I had to read this play for my Post-colonial theatre class, and was instantly attracted, compelled into this monodrama with two versions of a character played by a same performer. It talks about exile, borders, stereotypes, cultural clashes... it’s theatre that makes you think but that doesn’t make you nauseous with political propaganda.
I found it a beautiful, compelling piece and here are two extracts that particularly struck me.
from Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas (American Borders)
VERDECCHIA:
The tango, however, has not been entirely domesticated. It is impossible to shop or aerobicize to tango… porque el tango es un sentimiento que se baila.
An what is it about the tango, this national treasure that some say was born of the gaucho’s crude attempt to waltz?
(Music: ‘Verano Porteño’, Astor Piazzola)
It is music for exile, for the preparations, the significations of departure, for the symptoms of migration. It is the languishing music of picking through your belongings and deciding what to take. It is the two a.m music of smelling and caressing books none of which you can carry – books you leave behind with friends who say they’ll always be here when you want them when you need them – music for a bowl of apples sitting on your table, apples you have not yet eaten, apples you cannot take – you know they have apples there in that other place but not apples like these – you eat your last native apple and stare at what your life is reduced to – all the things you can stick into a sack. It will be cold, you will need boots, you don’t own boots except these rubber ones – will they do? You pack them, you pack a letter from a friend so you will not feel too alone.
Music for final goodbyes, for one last drink and a quick hug as you cram your cigarettes into your pocket and run to the bus, you run, run, your chest heaves, like the bellows of the bandoneon. You try to watch intently to emblazon in your mind these streets, these corners, those houses, the people, the smells, even the lurching bus fills you with a kind of stupid happiness and regret – music for the things you left behind in that room: a dress, magazines, some drawings, two pairs of shoes and blouses too old to be worn any more… four perfect apples.
Music for cold nights under incomprehensible stars, for cups of coffee and cigarette smoke, for a long walk by the river where you might be alone or you might meet someone. It is music for encounters in shabby stairways, the music of lovemaking in a narrow bed, the tenderness, the caress, the pull of strong arms and legs.
Music for men and women thin as bones.
Music for your invisibility.
Music for a letter that arrives telling you that he is very sick. Music for your arms that ache from longing from wishing he might be standing at the top of the stairs waiting to take the bags and then lean over and kiss you and even his silly stubble scratching your cold face would be welcome and you only discover that you’re crying when you try to find your keys –
Music for a day in the fall when you buy a new coat and think perhaps you will live here for the rest of your life, perhaps it will be possible, you have changed so much, would they recognize you? Would you recognize your country? Would you recognize yourself?
WIDELOAD:
Basically, tango is music for fucked up people.
VERDECCHIA:
Other things cross borders easily. Diseases and disorders. Like amnesia. Amnesia crosses borders.
Second extract:
VERDECCHIA:
… And written on the package is a note, a quote I hadn’t noticed before. It says:
No estoy el crucero:
Elegir
Es equivocarse.
SLIDE
I am not at the cross roads.
to choose
is to go wrong.
- Octavio Paz
And then I remember, I remember what El Brujo said, he said ‘The Border is your Home’.
I’m not in Canada; I’m not in Argentina. I’m on the Border
I am Home.
Mais zoot alors, je comprends maintenant, mais oui, merde! Je suis Argentin-Canadien ! I am a post-Porteño neo-Latino Canadian ! I am the Pan-American Highway !
Friday, November 17, 2006
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Death and procrastination
There they go, all the thoughts I was reveling in while playing mine sweeper. Gone, evaporated as I decide consciously to capture them, to pin them down on the virtual sheet of paper of my computer screen. Typing doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel like I’m doing the same kind of writing when I type than when I write in script. Maybe because I don’t type fast, but I think it has more to do with pain. The pain of scripting: your back aches, at least mine does, as if sitting straight would allow the ideas to evaporate into the surrounding air. And the hand hurts, too. The wrist and the finger. Computer writing is more comfortable, physically. I’m sitting straight and my fingers don’t ache. But the lack of physical pain brings a new anxiety that lodges about at the level of the heart in my chest. I’m not so much in the action, I’m distanced. There’s that screen, and I don’t feel the connection between the letters being punched and the result on the page. I intellectually know (kind of) that wires and complicated mathematical equations connect the two, but it’s a bit too complex to fully comprehend. Whereas the pain, the pen, the link between the mind, the pen and the paper, that all makes perfect sense. But maybe it felt as alien to the first human who figured out how to write. After all, it is a pretty alien action, alienating too. Inscribing a little bit of ourselves onto something outside. Odd.
