the abyss behind you…
Pico Reja: la verdad que la tierra esconde. (dir. Laura Hojman) In the cemetery of Seville, lies the unexcavated mass grave of Pico Reja, estimated to contain more than 2000 civilian victims of Franco's brutal repressive regime. In 2020, this grave was opened. This documentary chronicles the exhumation of the grave, and lays bare its history. It weaves testimonials of families and their disappeared relatives and archaeologists as they uncover human remains with a lyric encounter between the singer Rocío Márquez and the poet Antonio Manuel Rodríguez as they create a song about this process. A profound analysis of the past that serves to understand the present of a country that has yet to reckon with the memory of those who were repressed and with its own history.
A las mujeres de España. María Lejárraga (dirs. Remedios Malvárez, Arturo Andújar) a literary docudrama about the curious and poignant story of feminist writer, María Lejárraga, who chose to publish many of her works under the name of her husband, Gregorio Martínez Sierra. Lejárraga (potrayed in the film by Cristina Domínguez) was one of the most prolific Spanish playwrights of all times, author of works such as Canción de cuna, made into a film five times and the librettist of Falla's El amor brujo. She was also a deputy for the Second Republic and founder of pioneering projects for women's rights and freedoms. After her husband’s death, she stepped out from behind the pseudonym she had chosen and struggled to be seen and accepted as the writer of her own stories.
Women have always had to start from scratch because they've not had the testimony of women before them. And that's a terrible disgrace. Because culture is a palimpsest. We all build on what was built before. So if you always have an abyss behind you…
~ Rosa Montero, translated from the Spanish, quoted in A las mujeres de España. María Lejárraga
Born in Madrid in 1951, Rosa Montero has been a journalist for Madrid's daily newspaper El País since 1976. She has published eight novels, many of which have been best-sellers in Spain. Montero's novel La hija del canibal (1997) won Spain's most prestigious literary award, the Premio Primavera de Novela. Visit her website https://www.rosamontero.es/
13 days of the abyss behind me
a 13 day chronicle of what arises when i invoke the abyss behind me. 13 because I’ve always liked that number, especially as an age. for some reason, the threshold between 12 and 13 felt full of magic, possibility.
Day One: Friday, January 27, 2023
A girl is in the abyss, her mouth full of ash, chewing it
she falls in the truth of things.
A grandmother named isabel was felled in the plaza de pumarejo
shot in the back by franquistas, soldiers of the Franco regime who called her abuela and gave her to believe she was returning home
in the plaza in front of her home, her body lay in the square for 3 days
in front of her home
and no one told her great grand daughter till decades after.
A letter written to the women of spain
written by a woman who chose the guise of her husband.
What the earth hides
in the abyss behind me
p.s - someone has gone and returned an OBE citing the “toxicity of empire”
Day Two: Saturday, January 28, 2023
At the lowest fathom of the abyss behind me, there is a tree.
I have seen such a thing in a red mesa landscape broken with arroyos and fissures.
Once as I walked to the edge of a canyon, and looked down
a ponderosa pine rose to my feet and birds were in its branches and flew up to see me.
The abyss is full of rain and the sea and darkness that protects you till you are ready to step out from it
Day Three: Sunday, January 29, 2023
The abyss behind me is made of dust, darkness and trees felled by stories that lit the earth when it came into being.
In it, a train goes past the sea and the sun finds and loses you through a slatted window.
In the abyss, a girl sings her lungs out, the air is a corriente that shocks the sleeping song, it startles the throat, everything arises at once into sky.
the blue breaks
the song sifts
the abysss behind me is full of unfinished pages
many years ago, i tried out for the school play
something to do with sisters of mercy
but my voice did not carry and I lost the stage.
Day Four: Monday, January 30, 2023
In the abyss is waking up at 430am because I couldn’t sleep and picking up a book that a friend had sent. The book fell open to page 36.
I didn’t want to live the way we had been living. I wanted a more spacious life. Time to write. In a place that was softer where people valued laughter, music and poetry. in the end, the answer was surprisingly simple to uncover: I was going back to Ireland to live. [sharon blackie, hagitude]
I smiled out loud - can you do that? yes, you can. I smiled out loud and carefully put the book back on the table.
