I haven't written here in a long while. My second year at seminary was a blur of church work, school work, sweat, tears, sleeplessness and falling in love. This autumn semester I have been able to take a hiatus, blessed be, and accompany my love in the strangely historic and forgetful city of Cartagena, Colombia. We live by the sea, supposedly, but the most I see of it on a daily basis is the rust from the salt and the mold from humidity. I wrote a poem recently and remembered that I have a blog. Perhaps this will be the start of a more internet-prolific phase in which I discuss matters of dislocated spiritual cultivation and sundry lived realities in Latin America.
The
Anthropologist Who Tried to Meditate in Cartagena de Indias
I.
Some
days she woke up when everything was already covered
in
a film of sweet, sticky sweat
before
the swampy dew of the night
had
yet dried off clotheslines out on the patio.
Some
days she set an alarm
and
rose from the damp mattress in the dark
with
an almost religious fervor.
She
would get up and run down a dusty four-lane highway
that
smelled like sulfur and dead animals
where
buses had special horns to whistle at women
and
vendors pushed their wooden carts
to
God knows where at six in the morning.
II.
She
would lie down on cool white linoleum tiles
that
she swept daily of their dirt
until
the wooden broomstick broke in half.
She
tried to meditate with the subtle,
vibrating
unity of the universe,
as
she listened to the rhythm of flip-flips shuffling down the street
and
electronic music blasting out of nightclub-sized speakers
that
the neighbors on the corner would drag out front
to
make the whole block jump as they walked.
Heavy
bass beats made for grinding hips and genitals together
replaced
her rhythmic breathing methods
with
music to help you forget about oppression and love
and
anything else that makes humans go to sleep at night
with
the will to wake up the next morning.
III.
She
walked to the corner store sometimes
to
buy tomatoes, onions, or panela, the dark blocks
of
condensed sugarcane that she had never needed in her diet
until
she came to Cartagena de Indias with her boyfriend
and
all her grant money ran out.
In
this place she was only granted the privilege
of
walking to the corner store to buy a few spare things
and
to try not to look at anyone,
as
if this would deter them from looking at her.
She
finally learned what it is like not to study people,
but
to be studied by them.
“Are
you from Bogotá?” “Nena, do you play an instrument?”
She
learned to be the exotic other that must be decoded.
IV.
Her
boyfriend would come home from work in Flower of the Field,
the
neighborhood where freshly rotting meat
and
fermented sewage bloomed in the streets,
where
the people were even poorer and had even larger sound systems.
He
would tell her about the homes he visited
to
take down data for microcredit loan groups,
where
people evaded his questions with their winding tales
and
gave him sticks of frozen juice and little cups of coffee.
Where
tiny boys made lewd sexual gestures at tiny girls.
He
told her about the carnivalesque parade
with
the girls in shimmery dresses on handmade floats,
the
songs beat out at last with the organic sounds of voices and kitchen utensils.
He
told her about the children menacing with sticks and buckets of scum
to
extract coins from him on every street corner.
She
never went to see these things—for fear, for laziness, for absorption
in
quiet, solitary work, as she reminisced about a culture she had studied one
day.
Maybe
in reality she never knew how to integrate herself into communities
or
how to observe people with discernment and empathy.
She
could not feel the vibrating unity of the universe,
much
less understand people who spoke in a slurred cacophony of speech
and
taught their children to go door to door dancing doggie-style
so
that people would give them money
in
the vicious euphoria of patriotic festivities.
V.
She
found a man who sold bread
and
who was very kind to her.
She
found a woman who ran a little restaurant called “The Hand of God”
and
who gave her all the panela water that she wanted with her lunch.
She
found a woman who took power walks at six in the morning
and
asked her enthusiastic questions about her life.
She
found little pieces of humanity that she could thread together
loosely
in her jumbled mind as she failed at meditating.
But
she felt guilty that she never went out walking
just
to look for the strange unity
that
moved with a rhythm like breathing
between
everyone and everything
in
Cartagena de Indias.
I slipped away as everyone else was heading out to the carnival. It was strangely easy. I made my way across the river and through the jungle-like forest until I reached the house. With each step deeper into the forest I breathed with relief. High above the river, I looked back and could see the alien city, its boxy metal buildings interspersed with patches of flashy, multicolored carnival rides. They looked beautiful, tragic and menacing all at once.
