Poetry

The rain began falling at six pm on a thousand odd heads in the amphitheatre. Thunder cracked and the sky fell in sheets of rain. Many people left, nearly as many stayed. At 10 o’clock, after six hours of recitals, Alhaji Susso from Gambia, the last of 57 poets, rose to the stage to close the 17th International Poetry Festival of Medellín. He sang and plucked the strings of his kora, and the soaked audience danced and clapped beneath umbrellas. When he finished and the audience sang out for more, nobody doubted that what so many poets had said was true. Medellín is the world capital of poetry.

This is no small achievement. In 1991 Medellín, the capital of Colombia's coffee region, was the most violent city in the world, and a global centre for drug trafficking. “The poetry festival was founded in [this] context as a macro form of cultural resistance,” says festival organiser Fernando Rendón. “It is a voice for peace, and a protest against injustice and terrorism, including state terrorism.”

The festival is now the largest of its kind in the world. Over eight days, free poetry recitals are held in public parks, university theatres, high-security prisons, and schools and libraries in poor, marginalised suburbs. To date, Medellín has hosted 820 poets from 142 countries, and many indigenous nations.

Such contact with foreign visitors is an anomaly in Medellín. The city’s infamy has served to isolate it from contact with the world. The massive green mountains that surround it are a geographic metaphor for seclusion. Penetrating the valley like dust in a vacuum, the words, thoughts and solidarity of 60 poets each year bring hope, interest and dialogue to a city that for too long has been a black stain on the world map, rather than a black dot. The poets, in turn, leave the city with love and gratitude for its people and their compulsive generosity.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” says Nepalese poet Chirag Bangdel. “Thousands of people come to hear our poems. They cheer and ask for our autographs. It’s like being a rock-star. I don’t want to leave. In fact, I’m looking for somebody here who might adopt me.”

Miguel Barnet, from Cuba, has similar impressions. “I’m accustomed to see masses of people come together with a cultural motive,” he tells an audience of thousands, “but I’ve never seen an amphitheatre full of so many people gathered to hear poetry. UNESCO must declare Medellín the international capital of poetry!”

With the exception of the current Medellín city council, the festival has never received support from any level of government in Colombia. The festival organisers are vocal critics of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, and his government’s ongoing links to right-wing paramilitary groups.

As a voice of dissent, the festival is yet to receive the national and international attention it deserves, however last year it received a Right Livelihood Award, also known as ‘The Alternative Nobel Peace Prize’, and the annual event receives funding from several European nations including Germany and Switzerland.

Swedish Poet Bengt Berg and his wife dance with local kids at La Cruz, a suburb of displace people, while Gambian poet Alhajir Susso plays the kora.

Colombia is still a country at war, but Medellin is no longer a place where the majority live in fear. Walking to a poetry recital with friends, two young men on a motorcycle speed around a corner and pass us, accelerating up a busy street. “Ten years ago,” say my friends, “one would turn the corner and expect to see a dead body. There’s a saying here – a threat – ‘I’ll send the guys on the motorbike.’ Two men on a bike meant hit-men.”

We turn the corner. A man with a trolley sells juicy slices of papaya and fresh pineapple rings for 30 cents, and a lady walks in the opposite direction selling cups of sweet black mountain coffee from a thermos.

A repercussion of enforced isolation is authenticity. City buses are boisterous with local rhythms, and restaurants serve regional dishes. It has also made its people resilient, resourceful, independent and curious.

Jorge, 12 years old, is one of many people gathered to hear poetry in his primary school high above the city centre. In his suburb, La Cruz, 95 per cent of the population are internally displaced, victims of the ongoing civil war in Colombia’s mineral rich rural areas. “I don’t know much about poetry,” he says, “but it’s cool to see so many new people here, people from Africa and Europe. I like to hear them talk in different languages, and to hear their stories.”

Typical of Colombia kids, Jorge asks me more questions than I ask him. The first two questions are givens, as though they were taught in school: Where are you from? And, are you happy here in Medellín?

The Medellín International Poetry Festival is an annual opportunity for people to break open the vacuum, and say ‘yes’ to the latter.

Nnnnerves

We walked to the river along an old train line. Men were digging sand from the riverbed when we arrived, tipping it into wooden canoes moored to the shore. They dived beneath the water with a bucket and appeared again ten seconds later, heaving with the weight of wet sand above their heads. The midday sun was burning, but the men’s muscular bodies stayed cool in the water. An old tip-truck reversed into the river in a rocky, shallow section, and the men shovelled their canoe loads into the back. Truck drivers will sell the sand to construction companies that use it to make cement.

The railway line crosses the river on a rickety old bridge. Adrian was the first to jump. Fifteen metres, I reckon - high enough to count ‘one dinosaur two’ before hitting the deep brown water. I climbed out onto the frame of the bridge from the old railway sleepers, and looked down. Adrian stood by my side, wet and happy. My heart was thumping so hard my entire stomach and chest jumped with each beat. Adrian laughed. I jumped.

