FLICKING through the available entertainment on a long flight some years ago, I chanced upon a film titled Violeta Goes to Heaven. It turned out to be a mesmerising biopic of an artist whose musical oeuvre I was vaguely familiar with, but about whose life I knew next to nothing.
It was a troubled life in many ways and at various stages, not least in respect of the childhood poverty that induced Violeta Parra to become a performer. And it certainly did not end well. Yet it was peppered with uplifting phases that elevated her to the status of a cultural icon in her native Chile and accounted for a degree of international recognition.
Parra’s global claim to fame rests primarily on one particular song. It opens the last album she recorded before she put a revolver to her head and pulled the trigger 50 years ago. Small wonder, then, that ‘Gracias a la Vida’ is frequently interpreted as a suicide note. Each verse opens with the incantation, “Thanks to life, which has given me so much…”
Violeta Parra’s fame rests primarily on one song.
It goes on to express gratitude for a multitude of experiences, from the starry skies, crickets and canaries, bricks and storms, “and the tender voice of my beloved” to the alphabet, “the steps of my tired feet” and a heart able to distinguish good from evil. The concluding verses sum up the essence of the song: “Thanks to life, which has given me so much./ It gave me laughter and it gave me tears./ With them I distinguish happiness from pain/ The two elements that make up my song,/ And your song as well, which is the same song./ And everyone’s song, which is my very song.”
It sounds better in Spanish — a language that I regret never having acquired.
I first encountered ‘Gracias a la Vida’ in the positively vibrant version performed by Joan Baez. It is the title track in the only all-Spanish album she recorded in 1974, and has remained a cornerstone of her concert repertoire.
Baez’s rendition sounds joyous — a celebration of life rather than a lament, although it fits in both categories. The bittersweet wistfulness of the song arguably comes across more clearly when it’s sung by Mercedes Sosa, the Argentinian performer whose vocal depth, when first encountered, reminded me instantly of Abida Parveen.
Thanks in large part to Baez and Sosa, the song has made its way around the world, and, not entirely surprisingly, is a favourite at funerals. The Finnish singer Arja Saijonmaa, for instance, sang it in Swedish at the last rites for assassinated prime minister Olof Palme in 1986.
Violeta Parra’s renown, at least in her homeland and neighbouring South American nations, does not depend on one sublime set of verses, though. Born 100 years ago into a level of poverty that steadily deteriorated during her childhood, she began performing in bars, restaurants and trains at a tender age, her repertoire largely restricted to popular Spanish and Argentinean songs.
Her first marriage, to a communist train driver, served as something of a political education, and led to involvement in the 1944 presidential campaign of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla.
A few years later, she decided to travel across her country, soaking up Chilean folk traditions along the way, and in due course bringing them to national attention. Eventually, she was inspired to compose her own verses, often set to folk melodies. That’s why she’s frequently cited as the progenitor of Nueva Cancion Chilena, the Chilean New Song movement that transformed the nation’s popular culture. Regulars at the Pena de los Parra, set up in the early 1960s by her oldest children, Angel and Isabella, included the likes of the band Quilapayun and an up-and-coming singer-songwriter by the name of Victor Jara.
The latter is far better known than Parra, not only because of his talents but also as a consequence of his fate at the hands of Gen Augusto Pinochet’s thugs. Within days of the 1973 military coup, Jara was brutally tortured before being riddled with bullets. “The hungry ask for bread/ the militias give them bullets”, Parra had declared in her song ‘La Carta’ several years earlier. She did not allow herself the grace of witnessing the Allende presidency, or the lingering trauma of its aftermath. But ‘Gracias a la Vida’ was often sung in Pinochet’s prison cells.
Violeta Parra was much more than a singer-songwriter. Her talents extended to painting and tapestries; several sources suggest she was the first Latin American artist to be exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. That she was widely acclaimed in Europe, east and west, during her lifetime is not in doubt. But, at 100 years old and 50 years dead, her deserved stature as a proto-feminist and a cultural heroine remains unacknowledged in much of the Third World.
Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2017
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