Explaining the legacy of Violeta Parra is no easy task; it is vast and intimate, something like the nature and geography of a country. She blends in with her country’s history and inhabitants, and thus her song comes through. Her voice and her life hang over a winding, uneven environment: one of the most unstable and dynamic regions on the planet. This is the task that Ericka Verba undertakes in Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra (The University of North Carolina Press), where she goes beyond the facts to take in the character of a person and of a collective.
Verba is director of Latin American Studies at California State University. In the book’s first pages, she tells us of her first encounter with Violeta Parra’s music. As a teenager, she met and became friends with a family of Chilean artists and musicians. They introduced her to the author’s songs, and also filled her in on the political context of Chile in the seventies: the Pinochet dictatorship, violence, and exile. This was a moment of awakening and realization for her. From those days on, she cultivated a passion that would affect the course of her future work. Verba was a member of California-based musical group Sabiá and later Desborde, which played music from the Latin American folkloric songbook and songs by Violeta Parra. At university, she focused on Cold War cultural studies, the role of music in social movements, and the interaction of gender and class politics in twentieth-century Latin America.
Verba’s more than forty-year journey, her bond with music as a musician in her own right, and her gathering of materials surrounding the life of an artist, a woman, a country, all come together in a profound and colossal work—a detailed, almost archaeological immersion in Parra’s life. The amount of information and quotations with which the author reconstructs the folklorist’s existence from her beginnings is truly surprising, as is the manner in which she incorporates said existence into the story of a nation along a shared timeline. Social, political, and demographic movements, the role of women, poverty, and classism—all these elements are laid bare in order to answer a question that Ericka Verba asks herself just as Violeta did: “How could I have an exhibit at the Louvre, I, who am the ugliest woman on the planet, who come from a tiny country, from Chillán, at the end of the earth?”
The path is not an easy one. Verba has no intention of telling us a story of success or overcoming—far from it. Her explanations go hand in hand with a complex, unstable, and active personality. What matters is not success, but rather Parra’s ability to make of music, metalwork, painting, and poetry a vehicle through which to explain her world, which she constantly sought to lay out, arrange, and imbue with meaning. Her search for authenticity in all forms of expression became a premise and a manifesto. “I sing the difference / Between what is true and what’s false. / Otherwise, I do not sing.”
“From the moment I was born,” Parra answers when she is asked about her bond with her country’s folklore. And it is in this same phase of the singer-songwriter’s life—her birth in 1917 and her early childhood—that Verba begins her research. Here, in a village in the foothills of the Andes in Chile’s southern province of Ñuble, amid family, siblings, nature, landscape, and coexistence with music, she starts bringing together the materials we need to understand and construct a character. Music is present both within the home and outside its doors: “They were always singing, for births, for weddings, for deaths, for harvests.” Parra gets no formal music education—just practice and her ear, the sounds that surround her, speech and song. Songs descended from the décimas developed by the Spanish poets of the seventeenth century and the traditional ballads of the Chilean countryside, passed down from voice to voice.
Due to economic circumstances, Parra’s family becomes itinerant; their search for better opportunities leads them to move from place to place during the siblings’ childhood. San Carlos, Santiago, Lautaro, and Chillán. Violeta Parra remains in constant movement; movement, for her, is exploration. Her development as a musician goes hand in hand with a constant sense of inquiry. She understands the task of the folklorist as that of a collector who must preserve and share her traditions. Nomadism, poverty, and observation begin shaping her identity at an early age. “At age fifteen, Violeta may not have known exactly where she was going, but she knew where she came from,” Verba tells us. Little by little, the Parra siblings—through the mediation of Nicanor, the eldest—come to settle in Santiago; they form part of the greater migratory movement from the countryside to the city in search of better living conditions. Verba succeeds in recreating, with remarkable visuality, the environment of the nation’s capital in the thirties, forties, and fifties—particulary through her description of the era’s music scene, its bars and its districts, the kinds of music that were being heard and played. And, at the same time, how the siblings came to form part of this environment, where they started to play, spurred on more by necessity than by taste. “We needed to earn our living one way or another, and in those days things weren’t very easy, especially since the only thing we knew how to do was sing,” Hilda Parra says. She and Violeta formed a duet. In the following years, they would perform at all sorts of spots: bars, dance halls, and inns, traveling from one gig to another through the Santiago night. They played various genres of Latin American and Spanish music—whatever the people wanted to hear. Every so often, Verba pauses at a certain spot in her subject’s timeline, reminds us of her initial question, and returns again and again to the concept of authenticity. This process of identification is the destination toward which Violeta Parra was heading, and her past experience, the times she had to contend with out of necessity or circumstance, are not detours. They are essential pieces that gradually shape the artist.
