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Ariel Dorfman on parables of peace

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Essayist, novelist, political activist, poet, professor, playwright, Ariel Dorfman has worn many hats since his arrival here in exile (after a stint in Europe) from Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in 1980. All these years later, he still offers us fresh ways of looking at and around our embattled world. Here, he wonders why stories of peace are so scarce when the urge for peace is so basic to us all. Then, in his own inimitable way, he offers us one unexpected story, one parable of peace to consider. His is the kind of “realism” we hear far too little of these days. His latest book is Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet (Seven Stories Press). You can also visit his website(www.adorfman.duke.edu). Tom

A different drum
By Ariel Dorfman

At a time when the world seems to be madly rushing into yet another mad
conflagration, I look for signs of peace anywhere I can find them, I look
for stories of peace because there is nothing else I can really do to
exorcise the demons of destruction.

Why are they so few, these stories about peace, so difficult to find and so
difficult to transmit? Is it possible that the peace everybody proclaims as
desirable is in fact so elusive on our planet precisely because we humans
are much better at imagining discord than at imagining harmony? Is it the
spectacular and dramatic nature of war that exercises such a fascination on
our collective and individual imagination? Is it inevitable that we be
seduced and sucked into the whirlwind tales of violence that swamp us
everywhere we turn, and invariably prefer them to what are all too often
pictured as bland stories of monotonous peace? Must that peace always be
conjured up as unexciting, the mere yawning absence of hostilities, nothing
more than a dull interlude between sensational battles soon to be renewed?

And yet, if we only open our eyes (and perhaps our hearts) we could
probably find chronicles of peace, incidents of peace, allegories and yarns
and fables of peace everywhere.

Even when we are searching for images of war.

At a time when the world seems to be madly rushing into yet another mad
conflagration, I look for signs of peace anywhere I can find them, I look
for stories of peace because there is nothing else I can really do to
exorcise the demons of destruction.

Why are they so few, these stories about peace, so difficult to find and so
difficult to transmit? Is it possible that the peace everybody proclaims as
desirable is in fact so elusive on our planet precisely because we humans
are much better at imagining discord than at imagining harmony? Is it the
spectacular and dramatic nature of war that exercises such a fascination on
our collective and individual imagination? Is it inevitable that we be
seduced and sucked into the whirlwind tales of violence that swamp us
everywhere we turn, and invariably prefer them to what are all too often
pictured as bland stories of monotonous peace? Must that peace always be
conjured up as unexciting, the mere yawning absence of hostilities, nothing
more than a dull interlude between sensational battles soon to be renewed?

And yet, if we only open our eyes (and perhaps our hearts) we could
probably find chronicles of peace, incidents of peace, allegories and yarns
and fables of peace everywhere.

Even when we are searching for images of war.

As I was, last year, when I saw a thrilling episode of peace flare up in
the town of Iquique in northern Chile where I had journeyed with my wife to
write a book for National Geographic. We had timed our visit to that port
city to coincide with the May 21 holiday that commemorates the Combate
Naval de Iquique, a naval battle in 1879 that gave Chile dominion over the
Pacific Ocean and led to victory in my country’s war against Peru and
Bolivia and the subsequent annexation of a mineral-rich territory
previously held by our two neighboring nations. I was curious to see how
the May 21 observances of that bloody struggle against fellow Latin
Americans would be remembered in the very place where it had occurred — and
almost perversely expected that we would be overwhelmed with bellicose
images and nationalistic blathering.

After witnessing marches and speeches and patriotic displays all morning,
and a flotilla of ships of all sizes strewing flowers on the glorious bay
where the naval battle itself had been fought and won so many years ago,
Angélica and I had ended up way past noon in the central plaza of Iquique
as part of a boisterous festive crowd bedecked in Chilean flags that
contemplated two tamborileros banging on their drums and dancing in the
middle of the street. The word tamborilero comes from tambor (drum), but to
say drummer-man or drummer-boy cannot give even an approximation of what
these musicians do.

How to describe someone who carries on his back the colossal barrel of a
drum that he beats by pumping his leg up and down, accompanying that
incessant thud thud thud with all manner of other percussive instruments
set in motion by both his arms and his other foot, cymbals and tambourines
and chimes? Cousins of every hurdy-gurdy man who ever played his melancholy
songs, brothers to the lost organ grinders of the world, tamborileros are
in love with rhythm, producing a beat as they whirl and twirl their bodies
and their reverberations, merging in their music and their clothes and
their cadence the worlds of Andean and Spanish dancing.

