The violent suppression of a workers’ strike in 1928 came to be known as the ‘Banana Massacre’; estimates of the number of dead range from 47 to 2,000. The poem will strike a chord with both Indian and Pakistani readers given that united India itself was ruled by a multinational known as the East India Company which made and unmade the governments of Indian princely states and brutalized and terrorized Indian citizens through its blatant policy of divide and rule in the early 19th century in a rapacious and callous manner not entirely different from the United Fruit Company in Latin America a century later.
When the trumpet blared everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors and other entities:
the United Fruit Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest,
the central seaboard of my land,
America’s sweet waist.
It rebaptized these lands
as “Banana Republics,”
and over the slumbering corpses,
upon the restless heroes,
who conquered renown,
freedom and flags,
it established the comic opera:
it alienated self-destiny,
regaled Caesar’s crowns,
unsheathed envy, drew
the dictatorship of flies:
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carías flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies soaked
in humble blood and jam,
drunk flies that drone
over the common graves,
circus flies, clever flies
versed in tyranny.
Among the bloodthirsty flies
the Fruit Co. disembarks,
ravaging coffee and fruits
for its ships that spirit away
our submerged lands’ treasures
like serving trays.
Meanwhile, in the seaports’
sugary abysses,
Indians collapsed, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls down, a nameless
thing, a fallen number,
a bunch of lifeless fruit
dumped in the rubbish heap.
Ahmad Salim, the Punjabi poet, historian, anthologist, archivist, researcher and compiler, is regarded as one of the greatest living Punjabi poets at the moment. In his little-known Punjabi poem Neruda Wapis Aave Ga (Neruda Will Return) written in 1981, eight years after the great Chilean poet’s death, Salim writes: