APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land…

Thus opens Eliot’s powerful poem, The Wasteland, which both taunts and haunts us with powerful imagery in:

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.

Eliot primarily talks about the ruin that industrialized societies have wrought upon mankind. But he could as easily have referred to Communist Wastelands which Balbir Punj has written about. Punj mainly touches on South American communist nations. The parallel between poetry and real life is startling: imagery of squalor, helplessness, hopelessness, a feeling of being trapped, a life bereft of meaning and the human spirit crushed by manmade forces is available as living evidence in Communist and erstwhile Communist countries. Writes Punj:

It is a sombre illustration of how Castro’s socialist dictatorship in Cuba and America’s resultant trade embargo have reduced beautiful Havana into a cesspool of squalor, poverty and hopelessness. “The Socialist revolution has been a failure,” Aubin quotes a political dissident named Raul Rivero, “and everybody knows it, but nobody says so publicly, so we keep pretending.” [...] Allende’s niece and famous authoress Isabel Allende who now lives in San Francisco has given a humorous description of those days in her memoir My Invented Country (HarperCollins India, 2003): “The shortages were so severe that people spent hours waiting to buy a scrawny chicken or a cup of cooking oil, but who could pay bought anything they wanted on the black market… Soon there was a psychosis of shortages, and as soon as three or more people were together, they automatically started a queue… There were professional line-standers who got tips for holding a place; I understand that my own children rounded their allowance that way” (P. 152). Does this not remind us of days of rationing in India?

She further writes, “One Peruvian artist who arrived for a visit during that period asked, amazed, why Chilean women dressed like lepers, lived in doghouses, and ate like Fakirs.” (P.155)

Incidentally, South American communism seems to be gaining currency as the flavour of the season. Yazad has penned one on Che Guevara.

Read both.