And now I don’t have anything else to write, because I’ve been playing at catching up. Ages ago, about when I was writing about the wires and math equations of the computer, I was thinking of the printer, and usually how happy I am to snatch the page once it comes out of the plastic monster, and how I beam at seeing those shiny little signs, letters and sentences, finally, finally real and there. I also love taking notes on printed pages. On books, on photocopies… hell if this page ever gets printed out, I’ll probably take notes on it! I’m weird, don’t mind me.
I hate when I do that, when I cut myself out, when I censor myself saying ‘I’m stupid anyway, so what’s the use’.
God, you’re just lazy and you fucking know it. Lazy and afraid. Fear is very sly, and I’m starting to understand just how sly it is. I am an anxious person, and there are things that I think about, that are constantly on my mind, yet that I constantly try to hide, to keep out, just in order to remain sane. As sane as I can be. So these thoughts end up crammed in some subconscious spot, and also crammed in some not so subconscious spots. Wherever these ideas and these fears are stored, they of course reappear. Every once in a while, to nag me and to make me miserable. But also to make me think more, and perhaps more constructively.
So these ideas are mainly centered around the theme of death, yes I know, not very original. Death is present in my mind, often, and that’s not to say all the bloody time. But I suppose that’s the same for many people, even if they don’t actually say it. I mean, I don’t think to myself from morning to night ‘death death death death death’. Thank God for that. No, what I’m saying is that a lot of my thoughts and my actions tend to take into account the nagging idea and presence of death. In things like considering the future, for example. Actually, that’s the main example, if not the only one. Death and the future, my death and my future, are quite obviously intertwined, since my future ends with my death. But one might think that given that I’m 20, I could have kept the idea of death at bay by tucking it neatly in my subconscious, for it to reappear only in a few more years, when death becomes more tangible.
That would be forgetting my history, my ‘death heritage’ as it could cynically be called. Because unfortunately, many of my family members have died prematurely, and that has always bothered me. It bothered me when I was small, making me feel anxious in my bed at night because I didn’t understand why I didn’t have a father, and why in the world had he disappeared when I hadn’t actually met him? So rude. The fact that he had died prematurely especially bothered me. I would do the maths, and realize that all the other parents were alive, and not that old. And there’s something else. I wondered if I would have been more sad had my father died when I actually had known him, or if it was more sad not to have known him at all. I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and I decided, quite a few years after the question had initially arose, that I would be as sad, just in a different way. And now that I think about it, those two situations – loosing a parent when you’re a baby and loosing a parent when you’ve known the parent for a while- those two situations are quite different. In one you miss out on a figure, rather than loosing a person, and in the other you can remember the figure, you have learned from the parent’s role, but you sorely loose a person. I feel like I missed out on the experience of having a father, and of course on the experience of having Etienne Losq as a father.
There was something else I was getting at, and now I’m a bit confused.
Yes. Fear. Basically I’m insanely afraid of dying, and you guessed, of dying young, prematurely. I’m afraid of this for a number of reasons. Of course, because I know that it can happen. And I also know that it can happen to people that you thought wouldn’t die so stupidly, because ‘they had things to do in life’. My father had research to do; he had a family to take care of. Why does he die when clearly we still need him here? Questions that are painfully familiar to most people having gone through mourning. Knowing that you can die at any moment is paralyzing. It paralyzes me. Because there are two contrasting forces at work here. The knowledge that I can die at any moment prompts me to want to do as much as I can before I can no longer. But the fear of dying prevents me from doing it. And that’s where the slyness comes into play. Through laziness. The idea is that in a twisted twisted way, the act of not doing anything, of being lazy, of procrastinating, is in a sense a reenactment of death. It’s dying. And so, by reenacting death you keep it at bay, because if you don’t do that, you risk being surprised by it. I don’t know if this makes sense, but it doesn’t matter because the twisted slyness at work here is nonsensical.
The idea that we create art or if we think constructively, because we are afraid of our death is completely unrealistic. If everyone who was afraid of death created because of that fear, then the world would be full of creation, and of very urgent and important creation. But it is precisely because we are afraid of death, and because fear is paralyzing, that so many of us end up doing nothing. I think that the real redemption is in the knowledge, not the fear. Therefore, if we have the knowledge that we will die, but not the fear of death, then we can create, we can write, we can draw, we can figure out complicated equations.
I don’t care about typing or scripting anymore, since it all comes out being the same thing. Enough with stupid excuses like the pain of writing with a pen versus the distance of the computer. All that is nonsense. It just keeps me distracted from the urgent, pressing concern of acting my life instead of passively looking at it go away.
