The International Poetry Festival of Medellin for the Peace of Colombia

September 01, 2007 Since 1948, there have been more than half a million people killed by political violence: a lethal dose. During this period, six presidential candidates have been assassinated, most of them by State hitmen: Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1948), Jaime Pardo Leal (1989), Bernardo Jaramillo (1990), Carlos Pizarro (1990), and Álvaro Gómez Hurtado (1995). Five thousand leaders and members of the Unión Patriótica (to which president Uribe insists in assigning a “political status”) were massacred in the decade from 1986 to 1996, all victims of State terrorism and paramilitarism. And the massacre of opposition leaders goes on.

On July 22nd, the closing ceremony of the XVII International Poetry Festival of Medellín took place, with readings by seventy of the poets who had taken part in this annual poetic event, considered by the international press as the largest poetry festival in the history of poetry:  http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/pub/es/Festival/Prensa/index.htm

During this closing ceremony, two unexpected events took place. The first was the fact that several hundred people listened for three hours in heavy rain to foreign and native poets: a living expression of firm compromise, conscience and the determination to bring peace and a new life to the Colombian people.

Secondly, this year’s festival was like no other. Besides demonstrating our qualitative and quantitative development after 17 formidable years, thousands of people took the open and brave decision to actively struggle for peace in Colombia, as part of the movement “For Peace in Colombia”, promoted, so far, by 596 Colombian artists and intellectuals with the support of 593 artists and intellectuals from 87 countries.

Two main objectives of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín during its seventeen year history have been:

— To feed the vigorous poetic and spiritual resistance of the Colombian people; fighting doggedly for a homeland in peace and for the dream of a new, juster country; strengthening the dialogue between poets and poetic traditions, thus contributing to the interconnection of poetic endeavours in all countries (festivals, reviews, poetry schools, etc); encouraging the exchange of experiences, opinions, proposals and databases.

— To strengthen, through the continuous holding of poetry readings in Medellín and other main Colombian cities, a high level of social and aesthetic conscience, of coexistence and a sense of solidarity facing the structural problems that affect the population of our country, and to achieve renewal in the processes of symbolic integration and interchange; to raise in the public a higher understanding of the importance of listening to each other, thus becoming part of a plurality, of the diversity and the complementary dimension of human thought; and to create in people a participative attitude in culture and in a process of affirming Colombian democracy.

Including the poets participating in this year’s festival, more than 800 poets from 142 countries, from all continents, have taken part in it since 1991, and the event’s impact in the contemporary world has been such that it was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize in the Swedish Parliament in December 2006.

Colombia is a starving and plundered country militarized and paramilitarized. With 26 million experiencing extreme poverty (more than 60% of the population) and 11 million destitute, the unemployment rate rises and the number of people with informal jobs grows by the day. Thousands of crimes remain unpunished. More than 3 million displaced persons arriving in cities experience abuse and are being menaced by the paramilitary who control the shantytowns. The selective murders of popular leaders continues. The army and the national police apply their iron-fist policy against all social protest. The whole of Colombia is a concentration camp with more than 40 million inhabitants sequestered by war. On top of this there is the absence of political results benefitting Colombian society, caused by a guerrilla war of more than 40 years, with its condemnable load of kidnappings.

With poetry as the expression of the desire for humane solidarity, reborn from the ashes of meanness and selfishness that have debased human history during centuries, our will is to contribute to the construction of a solid peace, promoted by the International Poetry Festival of Mededellín and by the cultural movement Por la Paz de Colombia. Most Colombians support this, and we will continue fighting for peace to be achieved through humanitarian agreement between the contenders, for an exchange of prisoners of war and kidnapped persons, and for the development of constructive conversations leading to a political resolution of the war.

Guided by the war-like policies of US president George Bush, the Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe stubbornly and repeatedly objects to a dialogue that would allow humanitarian interchange, so strongly favored by Colombian society, while his deaf and intolerant discourse goes on promoting physical or moral attacks against human rights defenders, fighters for peace, labor unions, native Americans, agrarian and student leaders, democratic figures, and opposition poets and artists.

In 2003, the International Poetry Festival of Medellín organized the “I World Summit of Poetry For the Peace of Colombia”, in which poets and observers from many countries took part, and which issued a Summit Declaration on the tragic situation of the country:
http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/pub/es/Festival/Cumbre/declaracion.html

In 2007, the International Poetry Festival of Medellín held the National Meeting of Art and Poetry for Peace in Colombia which created the cultural movement “For Peace in Colombia” (http://www.movimientoculturalporlapaz.org) and issued a new declaration about the need to create a cultural movement to zealously press for the achievement of peace, through the language and actions of poetry and the arts, and directed at the Colombian people in its persistent action: http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/pub/es/Festival/Encuentro/carta.htm

On the occasion of the kidnapping and death of the eleven deputies of the Valle del Cauca Assembly, in circumstances not yet clear, the Festival issued a strong communiqué condemning the facts:

We condemn the cruel murder of the eleven deputies from the Valle del Cauca Assembly.

The International Poetry Festival of Medellín, firmly engaged in a collective task of searching for peace in Colombia, energetically condemns the cruel murder of the eleven deputies from the Valle del Cauca Assembly, who were in the hands of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), in unjustifiable circumstances, on June 18th in the Colombian jungle, and known by the public only six days ago, after president Uribe gave the order to rescue them by sword and fire.