A week later I stood in a room with a phone in my hands, dialling the organisers of the Medellín International Poetry Festival. Underneath my shirt, my heart was on a bridge again. Thump, thump, thump.

Definitions

Nine and ten year old kids in public schools around Medellín were asked to define things, feelings and ideas. These are some of the responses...

Body
It’s what covers our bones.

A very necessary organ.

Government
People dressed in green.

Person
Something covered in skin.

Earth
What they cover dead people with.

Memory
The reason for living

Night
Very dark daytime.

When the family gathers together.

Empty
It’s when there’s nothing in a jar.

President
Somebody who doesn’t value our complaints.

Hope
I hope that when I get home there will be food.

Dust
It’s when somebody coughs.

News
Information, or important gossip.

Mud
Something women put on their face to stop wrinkles.

Ingenuity Two

Door to door laundry... washing machines are rented at 50 cents an hour in poor suburbs.

waste

Wastage is global. Garbage bins outside of restaurants pile up with good food that has no value because somebody has touched it. Half a pizza is not worth half as much as a pizza; it is garbage.
This is irrational, but the greater waste is that which has never been: the human wastage on city streets, where intelligence and creativity are abused in menial labour. A massive loss of thought.
Life is dedicated to survival.
Protein has a price tag and remains in the butcher’s.
Brains atrophy.
Where there might have been a doctor, there is a shoe shiner. Where there may have been a young student with a book, there is a boy sheltering from the world under a newspaper he cannot read. What art? What literature? What medical breakthrough? What bridge is lost? This is the great waste of things, and people, that never were.

The Law

The gears creak and crunch with every shift. The jeep is orange, partly from rust, partly from a 1960s paint job. Eight fellas stand on the back, holding on as best we can. We don’t exceed 40 kilometres an hour on the way to the river. Going downhill, the driver puts it into first gear. Everything in the car is original – I guess – including the brakes. Other cars, buses and trucks rush past, honking and overtaking on blind bends. Two boys stand on the back ladder, each with one foot and one hand attached to the jeep. Inside, the driver says earnestly to the girl in the passenger seat, “put your seatbelt on. The cops around here are really strict.”

Ingenuity

In a little restaurant with $2 meals served on large plates, Gustavo tells me a story:
A few months ago a Japanese firm invented a machine to catch thieves in supermarkets. In London it caught 300 thieves in one day. In New York, 1400. The first day it was installed in a supermarket in Medellín, it was stolen.

Fame

Bon Jovi is coming to Colombia!
Sort of.
No insurance company will cover his stay, so, in fact, he’s not staying at all. He’ll be in Bogotá for five hours – long enough to give one concert – before flying in a private jet to a Caribbean island.

Colombians don't count; they dance

Half a million Colombians have been killed in the last 50 years. But that’s maths. Colombians don’t talk about numbers. They talk of brothers, cousins, mothers and uncles. Numbers are the lifeless illustrations of academics and journalists who forget about life and tally death on decorated walls. Four million forcefully displaced, nine million hungry, three million kids out of school…

“Bury the dead and keep on dancing,” they say here. And they dance.

Ana, mother of 11, makes arepas - corn bread - on a rainy street. She and her family were forced to flee their home on the Pacific coast because of violence.

Art

On the tile floor is Colombia. A sculptured mound of brown earth: two coasts, the Amazon, a peninsula in the north, and the Andes split into three – central, east and west.
A pale, hairy arm emerges from the eastern range. The hand lies still, palm down, across the humid eastern plains. From the highest peaks of the central range pokes a masculine nose. Death lies beneath Colombian soil.
Art.
A Cadaver becomes art, a message; anger, sad and silent. I look at Colombia spread across the floor. The arm is real. It absorbs my vision. From behind the white tape I look, bewildered, mouth open, breath slow, blank.
And suddenly it moves. Uuup and dooowwn. Slowly. Colombia is breathing; it is alive.

Upstairs in the gallery are photographs of war, torment and hardship in the Americas. Each photographer’s name is written with a brief description below the black and white prints: ‘Nicaragua’, ‘Guatemala’, ‘Prostitute’ and ‘Refugee’. The photos are beautiful.

Is this resistance? Seeking beauty in misery? Composing the right elements – the dirt floor foreground, diagonal lines, an anguished look towards oblivion, the dark evening clouds looming on the horizon? I’m not the first to address this contradiction. What role does art play in social change?

I can only think that peace emerging from war is not merely a physical change but an ethical and cultural change in which beauty and discussion play a critical part. Art, at least at its best, is a dialogue.

Bullet Holes in the door of a small, family home - A 1am reminder that Colombia is not at peace

A new friend and fellow photographer, Jonny Lewis, told me a story. He was exhibiting in Paris in a group show. His photograph was a portrait of an Aboriginal elder in northern Australia, a woman with the leathery, weatherworn face of a sea turtle. A Parisian woman approached the photograph slowly, one leg moving in unison with a walking stick, her back hunched with age. The woman looked up at Jonny’s photo. “Bonjour Madam,” she said.

Communication. Art at its best! The question, then, is what each of us chooses to say.