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I just turned the radio on while eating my lunch. A pleasant female voice, singing in Spanish, the lyrics vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite decipher them.
Then she got to the chorus, and I was singing along before I thought about it: "Guantanamera." One of the songs I grew up with, thanks to Pete Seeger. When I was sixteen or so, I was hanging out at a friend's house, and there were a bunch of other people there, mostly Dominicans [1]. It was someone's birthday, and they were improvising a song about him, in Spanish. I didn't know him, wasn't close to fluent, but I joined in on the choruses, and seemed to be a little more part of the group.
Literally, a "Guantanamera" is someone from Guantanamo. Yes, that Guantanamo. Too many layers of significance. One verse has the singer stating her (or his—I learned this from Pete) sympathy and affiliation "con los pobres de la tierra," the poor of the world.
It's not that history is a nightmare from which we cannot awaken, it's that it's layered, like Schliemann's Troy, and what we write changes meaning with time. I found myself explaining Flanders poppies in a comment last week, after casually offering one in response to a post elsewhere on LJ about 11:11. "Someday no-one will march there at all," and I never doubted that lyric, but neither did I think about that "someday" as something that would be part of my life.
[1] La Republica Dominicana, not monks.
Then she got to the chorus, and I was singing along before I thought about it: "Guantanamera." One of the songs I grew up with, thanks to Pete Seeger. When I was sixteen or so, I was hanging out at a friend's house, and there were a bunch of other people there, mostly Dominicans [1]. It was someone's birthday, and they were improvising a song about him, in Spanish. I didn't know him, wasn't close to fluent, but I joined in on the choruses, and seemed to be a little more part of the group.
Literally, a "Guantanamera" is someone from Guantanamo. Yes, that Guantanamo. Too many layers of significance. One verse has the singer stating her (or his—I learned this from Pete) sympathy and affiliation "con los pobres de la tierra," the poor of the world.
It's not that history is a nightmare from which we cannot awaken, it's that it's layered, like Schliemann's Troy, and what we write changes meaning with time. I found myself explaining Flanders poppies in a comment last week, after casually offering one in response to a post elsewhere on LJ about 11:11. "Someday no-one will march there at all," and I never doubted that lyric, but neither did I think about that "someday" as something that would be part of my life.
[1] La Republica Dominicana, not monks.