After the Zero Hour: Notes on Ernesto Cardenal Upon His Death
I purchased Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems back in the 1980s. I had no idea who Cardenal was, but the idea of a “documentary poem”…
I purchased Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems back in the 1980s. I had no idea who Cardenal was, but the idea of a “documentary poem” was intriguing. This was well before I started to see my own poetry in the documentary mode. The poems are cinematic, but not in the way we usually use the word. They are not full of broad vistas, but instead use the poetic form like a camera, panning across the wreckage of the Nicaragua under Somoza, zooming in on the tiniest details, and relying sharp Eisensteinian cuts to create a tableau of exploitation, brutality and resistance that I think still speaks to us today.
Cardenal was a priest and a revolutionary. As the AP wrote yesterday in its obituary, he built an arts commune of sorts on the Solentiname Islands in Lake Nicaragua that “came to symbolize artistic opposition to the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.” Somoza’s National Guard ultimately demolished the community, not long before Somoza himself was overthrown by the Sandinistas.
Cardenal’s support for the Sandinistas proved to be both a revolutionary act and something unsustainable. The Sandinistas routed the Somoza dictatorship but then turned dictatorial itself. Cardenal served as culture minister under Daniel Ortega, but turned away from Ortega when it became clear that Ortega was only interested in personal power and not in peasantry.
As the AP wrote,
After Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007, Cardenal denounced what he called the beginning of “a family dictatorship.” And in 2018, when anti-government protests broke out that posed the biggest challenge to Ortega’s increasingly authoritarian hold on power, Cardenal quickly aligned himself with the opposition.
“What we want is for there to be a different government, a democratic republic,” he said in a handwritten message of support, adding that dialogue with the Ortega camp would be useless.
“Now suddenly across the country the young people have risen up in protests, taking the streets,” Cardenal said, “something that was unexpected because the youth had seemed to be sleeping, or that a sepulchral slab had fallen on them.”
“Zero Hour” opens with a few lines that seem unremarkable, but allude to the themes and revolutionary nature of the work that is to follow:
Tropical nights in Central America,
with moonlit lagoons and volcanoes
and lights from presidential palaces,
barracks and sad curfew warnings.
A simple image that captures a seemingly simple moment. It reads as a traditional lyric poem, a nature poem, but clearly is not one. There are ominous presences here, allusions to dictatorship and violence. The simple language and the mundane-sounding conversation that comes next — “Often while smoking a cigarette / I’ve decided that a man should die” — reminds me of Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel,” which she writes more than two decades later. Both poems capture what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil,” the sense of normalization of violence and brutality under a dictatorship.
“Zero Hour,” which was written in the mid-1950s while Nicaragua suffered under the first Somoza dictatorship, and the other poems in the book of the same name move from the lyric through a documentary process that both mirrors documentary filmmaking’s presentation of real events through an individual lens, and uses actual documentary sources — government documents, newspaper accounts, etc. The approach, often called documentary poetics, has become central to my own method (see As an Alien in a Land of Promise), and was the subject of my MFA craft thesis. The method, as Steven White writes in Modern Nicaraguan Poetry, allows for an “intertextual dialogue” that explodes the purely individual consciousness into a fragmentary and public conversation.
Cardenal (qtd. by White) explained that “Statistical data, fragments of letters, editorials from a newspaper, historical chronicles, documents, jokes, and anecdotes (things that used to be considered elements of prose and not poetry) all fit in a poem” (171). The effect, I think, is as White says to “gather the elements … that condition a particular period in Nicaraguan history” (White 172). These elements then collide in ways that create something new that “‘debunks,’ ‘collaborates,’ and ‘mediates’ reality” (Pringles-Mill ix).
On the ground, one is faced with crowds “dispersed with phosphorous bombs” and a “San Salvador laden with night and espionage, / with whispers in homes and boarding houses / and screams in police stations” — images presented without emotion, in matter-of-fact manner, signaling a disheartening normalcy.
The poem rushes through the history of violence and the complicity of the United States and American business in the survival of the dictatorship, in the process flipping meanings. The United Fruit Company, for instance, engages in
revolutions for the acquisition of concessions
and exemptions of millions in import duties
and export duties, revisions of old concessions
and grants for new exploitations,
violations of contracts, violations
of the Constitution . . . (2)
The language moves from the lyric to the political, from the deadpan to the occasional bombast, incorporating what I called in my MFA thesis “inserted text” or what we can call supporting source material.
Consider the way the telegram alters the lyric mood in this passage from midway through “Zero Hour”:
The ranch hands begin to herd their cows:
Tooo-to-to-to; Tooo-to-to; Tooo-to-to-to;
the boatmen hoist the sails of their boats;
the telegraph clerk in San Rafael del Norte wires:
GOOD MORNING ALL IS WELL IN SAN RAFAEL DEL NORTE
and the telegraph clerk in Juigalpa: ALL IS WELL IN JUIGALPA. (10)
The wording is mundane, but we know that this is a nation in turmoil, and this gives an added sense of urgency to the capitalization — as if the capitalization is calling into question the words being used, transforming “all is well” in a nervous question.
The Somoza dictatorship would continue for another 20 or so years, surviving the assassination of one Somoza and a decade of another until the Sandanistas arrived and filled the presidential palace with shadows (15). Cardenal was a central figure in the demise of Somoza and the rise of what started as a people’s movement. He was far from perfect, as his failure to understand the dangers of Ortega and to see the Sandanistas’ drift into their own autocratic rule until much later. This should not mitigate against our viewing him for what he was, to use the end lines of his “Zero Hour” as his epitaph:
But the hero is born when he dies
and green grass is reborn from the ashes. (15)
Sources:
Cardenal, Ernesto. “Zero Hour.” Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, edited by Donald D. Walsh, New Directions, 1980, 1–15.
Pring-Mill, Robert. “The Redemption of Reality Through Documentary Poetry.” Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, edited by Donald D. Walsh, New Directions, 1980, ix-xxi.
Selser, Gabriela. “Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan poet and priest, dies at 95.” Associated Press, 1 March 2020. https://apnews.com/a96048e4c709e80ce5f20b54a0cee751. Accessed 2 March 2020.
White, Steven F. Modern Nicaraguan Poetry: Dialogues with France and the United States, Bucknell University Press, 1993.