At the same time, our work group condems vigorously the kidnapping practised by the Colombian guerrillas, the paramilitaries and the Colombian State, including the disappearances, that is to say, kidnappings without a possibility of a return to civil life.

The International Poetry Festival of Medellín calls the Colombian State and the FARC, on behalf  of the Colombian people, kidnapped by war, to nominate delegates to exchange views on the possibility of a humanitarian interchange, thus opening the way for a political, negotiated solution to end the ignominious armed conflict. In this plea we are joined by  delegates of the governments of Switzerland, France, Spain, and Germany who also condemn the armed rescue of the kidnapped hostages and support the formation of an International Commission for the Establishment of the Facts to investigate and transmit a clear report of the circumstances under which the eleven deputies, kidnapped by the guerrillas almost ten years ago, died.

Crafty enemies of peace — some of them extreme right poets and intellectuals allied with the paramilitaries — under the tacit support of the government, and even some media, oppose any form of majority and constructive action by the democratic artists and intellectuals of the country, and have undertaken a campaign of calumny and slander against the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, and against the newly-formed cultural movement for peace in our country, which will soon be transformed, due to its world-wide reception, into a World Movement of Artists and Intellectuals for Peace in Colombia.

The affronts against the International Poetry Festival of Medellín are also affronts against poetry because the symbolic structure and nature of the Festival is made up of the substance of the poetical traditions of the world and of the dream of new life contained within them. These affronts are also an expression of ignorance about present-day poets from all continents. They are affronts against Colombian young men and women whose understanding and love of poetry has been shamefully underrated by some poets of our country. Two generations of young people have been nourished by poetic legends and poems from all parts of the world, and intangible changes have transformed their conscience. Poetry in Medellín is made for thousands of persons, positively affecting the poetic experience of the authors. And these young men and women are transforming themselves and changing life in our country.

And now I will quote some authors known by all, to counter the lopsided memory of some of our critics. The poet and philosopher Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in the review Du (Switzerland) in 2000:

There is an enigma in all of this: We all ask ourselves how it is possible that a metropolis under violence burns in its desire to listen to poetry. Precisely because of that, say the natives. The inhabitants of Medellín are fed up of being called mafiosi, terrorists, tortures or tortured men and women. This is something different, a current of air, a breath of spontaneity, of imagination!

Perhaps it is necessary to go to the other end of the Earth to get out of the insensibility reigning in our cultural sphere, and to convince ourselves that some verses —who could have imagined it?— can yet today inspire a spirit in a whole city, just as in the times of Homer!

The Nigerian poet, Wole Soyinka, Nobel Literature Prize-winner, interviewed by the review Prometeo in 2005, said:

In Nigeria we have a cultural meeting where poetry figures, but it is small, it has not the structure or the international level of the Medellín festival. Something like this does not exist anywhere, and most of the developed societies do not have anything like it. I must say that I was quite surprised during the International Festival of the Word in New York, where there was a similar enthusiasm one finds here. There was a reading in a very big theater, every chair taken, and I noticed a deep thirst, a desire to be fed by the poetic word. What we see is the international expression of solidarity with the followers of poetry, which is a way of manifesting this rapture of the audience. One can observe that they also write poems and consider poets as part of a community. That is what I noticed from the moment I arrived. It is a very real experience.

Yves Bonnefoy, the great contemporary French poet, declared in 2003:

If new poetry festivals should appear, it would be much better that they are born in the same circumstances as Medellín’s, that is to say, in the frontier of evil, in the first line of combat against frauds and injustices: it is there where there is a greater need of poetry.

The Belgian poet Stefan Hertmans published a long report in The Standard, a big newspaper in his country, in 2004:

In Europe, one sometimes debates about engaged literature. In Medellín I have seen what it really means to include an audience that radically believes in the vital meaning of poetry in its own society, people that absorb poems with a thirst and a love that can leave no one indifferent.

It is well known that the aggressive nature of the dominant social system of our time, keeps active the machinery of war to affirm its dominance and its appetite for raw materials, and that its strategic enemies, as expressions of the struggle for peace and dignity in life, are poetry and culture. And the intellectuals in power, the president’s men, are the ones who oil the machinery of hate to confound public opinion.

I respectfully ask governments of the world, means of communication, and the national and international community of poets and artists, to declare, in solidarity with the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, against the dark forces that have attacked it through a combination of forms of repression, including calumny and infamy, the interception of our mail, the tapping of our phones, accusations by Colombian diplomats, telephone threats, shots fired once in front of our office, and even calling us ‘terrorists’, against whom we take part in a solid, patriotic and peaceful movement against authoritarianism and war, and for a full political, economic, cultural and social democracy for all Colombians, that we are sure will triumph. We shall soon see that day. And we will all celebrate.

The words with which I wish to end are dedicated to the brave young people of Medellín: the lines read by the poet Patricia Jabbeh (Liberia) during the storm, in the closing ceremony of the XVII International Poetry Festival of Medellín, dedicated to the great audience of the Festival:

At the International Poetry Festival, you sit there,
along your hill arena, clapping, thousands of people,
sitting and thinking and listening and hoping,
Medellin, I have never seen anything like this before.
Thousands of people sitting for long hours
at a poetry reading, Medellin…
we wait for that day, Medellin, we wait.
Trust me, I know how to wait, and I know you do too. Director of The International Poetry Festival of Medellín
Alternative Nobel Prize 2006


URL: http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/  
Email: poetryfestivalmedellin@yahoo.es