An Unfinished Song

"Victor Jara was one of the most famous musicians to come out of Chile in the 1970s. He was also one of the most famous victims of the military coup. He was arrested, taken to the notorious football stadium in Santiago and tortured in the most horrible way. He was a musician known for playing the guitar and they broke every single finger and his arms before they killed him. It was absolutely horrible. Joan Jara was a British woman—she died recently—who came to Chile in the 1950s, long before the military coup and married a different Chilean. She was a professional dancer and came to Chile for work. I chose her book partly because she came here such a long time ago. Reading her story, you get a sense of what Chile was like before the military coup. It’s also a great love story, with the tragedy of her husband’s death. Joan Jara became a survivor—one of the great survivors of the Chilean experience, if you will. Although she went into exile after the coup, she came back in 1984 and fought for justice for her husband. It took a long, long time. Not until 2012 was the person who was held responsible for Victor Jara’s murder found guilty and extradited to Chile to face justice. That was a huge achievement. Her story is one of incredible endurance and courage and it’s also very moving. I admire Joan Jara enormously. Absolutely. It’s a personal story so rather than just reading the history or articles in the newspaper, you get a sense of how the military coup impacted people’s individual lives, the shock and the horror and the cruelty as it was lived through. This couple is representative of thousands of other people and their experience. It’s a very good way of experiencing how awful it was, how terrifying it was for many, many individuals, not just the famous ones."

"Yes he did. When he was younger, he went to America, visited Berkeley and saw the late 1960s American left at its peak. He thought that the Americans didn’t know how good they had it and were not really up against life and death. Exactly, and he was proved right only a few years later. For all the hardships that someone like Pete Seeger went through when he faced jail after the American anti-communist red scare, nobody in the West had it as hard as the Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara – who was closely associated with the movement to get Salvador Allende elected and then keep him in power when businesses, rival parties and the American government were all conspiring to get rid of him. During the coup Jara was arrested, identified, tormented and mocked. He had his hands broken and then he was killed. Only recently did they really work out what happened to him. He had written his last song while being held in that stadium with lots of other political prisoners, and the song was passed around and written down and memorised by people so that it would get out. That chapter was the only one where I was moved to tears while I was writing it. It was great that she happened to be a very good writer with all those insights. She could quote from letters he sent her, and really break down what it was like in those final days during the coup. She writes about what it was like identifying his body and having to flee Chile. It is just one of those rare things. A lot of the time you have books written by the people themselves or people who were very close to them, and although they have lots of good information often they are not good writers. And then you have the professional writers who write much better prose but don’t necessarily have that first hand knowledge. This is one of those rare books where she has enough objectivity to give you lots of background but you also get the real emotional wallop."