And now I don’t have anything else to write, because I’ve been playing at catching up. Ages ago, about when I was writing about the wires and math equations of the computer, I was thinking of the printer, and usually how happy I am to snatch the page once it comes out of the plastic monster, and how I beam at seeing those shiny little signs, letters and sentences, finally, finally real and there. I also love taking notes on printed pages. On books, on photocopies… hell if this page ever gets printed out, I’ll probably take notes on it! I’m weird, don’t mind me.
I hate when I do that, when I cut myself out, when I censor myself saying ‘I’m stupid anyway, so what’s the use’.
God, you’re just lazy and you fucking know it. Lazy and afraid. Fear is very sly, and I’m starting to understand just how sly it is. I am an anxious person, and there are things that I think about, that are constantly on my mind, yet that I constantly try to hide, to keep out, just in order to remain sane. As sane as I can be. So these thoughts end up crammed in some subconscious spot, and also crammed in some not so subconscious spots. Wherever these ideas and these fears are stored, they of course reappear. Every once in a while, to nag me and to make me miserable. But also to make me think more, and perhaps more constructively.
So these ideas are mainly centered around the theme of death, yes I know, not very original. Death is present in my mind, often, and that’s not to say all the bloody time. But I suppose that’s the same for many people, even if they don’t actually say it. I mean, I don’t think to myself from morning to night ‘death death death death death’. Thank God for that. No, what I’m saying is that a lot of my thoughts and my actions tend to take into account the nagging idea and presence of death. In things like considering the future, for example. Actually, that’s the main example, if not the only one. Death and the future, my death and my future, are quite obviously intertwined, since my future ends with my death. But one might think that given that I’m 20, I could have kept the idea of death at bay by tucking it neatly in my subconscious, for it to reappear only in a few more years, when death becomes more tangible.
That would be forgetting my history, my ‘death heritage’ as it could cynically be called. Because unfortunately, many of my family members have died prematurely, and that has always bothered me. It bothered me when I was small, making me feel anxious in my bed at night because I didn’t understand why I didn’t have a father, and why in the world had he disappeared when I hadn’t actually met him? So rude. The fact that he had died prematurely especially bothered me. I would do the maths, and realize that all the other parents were alive, and not that old. And there’s something else. I wondered if I would have been more sad had my father died when I actually had known him, or if it was more sad not to have known him at all. I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and I decided, quite a few years after the question had initially arose, that I would be as sad, just in a different way. And now that I think about it, those two situations – loosing a parent when you’re a baby and loosing a parent when you’ve known the parent for a while- those two situations are quite different. In one you miss out on a figure, rather than loosing a person, and in the other you can remember the figure, you have learned from the parent’s role, but you sorely loose a person. I feel like I missed out on the experience of having a father, and of course on the experience of having Etienne Losq as a father.
There was something else I was getting at, and now I’m a bit confused.
Yes. Fear. Basically I’m insanely afraid of dying, and you guessed, of dying young, prematurely. I’m afraid of this for a number of reasons. Of course, because I know that it can happen. And I also know that it can happen to people that you thought wouldn’t die so stupidly, because ‘they had things to do in life’. My father had research to do; he had a family to take care of. Why does he die when clearly we still need him here? Questions that are painfully familiar to most people having gone through mourning. Knowing that you can die at any moment is paralyzing. It paralyzes me. Because there are two contrasting forces at work here. The knowledge that I can die at any moment prompts me to want to do as much as I can before I can no longer. But the fear of dying prevents me from doing it. And that’s where the slyness comes into play. Through laziness. The idea is that in a twisted twisted way, the act of not doing anything, of being lazy, of procrastinating, is in a sense a reenactment of death. It’s dying. And so, by reenacting death you keep it at bay, because if you don’t do that, you risk being surprised by it. I don’t know if this makes sense, but it doesn’t matter because the twisted slyness at work here is nonsensical.
The idea that we create art or if we think constructively, because we are afraid of our death is completely unrealistic. If everyone who was afraid of death created because of that fear, then the world would be full of creation, and of very urgent and important creation. But it is precisely because we are afraid of death, and because fear is paralyzing, that so many of us end up doing nothing. I think that the real redemption is in the knowledge, not the fear. Therefore, if we have the knowledge that we will die, but not the fear of death, then we can create, we can write, we can draw, we can figure out complicated equations.
I don’t care about typing or scripting anymore, since it all comes out being the same thing. Enough with stupid excuses like the pain of writing with a pen versus the distance of the computer. All that is nonsense. It just keeps me distracted from the urgent, pressing concern of acting my life instead of passively looking at it go away.
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