“The
pain, the murders,
the
hunger, the tortures,
all
continued,
and
continue still, and increase—
“yet
the voices that tell us
our
broken bodies are not after all
worthless
rubbish, but hold
sparks
of the God--
these
voices
begin
to give us our freedom.”-- British-born American poet and
Roman Catholic convert Denise Levertov (1923–97), “El Salvador: Requiem and
Invocation (A Libretto),” in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov,
edited by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey (2013)
In
the later half of her illustrious career as a poet, Denise Levertov
became increasingly involved with urgent issues such as nuclear arms, the
Vietnam War and American policy towards Central America. In the case of the
latter, she used her verses to underscore the horrendous impact of U.S.
military aid to El Salvador—and how Roman Catholic priests and nuns bore
witness to the plight of the poor.
Throughout
the 1980s, as civil war raged between the government-supported military and a
coalition of guerrilla groups known as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation
Front (FMLN), the Reagan and Bush administrations extended the conflict through
aid to the government, which they saw as a bulwark against Communism.
During
the height of the war, American financial and military aid averaged $1.5
million a day. All the while, Salvadoran military-sponsored death squads
targeted proponents of political and economic reform.
Levertov’s
poem commemorates the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, three American nuns
and a lay sister murdered in the early 1980s. Three and a half decades after
its composition—and 29 years after the end of the civil war—El Salvador
continues to wrestle with the fallout from the conflict.
This past week, Inocente
Orlando Montano, a former colonel with the Salvadoran military, was accused of
planning the murder of six priests in 1989. The massacre aimed to prevent peace
talks. The martyrdom of the priests, as Levertov wrote, continued to remind the
poor that they hold “sparks of the God.”
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