****
Later, I met S for breakfast. We hadn’t seen each other since the summer. She has a shock of grey hair now. She is letting it grow out, she says. She has other friends who are 56 like her, and who don’t have a touch of grey in their hair. But hers is all grey and she likes it that way. She has a high forehead, the kind that I tell her marks sages in India. Yours is the same, she grins and points. Well, yes, but I have more of a widow’s peak. Here, they they call it “frente de bruja.” Forehead of a witch.
It is good to laugh with friends who have known you for years. Who see straight through you. S is that way. She sees straight through and beyond. I tell her that my last journey to a green place with standing stones changed so much of the story. I am sitting with it all, asking is this metaphor or is this asking for movement? I am asking: is there something I am holding on to, protecting, not letting go of?
She says, if you ask me, I think what you are protecting, that you don’t want to let go of is “racionalidad”
That is your final frontier.
Once you let go of that, whatever that is for you, you’ll be out of the box.
There was a chicken involved in the metaphor. There were wings that flapped out of the box. Up up and away. We laughed.
I said, on that beach,
allí
no pensaba
solamente bailaba
bailaba en el mar frío
en la arena fría
sin zapatos
no pensaba en que tipo de baile estaba bailando
soló bailaba lo que surgío, lo que sentí…
I just danced in the cold sea, without shoes, not asking what kind of dance it was. I just danced what arose.
There she said, that poem, that poem that arose just now. like that. That’s the poetry that feels true to you, she said, what arises just like that.
the alchemy of encounter.
I am still in love with technique
still learning the body
the peso the aire
the sound when the footwork becomes soniquete
when the arms rise like wings
I am not ready to leave but I also know that I need to be close to the wildness of old trees
sing under streams
like that
Leave behind all the planning in my lineage
the scouring and scurrying away of funds
the merchants in the lineage
who stopped their songs long ago
Even as they sang counting the money
…still they stopped their songs long ago
***
Today is Bloody Sunday. One day in 1972.
Bloody Sunday, or the Bogside Massacre,[1] was a massacre on 30 January 1972 when British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march in the Bogside area of Derry,[n 1] Northern Ireland. Fourteen people died. [wikipedia]
An Irish friend in Sevilla sent me a photo of her uncle who was at the protest. he is sitting still on the ground while the protests rage around him. The photo captures the last minutes of his life. He was shot in the back. He was lying belly down when he was shot.
In Jenin and Jerusalem:
JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Several vans, including a milk delivery truck, rolled into the center of the Jenin refugee camp around 7 a.m. Thursday. Israeli forces burst out, rushing through the narrow, trash-strewn alleys. They lobbed an explosive toward a house, calling for the Palestinian militants inside to surrender, but the young men spilled into the streets and began firing back.
Magda Obad went to have a look from her upstairs window.
She was shot in the heart and the neck, said her daughter, Kifaya Omar Obad, who held her 61-year-old mother as she died. “I’m sure her killing was intentional,” Kifaya said. “She was not armed.” [washington post]
I visited Jenin Refugee Camp in 2016 as part of Ashtar Theatre’s Youth Theater Festival. I saw four young boys on stage dare to act out their dreams. In a video for the Freedom Theater, a young man said: “Before I wanted to die as a martyr,” he said “But after I started acting, I began to consider living as a martyr, not dying as one.”
In Memphis:
Tyre Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells: “No mother should lose their child in the violent way that I lost my child…Where was the humanity?” Tyre Nichols’s mother says she feels sorry for the five Memphis police officers who are charged with killing her son by beating him “to a pulp”, but says they brought “shame on their own families and the Black community”. RowVaughn Wells was speaking in an emotional live interview on CNN on Friday morning one day after the officers, who are all Black, were charged with murder in the beating death of her son following a traffic stop in the city earlier this month.
PPS: did I mention someone returned their OBE citing the toxicity of empire?
In The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects, I say:
And a good immigrant agrees…. And I was already a good subject, I had already learned – before arriving – to make the sounds as they were pronounced by men with pens, quills, feathers who had drawn the world into place - this border, that border - such fine penmanship..
All this is in the abyss too.
Is the abyss behind me or in front of me?
Somedays I am stepping from one to another, from the past to the present or is it the future.
It’s staggering how much of the world we live in was made by men with pens.
The toxicity of empire.
that. Enough of that.
