but pastures 

ii.  Look at those sheep run across the desert pastures

iii.  Look at their very dreams bleat over there throughout those   

       infinite pampas

iv.  And if you don’t listen to the sheep bleat in the 

      Desert of Atacama then do we become the pastures 

      of Chile so that everywhere    all over the world    

      all over the country you listen now to your own souls 

      bleat throughout those miserable desolate deserts 

(Purgatorio, trans. Anna Deeny Morales, 1979)

Zurita has explained these mathematical or philosophical forms as extensions of his studies in engineering. He creates poems that are systematically rigid, evoking claustrophobic structures of imprisonment. In this sense, form and content cohere. However, Zurita complicates this logical coherence by filling these forms with surreal dreamscapes, landscapes, and nationscapes, whose borders are always shifting into worlds where “the plains of Nagasaki and Hiroshima pass before the Chilean sky;” where the death camps of Auschwitz are situated at the base of the Andean cordillera; where the sea is in the sky and the mountains are in the sea. In other words, political, historical, and ecological atrocities converge. In Zurita’s poetics, these transhistorical and transnational disfigurations are impressed (as in pressed into) not just upon the bodies of those who are imprisoned, tortured, and murdered, but also impressed upon the entire earth. Ecological damage, a new logic of ecology, is inevitable. The earth must bear the scars of what happens when humans decide to destroy each other.  

 In “The Deserts of Atacama IV,” the numerical structure reveals a desert that no longer has sand, which is now filled with dream-bleating sheep heard all over the world, sheep that reveal our own selves, our own suffering, and who, if ignored, will force us to confront the illusion that the desert is something other than the “miserable desolate desert.” Of course, during the dictatorship, the miserable desert housed concentration camps, such as the one in Chacabuco, a town of abandoned saltpeter mines in the northern Atacama, which became one of the most brutal sites of imprisonment, murder, and torture; or Pisagua, another prison site, on a bay in the Atacama, where “a mass grave was discovered in June [1990], containing 20 extraordinarily well-preserved bodies identified as those of leftists taken prisoner after the 1973 military coup […].The desert soil, rich in minerals, mummified the corpses. Clothing and flesh remained intact, with bullet holes clearly visible. Many still wore blindfolds, and their hands were tied” (Los Angeles Times, 1990).

While Zurita’s poetics have always been centered in Chile, it’s important to emphasize that his reach extends across the Americas to highlight interconnections of historical violence, and to articulate shared visions of solidarity, as in the poem below, which takes its title from one of Zurita’s most famous artistic interventions, “La Vida Nueva,” a poem written with an airplane in the sky over New York City in 1982.

                              MY GOD IS DREAM    MY GOD IS      MY LOVE
OF GOD

Then the new deserts appeared    lying over the sea

Silent    just like giant cities of thirst swept up by the wind    

fluttering    desiccated     rising with the new day 

Covering the sky with the seas of ash and sand that the dream 

called the ex deserts of Atacama    ex deserts of Nazca    ex 

deserts of Sonora     lying     above 

Watching the obliterated cities of the dawn float I say to PW 

that these are the new deserts:  desert U 24:  ex Neruda city    

desert U 25:  ex Mistral city    deserts U 27 and 28: ex Chilean 

poetry cities    and it was the new day dawning over the arid 

love    over the arid wind     over the arid countries of pastures 

and dreams sinking like waves that surrender against the ocean 

“My God is Dream” unfolds as a poem of regeneration where “the new deserts appeared/lying over the sea.” This perhaps utopic move of bringing new life to the desert is complicated by its environmental dislocation. The desert is in the wrong place; it is exiled from the earth, misplaced above the sea. As the poem progresses, its regeneration is linked directly to the “obliterated cities of dawn” that were the “ex deserts.” Notably, the new deserts are sites of poetry named for Chile’s two Nobel Prize winning poets, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral.

Zurita writes of the Sonora in other poems as well, denoting that these two deserts (the Atacama and the Sonora) are both sites of atrocities and disappearances in the Americas. In the Atacama, the search continues for the bones and bodies of those who were disappeared in the desert during the dictatorship. In the Sonora, meanwhile, each year hundreds of migrants die or anonymously disappear in the brutal heat of the desert as they seek economic or political refuge in the United States.

I want to conclude by suggesting that echoes of Zurita’s writing, both in terms of content and form, are poignantly present in some of the most vital and innovative, contemporary UnitedStatesian poetry written about the desert, and about the migrants who cross it. Thus, if Zurita has been grappling, for five decades, about the appropriate poetic forms to represent the desert, we also see a hemispheric connection in how Latinx, Indigenous, and activist poets in the U.S. are asking analogous questions: how do we represent the experience of migrants trying to endure the crossing of the Sonora? What forms can be used to write about brutal, militarized policies that end up creating treacherous desert trails of dehydration, suffering, and death? How do we write poetry of the desert?

One such writer creating new poetic forms to write about the desert is Eduardo Corral. At the heart of Corral’s 2020 collection Guillotine is a 30-page, multilingual section called “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel.” Each poem in this section speaks in the voice of someone who has crossed the Sonora and, ostensibly, etched their story into a water barrel. The forms these poems take are multitudinous. Some poems snake and curve across the page, while others stand in thin, vertical fragments. Others take concrete forms reminiscent of word clouds, or prints whose words are overlaid on top of each other in layers of blurriness and illegibility:. Below are two notable excerpts:

      On the bottle,

                                                        in red print,

                                                                a proverb: beauty

          can’t be talked into speech. The sky isn’t blue.

                          It’s azul. Saguaros

                                 are triste, not curious.

                           In México, bodies

          disappear. Bodies, in the Sonoran desert

are everywhere

  A headless corpse

sporting a T-shirt

          that reads: Superstar.

Corral’s migration narratives are remarkable feats of form and voice. To use Zurita’s terms—though Corral himself does not announce this link to Zurita—they are constantly questioning what forms should be used to depict the “strange perpetuity and survival […] reflected in the landscape.” These testaments are haunted, and they haunt us, with the realities of disappearance, and the tragedies and dignities of voices and bodies who survive, or attempt to survive, the brutalities of political cruelty. ■