Can exhumations really answer all the terminal questions?

What links Latin American icon Simon Bolivar, chess great Bobby Fischer, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, English King Richard III and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda? All dead, yes, but also those who’ve risen from the grave in the last few years. The first three in 2010, and the rest in the last few months, with Neruda popping up earlier this month. But here, the Shakespearean notion of “The good is oft interred with (men’s) bones” isn’t at work, rather, the motivation is the evil that might be buried within the bones. For, such exhumations are an attempt to answer a bitter question from contentious times. Not for these, then, the Bard’s warning on his own grave, “Blest be the man that spares these stones / And curst be he that moves my bones.”

Like in Neruda’s case, it can be like a curse coming back to the accused from the grave. At stake is the claim that Neruda, like many friends, was done in by the Pinochet regime. And if modern science offers evidence of foul play, then some may feel a sense of vindication. Neruda himself, one thinks, mightn’t have cared. He, who likened awaiting death to a “dressed admiral”, also pointed to the absence therein, where “death arrives…like a shoe with no foot in it / like a suit with no man in it”. A poem, after all, can say so much more than any DNA or biochemical analysis.