Is a celebrated Chilean-American poet lying about his family history?

Daniel Borzutzky's professed family history should possibly arouse a bit of skepticism

Daniel Borzutzky’s voice is an expression of Chilean historical sorrows. Daniel Borzutzky has written about the awful circumstances of Chilean history and drawn allusions to it throughout his work. Daniel Borzutzky was an obvious choice to let translate Zurita, considering Zurita’s INRI is probably one of the most powerful expressions of post-Pinochet grief ever put to paper, with Borzutzky translating Zurita’s likewise-themed Song for His Disappeared Love. Daniel Borzutzky comes by it honestly, of course, as he has told us that his parents chose to live in America out of avoidance of the murderous Pinochet dictatorship themselves, and his family had deep ties to the Allende government and lost many a friend to the disappearances. Daniel Borzutzky is probably full of shit.

There’s an interview that Borzutzky gave a bit ago, centring on his Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, where he details some of his family saga. Borzutzky mentions that his parents came to the United States rather young, as students, in ‘70 or ‘71, but stuck around after the coup happened. The interviewer, enthusiastic at the chance to tie this into Borzutzky’s work, immediately jumps in to clarify: “they stayed essentially because of the coup, the dictatorship?” to which Borzutzky convincingly responds: “yeah, I think that’s a fair thing to say” (emphasis mine). Borzutzky then says that he has “affiliations” with Allende on both sides of his family. Let’s assess those claims. First he says that his maternal grandfather “worked as a bureaucrat in the Allende government.” Is that really “affiliation”? Burueacrats during Allende’s presidency were not necessarily “affiliated” with Allende as saying that may suggest, in fact Allende’s enemies in the PDC had made sure the civil service bureaucracy preceding Allende’s government remained intact. Peter A. Goldberg, in his essay “The Politics of the Allende Overthrow in Chile,” establishes that in Chile “each bureaucratic unit would tend to go its own way, enjoying considerable autonomy from presidential control.” In other words, the bureaucrats were rarely “affiliated” with any given president.

What’s more is that civil servants were often members of the middle class, which on the whole was not pro-Allende. Borzutzky tells us that “nothing happened directly” to this grandfather but says that “I think he lived with a lot of fear” (emphasis mine). He thinks. Interesting choice of words. As interesting as responding to a direct question about whether your family was ostensibly fleeing a Murder Regime with what amounts to “yeah I guess so.” Ultimately, his grandfather stuck around in Chile in spite of his deep “fear” and in spite of the fact that his daughter, the American citizen, could surely have procured him a family-based visa. Scared, yes, but not the most motivated. Well, I mean, maybe red tape got in the way, I understand that, the complications of these processes often alienate people from even trying. Bureaucracy is difficult! Unless you’re, oh, you know, a professional bureaucrat? Like Borzutzky’s grandfather? I wonder what he did after Allende. My money is on “continued to be a bureaucrat for Pinochet.” Anyway. On to grandfather #2.

Borzutzky says his paternal grandfather was a close friend of Allende. Borzutzky explains the relationship in his (fucking dogshit) poem, “How I Got Here”:

He was besties with the president played ball with the president when they were in high school went out drinking with the president when they were in college wrote revolutionary treatises with the president over bottles of wine and cigarettes

Besties, eh? That’s a pretty lofty claim. He tells his interviewer his grandfather “had participated in the founding of the Socialist Party.” Wow! Sounds like this guy should surely show up in the historical record attached to Allende! Maybe you’ll have an easier time finding mention of him in that record than I did, because I certainly can’t find him. It’s okay though, in the same aforementioned (fucking dogshit) poem, Borzutzky preemptively explains my failure to find his grandfather:

My father’s father was a revolutionary

But they excommunicated him from the party

Or he excommunicated himself from the party

It’s complicated

…

My grandfather was written out of the revolution

Haha oh, okay, I see, I would have heard of him, but Allende hit ‘im with the ol’ Stalin Classic, the socialist damnatio memoriae. It’s complicated, man. Even Borzutzky doesn’t really get it, I mean, he tellls us as much in the interview: “He died when I was very young, so I don’t know these stories very well.” This all sounds a lot like “my girlfriend in Canada” logic. My grandfather was an important Chilean socialist, founding member of the socialist party, and best friend of Allende, but you won’t find anything about that connection because he was “written out of history” oh and also in case you find evidence counter to what I said um… I actually don’t even know the stories all that well, so you can’t fault me. At the very least I’ll be willing to believe that he was maybe a member of the Socialist Party. But he was excommunicated? That’s interesting, why was that? Let’s see in that interview.

He was an old school Socialist Zionist who was very involved with the Jewish community in Chile, and I think he fell out with Allende in part because the Socialist Party had expressed solidarity with Palestine, or something like that. He died when I was very young, so I don’t know these stories very well. He wrote biographies of Jewish intellectuals, like Freud and others, but also wrote for a Zionist newspaper or something like that.

Oh. Zionism. Great. And topical, I guess!

