In the Sea of Pain, Raul Zurita dips into memories

"Ah, the world of art, the world of images, billions of images. The words of a poem are cleaner, more pure." - Raul Zurita

By the sea in this small industrial town, we decided to do away with niceties of translations because Raul Zurita says love doesn't need to be understood. Sometimes a poem can take very, very long and sometimes love takes very, very long.

We, who have walked in the Sea of Pain know that to cross the ocean it will take very, very long. But oceans and poems and love need no translations. They are there. 

As he writes in a poem called For Kurosawa/The Sea "...this isn’t a dream, this is the sea", you know the sea has returned. You also know that poetry has returned.

But before the words appear, one is required to get one’s feet wet in the Sea of Pain, an installation where Zurita has flowed seawater into an old warehouse at Aspinwall at the third edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale. With the return of the sea in this work, Zurita conjures a multitude of seas and deaths he has witnessed for years in Chile where he was born in 1950.

A self-professed poet, a woman hitches up her dress and asks if the water is dirty. The poet looks away. He walks into the made up sea himself. He stands there in the middle exposed, vulnerable and open to interpretations as all poets would. He is the bearer of many seas. 

“But dead I love you and we love,

each other even if no one understands this,” he wrote in Songs for His Disappeared Love. 

The poem at the end of the make-believe sea in this old warehouse is ancient. The poet says it took him 66 years to think about it. The ode to the Syrian refugee child drowned by a poet from Chile is perhaps the most powerful work at the biennale where literature has occupied the centerstage. It transcends abstractions and its alibis. He read about Aylan Kurdi in the newspapers, heard about the drowned children on the radio and wondered about the faceless Galip Kurdi.

The sea had returned. He calls himself the father of Galip Kurdi, the brother of the Syrian child who was found on the beach, washed away on the shore by the misfortune of not belonging anywhere.

Zurita studied engineering and became a poet. The poems were his response to the coup and the deaths. He saw the bodies dropped in the sea. He wrote verses commemorating the deaths. He speaks to the sea. The poet offers no answers in a post-truth world. He only offers hope.

“Love is the only boundary you can put against death,” he says.

Once, in a poem he had written about the millions of faces with their mouths open, infinite hips, arms and legs sweeping again and again the beach as if painted ropes, the sea had been the holding piece. He repeats the sea in a simple installation where the audience in invited to walk in seawater. On the walls, the 66-year-old poet challenges you - “Don’t you listen? Don’t you look? Don’t you hear me? Don’t you see me? Don’t you feel me?”

Galip Kurdi, the one who was invisible to us, who wasn't present in pictures is the muse because absence is more powerful than presence, which the poet believes lives in absence.

The poet lends dignity to the dead child who had no home while young, urbane and shallow poets and others are worried about the hems of their dresses. Poetry is a solace. Poets need no keepsakes. They work with memory, a bent back and in his case, a pen that anchors him in the face of a disease that limits physical movement.

What I didn’t tell him then that I walked into the Sea of Pain everyday and searched for every bit of pain in my being. I hoped tears would come and flow into this contained sea. They eventually did. That morning the old and withered poet sat at the edge of the sea untying his shoelaces. Every day I saw him walk slowly around the town, his curved back against the blue skies of this town by the sea. He doesn’t speak English, the language that could perhaps be the point of a conversation between us. But he smiled always.

Once, he said he felt potent in his pains. There was an increasing difficulty of holding the pages when he reads.

Another poet asks not to ask Zurita too many questions. He has Parkinson’s, she says.

But I remember what he once said about his day-to-day life with the disease.

“I might have a bizarre sense of beauty, but my disease feels beautiful to me. It feels powerful,” he has said.

But even as he looks at me from the edges of the sea, I hide my tears. I am an expert at hiding such weaknesses. But in that moment, I could see that the Sea of Pain could be the sea of tears. We shed tears in silence and in anonymity.

***

Zurita’s work revolves around memory or repetition. The past can’t be forgotten. Perhaps the curved back is with the weight of memory of seeing bodies being dumped into the sea, of murders, of deserts and of the failures of human life. He offers no answers.

Once, he had named another installation in another time and space called “Your Life Breaking”.

“You Will See Soldiers at Dawn,” “You Will See the Snows of the End,” “You Will See Cities of Water,” “You Will See What Goes,” “You Will See Not Seeing,” and “And You Will Weep.”

In 1973, he had been detained in ship with many others. His collection of poems he had called Purgatorio he was carrying with him had been thrown into the sea by a soldier who suspected these poems to be some kind of coded messages. Those who had died in the Chilean coup had been dumped into the sea. An erasure had been attempted. But to the poet who would write A Song for Disappeared Love about the sea and deaths later, memory and hallucinations became the tools. His Chile was Dante-esque. The deserts, the sea, the suffering multitude. He spoke to the sea. He saw blood in the sea.

Many years later, he would recreate Sea of Pain in an old warehouse at Aspinwall in a small industrial town by the sea - the wastewater of Watery Hades. This is an ode to a faceless child drowned in the waters. His three-year-old brother Aylan Kurdi, a Kurdish Refugee, had been washed on the shores of Turkey. The world gasped in horror when images, billions of images circulated around in the world. But then, everyone forgot. But the poet remembered. Zurita has always been interested in the death of the other. That’s how expansive his love is.

Poetry, he says, can’t save the world but the world will end in 30 seconds without it.

If the Sea of Pain could drown us then and there, we’d be released of a million guilts. The poet holds his pen steady. For minutes, the pen rests in his hand. Parkinson’s hadn’t come in the way.

***

That’s the spirit of this biennale in its third edition. Artist and curator Sudarshan Shetty’s says the intention of the biennale was to create multiple narratives to look at the worlds that are seemingly outside like poetry and words that are transcribed all over the space. It is all about intersections, introspections and interactions with artistic practices. 

“It is all about conversations,” he says.

This is art that can’t be mounted on the walls. It can only be experienced in transience.

The curatorial note written by Zurita begins with a story of a boy and a sage. The young traveller struggles with darkness around him for hours and when the Sage looks up at the boy, he sees her pupils glowing. 

“Not perceiving what is immediately around her-the room and all in shadows-the Sage assimilates the entire universe, In that moment and one vision, she grasps its enormous mulitplicity- internal and external…,” the note called Forming in the Pupil of an Eye, a line from poet Sharmistha Mohanty’s poem, says. 

“How can I see through these shadows and reflections?” the boy asks the Sage. 

That’s the question posed. Not every question has an answer. Here, there are alternative realities to be explored, he says.

There are time lapses. It takes into account the reflexes of time, the politics of abandonment, the marginalized narratives, the cache of memory and its illusions. It mainstreams the marginal. The centerpiece of this biennale is a poem, a response in words.

But then, to cross the Sea of Pain takes a long time. A poem waits at the end. Below it you can make out a piece of the sea, a sea of pain.

For long, you will be haunted by the words “I’m not his father, but Galip Kurdi is my son.”