Apolitical intellectuals

Castillo poem: Apolitical intellectuals 

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Otto Rene Castillo

Apolitical Intellectuals



One day

the apolitical

intellectuals

of my country

will be interrogated

by the simplest

of our people.

They will be asked

what they did

when their nation died out

slowly,

like a sweet fire

small and alone.

No one will ask them

about their dress,

their long siestas

after lunch,

no one will want to know

about their sterile combats

with "the idea

of the nothing"

no one will care about

their higher financial learning.

They won't be questioned

on Greek mythology,

or regarding their self-disgust

when someone within them

begins to die

the coward's death.

They'll be asked nothing

about their absurd

justifications,

born in the shadow

of the total life.

On that day

the simple men will come. 

Those who had no place

in the books and poems

of the apolitical intellectuals,

but daily delivered

their bread and milk,

their tortillas and eggs,

those who drove their cars,

who cared for their dogs and gardens

and worked for them,

and they'll ask:

"What did you do when the poor

suffered, when tenderness

and life

burned out of them?"

Apolitical intellectuals

of my sweet country,

you will not be able to answer.

A vulture of silence

will eat your gut.

Your own misery

will pick at your soul.

And you will be mute in your shame.


--Otto Rene Castillo

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Otto Rene Castillo, born 1936, was a Guatemalan revolutionary, a
guerrilla fighter, and a poet. Following the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup
that overthrew the democratic Arbenz government, Castillo went into
exile in El Salvador, where he met Roque Dalton and other writers who
helped him publish his early works. When the dictator Armas died in 1957
he returned to Guatemala and in 1959 went to the German Democratic
Republic to study, where he received a Masters degree. Castillo returned
to Guatemala in 1964 and became active in the Workers Party, founded the
Experimental Theater of the Capital City Municipality, and wrote and
published numerous poems. That same year, he was arrested but managed to
escape, going into exile once again, this time in Europe. Later that
year he went back to Guatemala secretly and joined one of the armed
guerilla movements operating in the Zacapa mountains. In 1967, Castillo
and other revolutionary fighters were captured; he, along with his
comrades and some local campesinos, were brutally tortured and then
burned alive.