To Separate Art from the Artist

We cannot absolve Pablo Neruda of the crime of raping a powerless woman, but what's wrong in saying. "Neruda, an unconvicted rapist, was a great writer"?

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

ABOUT two decades ago, my late-teenager-self encountered a major heartbreak: I learnt that the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda—whose passionate poetry and sensual language were an integral part of my life—was a rapist. It was not someone’s allegation; he confessed to it in his memoirs. How could such a powerful writer of love poems rape someone?

I had to get one answer immediately: how did he write about it? Expressing what emotion—guilt, regret, remorse, objectivity, pleasure or indifference? So, I went through his memoirs, which were published a year after he died in 1973.

While describing his life as the Chilean consul in Colombo, Neruda mentions how “girls of various colourings” visited him and left “no record but the lightening spasm of flesh” when his “body was a lonely bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast”. Those girls, “dusky and golden, girls of Boer, English, Dravidian blood”, went to bed with him “sportingly, asking for nothing in return”.

Neruda rather smartly describes one of these girls, who confessed to him of having sex with 14 British colonial clerks in their barracks one night, as “just another product of colonialism, a candid and generous fruit of its tree”. He also says her story impressed him and earned her a soft spot in his heart.

A few paragraphs later, comes a series of four paragraphs where he talks about “the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon”. The Tamil woman was the cleaning lady, wearing the “cheapest kind of cloth”. But to the consul-poet, nose pins made of ordinary red glasses appeared like rubies on her. He sees her carrying the dirty receptacle from the latrine on her head “with steps of a goddess”. The poet took her to be “a shy jungle animal” belonging to “another kind of existence, a different world”.