An early poem, Segregation represents Peruvian Carlos Germán Belli’s role as a nexus among the Latin American avant-gardes, the poetry of social concerns, and his own later, formally complex neoclassical verse. Belli uses short arte menor verses (fewer than eight syllables) with sparse and irregular rhyme to create an oral, conversational tone.

We see an abject, childish, narrative position, close to that of César Vallejo’s The Black Heralds, whereby the boy narrator focuses on the existential and material suffering of “Yo, mi mamá, mis dos hermanos / y muchos peruanitos” (My mother, my brother, myself / and many little Peruvians). Belli’s adoption of a simple—perhaps deceptively simple—lexis, including terms such as “árbol . . . frutos . . . techo” (trees, fruits, roof) to describe social injustice, “porque arriba todo tiene dueño” (because above everything’s owned), signals his links to social and politically committed poets, including Chile’s Gabriela Mistral, and their use of verse as denunciation.

The poem operates through binaries of weakness/strength, dispossession/possession, up/down, and beauty/shame, dividing the little Peruvians and the bosses. The distinction drawn between the values of high culture and the lives of the “Peruanitos” and their naive and secretive lives is reminiscent of the position of Diogenes the Cynic and his questioning of the values in contemporary classical Greek society.

Furthermore, Belli undercuts social divisions to display the power that poetry, and particularly socially themed and formally innovative poetry, holds as a weapon of the weak. Structured repetition within and across lines reveals Belli’s thematic complexity, as in the recurring need to escape from hierarchy, “lejos, muy lejos de los jefes . . . / . . . lejos, muy lejos de los dueños” (far, very far from the bosses . . . / . . . far, far away from the owners), and reinforces both social striation and the desperate need to escape it by withdrawal.

The deceptive faux-naïf indicated in the subtitle, “a modo de un pintor primitivoculto” (in the style of an educated-primitive painter), adds a satirical, almost mocking tone. Thus the values of “buen decir” (well-spoken language), the correctness and beauty represented by accepted cultural production, are shown as complicit in the organization of society along unjust lines; meanwhile, the narrator-as-victim displays the importance of poetry as a tool for recording injustice and for satirical diatribes against the social order.

Bibliography
Aherne, Maureen, and David Tripton, eds. Peru: The New Poetry. London: London Magazine Editions, 1970.
Borgeson, Paul W., Jr. Los Talleres del Tiempo. Versos escogidos de Carlos Germán Belli. Madrid: Visor, 1992.

Categories: Caribbean Literature, Literature, World Literature

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