Getting to know Neruda - and Myself
I was quite suddenly face to face with a challenge that I was not quite prepared for. My students opted for a course on Latin American poetry as a part of their final year Graduation course, and I was given the responsibility to teach them the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Neruda was not one of my strongest areas, and although I did have some grounding on Latin American magic realist literature, the poetry of the land was outright out of my ken. However, work is worship, and I had new gods to deal with.
 The flip side of the situation was that my students were hardly more initiated in Latin American poetry than I was. The first challenge for me was to locate Neruda: he being a poet intensely grounded in his time and place. Neruda wrote poetry from his life, his ideology was formed as much from experiences immediate to him in his native Chile, as from books and manifestos. You will never know Neruda till you know his nation, its location and history and the time that he was writing in.  I was desperately in search for some South America maps, or more particularly a Chile map, which I could use for my classroom teachings.
 My first day, thus started with a detailed presentation of the South America map: a primarily political map showing the various countries, borders, and demographics. Soon the mere name of a poet – a signifier in the abstract - got a life, a body, assumed a persona. They say there is no history without geography, and I say there is no culture without history. However, I never realized that this train of logic would come back to re-assert itself in such an unforeseen way - I never realized before how important a map can be in the understanding of literature.
 What ensued was nothing less a journey of self-discovery for me and my students. His poems found a ground to take flight, and soon took wings. I realized that they were finding Neruda more interesting than most of the archaic English poets they were studying and getting thoroughly bored with. It was a kind of learning experience for me too. Before long, through an intense dialectic process between my students and myself, I was feeling more and more attached to this Chilean genius.
