Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Seventeen Section Two: The Poet As Diplomat by Dave Jaffe

  The Poet As Diplomat -Section Two by Dave Jaffe
   

       In his book 'The Labyrinth of Solitude' the Mexican poet Octavio Paz pointed out  that the history of Mexico was a violent one. There's no doubt that the story of Mexico is full of bloodshed. When Cortes the Spanish conquistador  invaded Mexico in the early 16th century, he and his troops killed thousands of Aztecs as well as their  ruler Montezuma.
    In the last half dozen years or so, at least 40,000 Mexicans have died in the country's drug wars. In between Cortes' conquests and today, lie the Mexican War of Independence against the Mexicans' Spanish overlords, the French invasion of Mexico in the 1850's, wars with the United States of America, and the Mexican Revolution that lasted from 1910 to 1920.
      What are now most of the western and southwestern states in the U.S. of A., were seized by the United States from Mexico in the nineteenth century. "We never gave California to the U.S.," an angry Mexican official told this author in 1970. "They grabbed it from us and a whole lot more of besides."
      In 1968 rebellions shook the four corners of the world. In that year Mexico held the Olympic Games in and outside Mexico City. At about the same time Mexican troops shot and killed hundreds of Mexican students who were protesting against the Mexican government. This erupted in the Plaza of the Three Cultures near Mexico City.
      Octavio Paz resigned from his diplomatic post in protest against this massacre. He then spent time teaching at Cambridge University in Great Britain and then taught at Harvard University in the U.S. As he aged Paz definitely became more conservative. He turned against Fidel Castro's communist rule in Cuba, and against the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.
     "Revolution begins as a promise," Paz wrote. "But it is squandered in violent agitation and then freezes into bloody dictatorship."  The history of 20th century revolutions including the Mexican, the Russian., the Chinese, the Iranian and the Cambodian revolutions, do prove Paz's statement. Yet many of these revolutions do start against terrible social injustices.
    Because of Paz's new attitudes towards social change, Mexican novelists like Carlos Fuentes ended his friend ship with Paz. Some other younger artists also kept their distance from the ageing poet.
   Still, above all, Paz was a poet and a great one. In 1957 he published his greatest poem called 'Sandstone' or 'Piedra de Sol'. In 1990 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
      "More than our air," he wrote in his poem called "Passages'
      "More than water,
      More than lips

      Your body is the trace of your body."

    Paz was married twice and had a daughter named 'Helena'. He died in 1998.