Apparently his grandfather “wrote for a Zionist newspaper or something like that.” Yeah, I guess you could say it was “something like that”—someone by the name of Rodolfo Borzutzky-Fridman was certainly the President of the Federation of Chilean Zionists. Surely there’s other Borzutzkys and maybe some of them were Zionists too, but this man died in 1979 at the age of 62, and Daniel Borzutzky was born in 1974 so the whole “he died when I was very young” story certainly matches up time-wise.

Prominent “leftist” Zionists (an oxymoronic label if ever there was one, about as meaningful as the “socialist” in “National Socialist”) were spirited out of the country by the Israeli embassy when Pinochet took power. Yet again, another of Borzutzky’s “Allende-affiliated” grandfathers had a perfectly good opportunity to leave the country, which, yet again, this one did not take. He died in Chile in 1979. If it was Pinochet’s doing, you’d think Daniel would have mentioned it, but he doesn’t. As for the Federation of Chilean Zionists he may have been the one-time president of? They loved Pinochet and Pinochet loved them. Why wouldn’t he? Pinochet loved Israel. They helped him commit mass murder!

Anyway, being a Zionist is pretty fucking awful to begin with, I suppose—how’s Borzutzky feel about that legacy? For an elucidation we may turn again to Borzutzky’s dogshit Facebook-post-with-enjambment, “How I Got Here”:

But then they had an argument

It’s complicated 

Like really geopolitically complicated

Sort of

The party loved nation A in a faraway land but my grandfather did not like nation A because nation A wanted to kill the people of nation B and the party (though they did not believe in violence) were not fans of the people of nation B and they supported the people of nation A in their {impossible} quest to wipe nation B off the planet 

The president liked nation A     my grandfather liked nation B 

They fell out over this

[Emphasis mine]

Oh! Haha, well that sucks! I know he’s trying to suggest “nation B” is Israel here, but it sounds a lot more like this “nation A” since Israel’s entire inherent national project is wiping another nation (Palestine) off the planet. Look at the sneering “{impossible}” Borzutzky includes here. I don’t have a pithy witticism for this one. Sneer all you want, Daniel. Nations fall. Your middle-eastern Rhodesia will be next.

Borzutzky just writes and talks like someone who is full of shit. This poem is like the smug and pathetic raving of a shitty wannabe Gore Vidal, with the casual dropping of weekend car rides with Jack Kennedy replaced by patently over-exaggerated stories about how his mom, like, totally talked to Allende once.

The president was a nice man

The president offered my mother a job

He said    When you finish law school    join the revolution

He offered her a job with the revolution

My mother was not a Jedi but she knew how to use the force

You will give me a job when I finish law school     my mother said to the president

And the president repeated     I will give you a job when you finish law school

I do not use the force but I am force-sensitive

My mother said     you will give me a job when I finish law school

And the president said   yes I will give you a job    if they don’t shoot me first 

Ah, yes, he “offered her a job,” very intimate. Except that it’s clear from his own depiction that this was a meaningless exchange between Allende and some civil servant’s daughter at a political event where he effectively communicated “you should vote for Popular Unity!” And Allende didn’t offer the job, Borzutzky’s mother half-jokingly asked for a job, to which the President gave a canned joke response about political turmoil, a fatalist joke I’ve actually read him make elsewhere. There’s so little to this exchange that Borzutzky has to repeat and rephrase the same lines multiple times. And man, I’m trying to just talk about Borzutzky here and not how bad his writing is, but Jesus Christ this is bad—and that Jedi reference? I’m upchucking in my mouth a lil’ here.

Borzutzky has either openly lied about/exaggerated his family’s history, or else he’s been wilfully ignorant of the truth of it. He is someone invested in his familial attachments to Chile, and yet he is somehow also so fundamentally incurious about his own family that he hasn’t even slightly looked into them to confirm any of the things he says himself he doesn’t know. How the fuck am I just sitting down to write this article today and found all this shit while barely even scratching the surface, and he somehow hasn’t? He has no business translating Zurita poems. Has he even been impacted in any way by the Pinochet regime? Did he lose anyone at all? In the interview he says “everybody in Chile knows someone who was affected by the coup” (emphasis mine). Someone? Fucking name one! Name one single fucking person you know who was actually disappeared. Since the depth of your “affiliations” with the Allende side you name are two grandfathers whose affiliations were abysmal at best, antagonistic at worst, I’m going to assume they are among the most disappeared of all: the non-existent.

Not only has Borzutzky plainly exaggerated his connections to that history, it’s possible his very relatives he references actually may have supported the Pinochet regime, and that is to say nothing of Borzutzky’s comments which clearly mark him as tacitly supportive of Israel, a genocidal, apartheid, fascist regime which does all Pinochet did to Chile and more to the indigenous Palestinians and has done so since it was born crawling out of Balfour’s hernia’d asshole. He’s further a bad fit for the material because he, as evidenced here, can’t write worth a damn, and no wonder he needs this farce to lean his work against considering the work can hardly do to stand on its own. It is a complete fucking insult to the countless victims of Pinochet and his goons that someone like this is given the job of translating the grief of their survivors. He should be deeply ashamed.