Otto Rene Castillo Catches The Apolitical Intellectuals By Their Collars, And Shakes Them
For someone who started reading quite late in life, and for who the idea of poetry was limited to ornamental words, watching Govind Nihalani’s movie Party was an uncomfortable exercise.
As a bloody-mouthed Naseeruddin Shah with his mutilated tongue walks towards you, the TV screen dissolves. You know his groans carry a question, you know what the question is, and you soon realize the question is directed at you.
Guatemalan revolutionary poet Otto Rene Castillo’s poem “Apolitical Intellectuals” carries the same question:
One day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.
They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.
Under-read beyond his home country to the point of oblivion, Castillo was a man who lived and died for his ideals — captured and burned alive at the age of 33 by the CIA-backed Guatemalan dictatorial regime.
Fueled by the achievements of the October Revolution, also known as the Ten Years of Spring, his was a new breed of Guatemalan writers who dreamed and believed in the day of freedom:
Here, no one cried
Here we only want to be human
Eat, laugh, fall in love, live
Live life, not die
When a U.S-backed coup led to the fall of the Jacobo Arbenz government in 1954, the 20-year-old Otto Rene Castillo was forced into exile in El Salvador. There he formed a vibrant literary group and soon became the most powerful voice of the “La Generación Comprometida” (The Committed Generation), a group that attempted to set right whatever was wrong with their “intellectual” predecessors. The “hypocrisy” of the towering literary figures Pablo Neruda and Miguel Asturias was to be laid bare, and over them was to be built the foundation of the new writers who wrote exactly what they believed in and whose thoughts and actions were always in sync.
They won’t be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward’s death.
They’ll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total lie.
The Generation’s motto was “poet is a form of moral behaviour”, borrowed from Miguel Asturias, which served both as a statement to all and a critique on the man who had accepted the dictatorial government’s offer of ambassadorship to France.
This generation valued action. Castillo having sneaked back to Guatemala joined the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) and became their propaganda and education chief. After 15 days of eating “nothing but roots” while hiding in the mountains of Sierra de las Minas, he was finally captured and killed along with various plantation workers.
Many poets die young. So do most rebels. But poems and rebellions?
Today, we need the Castillos and Safdar Hashmis, as much as we needed them when they were around. Here for you a spine-chilling reading of “Apolitical Intellectuals” by the Castillo Theatre in New York City.