Wendy Brown-Baez's Blog: Wendy's Muse - Posts Tagged "honoring-the-dead"
The year has come around again to that day when many traditions believe that the veil between the worlds is thinnest and the dead return to the places they once inhabited.
I have celebrated Día de los Muertos with a bilingual poetry performance in Puerto Vallarta. I asked the members of the audience to light candles in honor of their own dead and later, my performance partner and I called out the various Spanish names of La Muerte (la perra, la hedionda, la harpienta, la chingada, La Katrina, etc) across the space like an echo, as if we were searching for her. The realization that death is a cycle of life, that it comes for all of us, was healing after my son's death.
In 2000, my partner Michael and I wandered among the graves in Xoxocatlán, the site of ancient Día de los Muertos traditions, under the hovering ruins of Monte Alban in the city of Oaxaca. I wish you had been there with me. The air was reverent but festive. Copal incense rose up to sweeten the air; the graves were illuminated by candles; families sat together to pass along stories; candies, hot chocolate, and cervezas were enjoyed. For two weeks, we saw people with huge bundles of cempúsechil flowers on top of their cars or in wheelbarrows and every public building from the panadería to the biblioteca had ofrendas, homemade altars with sugar skulls, miniture skeletons, flowers, candles, and treats for the dead.
Michael would pass on a year and a half later. His ashes were spread on a hilltop above the town of Magdalena, a town that often began our excursions into Mexico. With roosters echoing the colors of the sun, four of us lit candles in each of the four directions and blessed him. This town favored plastic wreaths over the elaborate designs of Oaxaca and although the cementary was packed, Día de los Muertos felt more subdued.
Two years ago I dressed as La Llorona, the mother who wanders the arroyos of the southwest weeping for her dead children, an archetype of a misfortunate and terrorizing ghost. I was attending the Dead Poets Party sponsored by The Loft. I teased my hair into a tangle, painted my face white with teardrops, and dressed in black. Who knows what the people on the bus thought? I felt inhabited by her. I understood that she did not kill her children as she is accused, but that they were murdered and she was blamed. Too stunned to defend herself, she wanders the world weeping. Today she weeps for the destruction and desecration of Mother Earth. I think she also was weeping for the slain children of my neighborhood, the senseless violence of gang retribution.
Last year I did a presentation of Versos de Calaveras, a Mexican tradition of eulogies for the living, in particular those in power, such as politicians and the weathy, as a form of social protest. In some villages, the poets seek out those who have lost someone recently and their silly "character roasts" are meant to bring the survivors back from mourning to rejoin the living.
This year, I will decorate my ofrenda with the photos of my loved ones who have passed on, but I will not be there to greet them if they come from the other side. I will be holding my 8 week old grandson.
Tell me, what will you do to honor this sacred time? Light candles for those who have fallen in Iraq, both soldiers and civilians? Your ancestors? Your best friend who passed away from cancer last year, your elderly neighbor, the I35 bridge victims, the dying in Africa, the murdered women of Juarez? Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, or maybe Jimi or Janis? Not too much time has passed; time means nothing on the other side. Do they come to check up on us, to be sure they are not forgotten? Do they come to bring a message? Do we show our love with a prayer, a candle, a visual creation? Or do we simply hope that someday, we, too, will be remembered and thus, set the example of how we want it to be done.
But for the Dead Poets party tomorrow, I will dress in my red fringed Spanish shawl and read Neruda's poem Nothing But Death:
There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.
Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.
Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.
But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.
Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
Translated by Robert Bly
I have celebrated Día de los Muertos with a bilingual poetry performance in Puerto Vallarta. I asked the members of the audience to light candles in honor of their own dead and later, my performance partner and I called out the various Spanish names of La Muerte (la perra, la hedionda, la harpienta, la chingada, La Katrina, etc) across the space like an echo, as if we were searching for her. The realization that death is a cycle of life, that it comes for all of us, was healing after my son's death.
In 2000, my partner Michael and I wandered among the graves in Xoxocatlán, the site of ancient Día de los Muertos traditions, under the hovering ruins of Monte Alban in the city of Oaxaca. I wish you had been there with me. The air was reverent but festive. Copal incense rose up to sweeten the air; the graves were illuminated by candles; families sat together to pass along stories; candies, hot chocolate, and cervezas were enjoyed. For two weeks, we saw people with huge bundles of cempúsechil flowers on top of their cars or in wheelbarrows and every public building from the panadería to the biblioteca had ofrendas, homemade altars with sugar skulls, miniture skeletons, flowers, candles, and treats for the dead.
Michael would pass on a year and a half later. His ashes were spread on a hilltop above the town of Magdalena, a town that often began our excursions into Mexico. With roosters echoing the colors of the sun, four of us lit candles in each of the four directions and blessed him. This town favored plastic wreaths over the elaborate designs of Oaxaca and although the cementary was packed, Día de los Muertos felt more subdued.
Two years ago I dressed as La Llorona, the mother who wanders the arroyos of the southwest weeping for her dead children, an archetype of a misfortunate and terrorizing ghost. I was attending the Dead Poets Party sponsored by The Loft. I teased my hair into a tangle, painted my face white with teardrops, and dressed in black. Who knows what the people on the bus thought? I felt inhabited by her. I understood that she did not kill her children as she is accused, but that they were murdered and she was blamed. Too stunned to defend herself, she wanders the world weeping. Today she weeps for the destruction and desecration of Mother Earth. I think she also was weeping for the slain children of my neighborhood, the senseless violence of gang retribution.
Last year I did a presentation of Versos de Calaveras, a Mexican tradition of eulogies for the living, in particular those in power, such as politicians and the weathy, as a form of social protest. In some villages, the poets seek out those who have lost someone recently and their silly "character roasts" are meant to bring the survivors back from mourning to rejoin the living.
This year, I will decorate my ofrenda with the photos of my loved ones who have passed on, but I will not be there to greet them if they come from the other side. I will be holding my 8 week old grandson.
Tell me, what will you do to honor this sacred time? Light candles for those who have fallen in Iraq, both soldiers and civilians? Your ancestors? Your best friend who passed away from cancer last year, your elderly neighbor, the I35 bridge victims, the dying in Africa, the murdered women of Juarez? Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, or maybe Jimi or Janis? Not too much time has passed; time means nothing on the other side. Do they come to check up on us, to be sure they are not forgotten? Do they come to bring a message? Do we show our love with a prayer, a candle, a visual creation? Or do we simply hope that someday, we, too, will be remembered and thus, set the example of how we want it to be done.
But for the Dead Poets party tomorrow, I will dress in my red fringed Spanish shawl and read Neruda's poem Nothing But Death:
There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.
Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.
Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.
But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.
Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
Translated by Robert Bly
Wendy's Muse
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