Round and round they went that day in Iquique, seemingly lapsing into a
trance, oblivious of everything around them, apparently disregarding the
adults celebrating Chile’s past military heroics and the children
celebrating the ice cream that vendors hawked in loud voices, but
particularly heedless, at their peril, of something more ominous. Along
Baquedano, the main avenue of Iquique, we could all hear the sound of a
naval band that was advancing like an arrow, like a tidal wave, straight
from the ceremony that had finished half an hour ago at the monument to the
Unknown Sailor by the boardwalk, martially advancing 40- or 50-strong
towards the square, towards us, towards the tamborileros who did not seem
to notice, who were not hearing or pretending not to hear the trumpets, the
kettle drums, the rat-a-tat of the military parade.

A clash appeared inevitable as the band in full array approached, did not
slow down, tramping and treading towards the tamborileros. I waited,
expecting the worst, almost hoping for it, yet another story of conflict
and warfare, the confirmation of how these soldiers, as they had so often
before in my life, would once again stifle a swirling touch of beauty,
smother popular creativity, roll over anything and everything that stood in
their way. The fact that these were representatives of the navy and that
they would mow down two men who, with their indigenous features, originated
from the mountains and interior of Latin America, projected the upcoming
showdown in my mind as one more metaphor, one more small milestone in the
conquest of the natives by the technologically more powerful men who had
come from the ocean.

Was that going to happen yet one more time? Would the two tamborileros,
armed with nothing but their music, just keep on playing, invite yet again
a confrontation that had played itself out over centuries of Chilean
existence, or would those defenseless men withdraw, accept quietude and
meekness and submission as the price to be paid for not being run over? The
crowd, sensing a brawl, went suddenly silent, perhaps not exactly lusting
for blood but hungry nevertheless for a good spectacle, a dramatic
denouement, yet one more anecdote of war to add to an endless repertoire.

It was not to be.

When the flag-bearer at the head of the naval band was but a few inches
from the ragamuffin Andean dervishes, every member of the marine company,
as if animated by some secret agreement between themselves or in harmony
perhaps with the universe, every one of those men in uniform simultaneously
halted their march and their epic music. If there was some sign or hidden
order from the officer in charge, I did not catch it. At any rate, I would
rather believe that they all reached, on their own, some inner unanimous
accord not to goose-step over those two men.

For a few seconds and then on and on, for another interminable minute, the
tamborileros stamped and pounded away, under the very noses of the august
band whose progress they were obstructing, not taunting the naval musicians
or provoking them, simply waiting, the tamborileros, just like the soldiers
and the spectators, all of us, tirelessly waiting for the song and cycle to
be over. And then they were done, the gyrations started to wind down, the
beat became less piercing, the dance edged into a shuffle and the two men
slowly doffed their bedraggled hats and began to weave in and out of the
assemblage to gather a harvest of coins and bills. And only when they had
finally and gently abandoned the street and the last echo of the last
tambourine had been extinguished, did the naval band strike up its anthem
once again and parade off into the distance, towards the port where they
were supposed to greet the return of the ships from the celebratory waters.

I felt a sense of wonder at this moment of — what could I call it —
reconciliation, relief, truce? Not just the intimation of some
understanding between the deepest populace of Chile and its soldiers,
separated by the many years of the Pinochet dictatorship and all the
massacres that had in the past preceded and in some way foretold that
dictatorship, but of something different, a meeting of the highlands and
the coast, a mutual recognition based on the sea accepting what the heights
would bring, had been bringing for so many millennia, an inkling of a
future where Latin American antagonists would not inevitably resort to
violence as a way of deciding who would rule the air and the avenues. And
offering us, also, a model of conflict resolution: war can be avoided if
the weaker side decides to persist in its dignity and its resistance,
conquering its fear — but only if the other side, the more apparently
powerful one, banishes its automatic presumption of superiority, daring to
allow itself to be challenged.

That peaceful interval was worked out by ordinary human beings going about
their everyday existence. Something similar, I am sure, must be repeated
over and over in thousands of places all around our murderous globe, even
if they are rarely, if ever, reported or remembered or nourished by those
who tell our stories. The deep well of truth of what we all want, each man,
each woman, each child on this earth: that the small space that surrounds
our fragile bodies be respected, that our right to some minimal
territoriality or identity or autonomy, be afforded recognition by those
who have the power to smash and invade it.

Is it that hard to imagine a world where such respect and such recognition
would be the norm and not the exception? Are we so bereft of stories of
peace that each one of us could not recall at least one miraculous moment
in our recent lives when we witnessed humanity demanding and receiving the
right to control its own existence without being violated?

Isn’t it time, as war approaches yet again, that each of us tells those
stories of a possible peace over and over again?

Copyright Ariel Dorfman