The growth of radio and their first recordings bring them some notoriety, but theirs is still a precarious, poorly paid profession. Parra never gives up on her research into folklore and tradition. She goes in search of that song she fears may be disappearing. “How could I possibly imagine when I went out to collect my first song one day in 1953 (…) that I would learn that Chile is the best book of folklore that has ever been written.” The living and working conditions she finds on her journeys will give her the raw material for her best-known protest songs from the sixties, her political affinity with the communist party and, at the same time, a deeply-held notion of her own country, its geography and nature, its settlers, singers, miners, and peasants.
Violeta Parra’s journey is not the journey of a solitary creative. Verba emphasizes that she always formed part of an ample family of artists and musicians. She was friends with photographers, painters, and poets, collaborating faithfully and reciprocally with them. This collaboration was based on a shared interest in each and every one of the disciplines they practiced. And, besides, she was always linked to her own family, her siblings and later children, nieces, and nephews, who would come to form a clan of artists that lasts to this day. The author’s personal life, her motherhood, her marriages and partners, and her refusal to be placed in a subordinate role—due as much to her personality as to her absolute devotion to music—flows through the heart of this story. They are threads of the same fabric, weft and warp. There are not two Violetas, just one. Her work is a reflection of her life and her life is the subject of her work. There is a game of mirrors in Verba’s book as she makes use of autobiographical décimas written by Violeta herself.
As we continue reading Thanks to Life, the question shared by Verba and Violeta starts to be answered. We receive the solution in small doses, which shed light on the material that gradually forges Violeta Parra. On her first trip to Europe, where she stays for a year and a half, as well as back in Chile, she presses on with her search and her own creative endeavors. There is something frenetic and euphoric in the way she approaches her work. This no longer comes down just to music; she explores ways to connect music with her visual work: “Every song can be painted.” But, at the same time, seeds of frustration emerge. She starts suffering crippling bouts of depression and lapses into immobility. She doesn’t feel the appreciation and recognition she deserves, but she does feel the lack of support and the fatigue.
A family emergency leads her to Argentina. She settles in Buenos Aires and, from there, travels once again to Europe; this time, besides her instruments, she brings along her tapestries, embroidery, and paintings. For three years, she remains in motion between Switzerland and France, with a few forays into the USSR. Verba elucidates the growing interest the capital cities of Europe were taking, in the sixties, in Latin American culture. This interest—real but condescending, at times—played a part in spreading her work and opened doors to new opportunities. The pieces fall into place, paving the way to Violeta Parra’s exhibit at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs of the Louvre. The details of how it came to be arranged are fascinating. Throughout the book, Verba delves into magazines, newspapers, letters, interviews, radio programs, memoirs, and museum archives, both in Chile and elsewhere in the world. The notes at the end of this biography make up a glossary from which countless stories could grow, not just about Violeta Parra, but also about Latin American folk music and a continent on the edge of the abyss.
Likewise, the use of décimas, poetry, and songs inserted throughout the book’s chapters lights up the story and forms a “playlist,” melding the artist’s work with her own biography. Verba warns us on the first page, in a note to the reader: “For those readers who are not yet familiar with her, I urge you to stop reading and take some time to get to know her work. (…) Explore.” It is in the work of the Chilean artist herself where we must seek the answer; it is in her own life where we might find the seed that gave rise to her work. When life and work are entirely unfurled before us, we finally understand the path that led her to the Louvre, and also to record Las últimas composiciones once back in Chile. Her last LP is a perfect album; if it were her only work, she would still stand the test of time. We understand that, when it comes to artists whose driving forces are much like those of nature, anything can happen; once freed, energy expands outwards.
I remember vividly when, in 2016, they announced the Nobel Prize in Literature would be awarded to Bob Dylan for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” I remember the reactions and the controversy, the argument over whether his work is truly literature or not. And, above all, I remember thinking of Violeta Parra. Verba does not go into such comparisons, nor does she seek analogies; she stays focused on the work, the life, and the times of the singer-songwriter at hand. It is the reader’s job to ask other questions, to seek parallels, to react to the text. In Violeta Parra’s case, the answer is clear: she has always been considered a poet among great poets. This is the nucleus from which her energy is freed. Can the magnitude of this expansion make an impact? In her case, maybe so.
“Of singing to the human and the divine / you willingly made your silence, / with no other illness than sadness.” – Pablo Neruda
“In Violeta Parra, the most human of our poets, there is something inhuman. It is as if her poetry were spoken by other things: the springtime, the winter, the wind.” – Raúl Zurita
“No one can complain when you / Sing softly or when you scream / As if they were slitting your throat / Volcanic Viola!” – Nicanor Parra, tr. Anna Deeny
Poetry, in its way, is ultimately mythology—telling the stories of the soul in its adventure over this earth. Ericka Verba understands this and immerses herself in Violeta Parra’s life with complicity and respect.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
