My Words

As Americans, when we think of war, we think of soldiers and the toll their sacrifice has on our families and communities. We think of the financial cost of war. We fight over the righteousness of war. This is not a discourse on the socio-political aspects of war, or even its righteousness. What I am attempting to do is to create a window for you, the reader, to peek through. A window of what war looks like for those of us who have been caught, literally, in the cross-fire. For every soldier who comes home in a body bag, there are hundreds – if not thousands – of lives which have forever been scarred by the violence and mass trauma of civil unrest.

I arrived in El Salvador, my Mother’s homeland, from Spain when I was not quite nine years old with my two older brothers and Mother. We left our Father behind in my country of birth and arrived in a land about to erupt with violence enhanced by Reagan’s war on the Russian encroachment of Communism into the Americas. Of course, I knew nothing of this “bigger” picture. All I knew was that my parents were separating and I had chosen Mother. At the time, I did not know that the war in El Salvador would officially last twelve years and take over 100,000 lives. Unofficially, there is no “set in stone” date. I lived through the “invisible” war which began somewhere in 1976 and some would argue that it had been brewing since the first indigenous uprising at the turn of the 20th century.

The stories and poems you will find here are not linear. I, myself, question the accuracy of the details. Sometimes, one event merges into another to fill the gaps left by the emotional detachment necessary to survive. The brain is an amazing organ. It tries to protect your sanity at all costs because it knows that if it doesn’t, it won’t survive either. It takes the ugly, hard stuff and puts it away deep within its archives. It creates a happy place for you to escape during traumatic events so that its impact in your psyche is minimized. I have spent the better part of thirty years by-passing the archives of El Salvador; discriminately pulling files of memory and putting together some palatable stories. But there are some stories I have not been able to access. And there are some stories which I may never dare tell.

Two years ago, I accidentally came across a picture of my cousin, Jimmy the Poet. A beautiful, talented man who found his strength by choosing to not ignore the burgeoning civil war and wrote of the injustices and atrocities being perpetrated against his people by the El Salvadorean government. He found his strength in his words. He used his words as fists against the deafening silence at a time when most of us kept our head low and eyes to the ground. Unfortunately, not even his high ranking General brother could spare his life and he was murdered one hot, April morning. I have carried the weight of his death in my heart since 1980. I have felt great shame and guilt over my silence for over thirty years. My brain has finally decided that I am sufficiently strong to give voice to those deeply buried files in the archives of memory.

This is a work in progress. Some of the words being liberated in this exercise will be powerful, painful, inspiring, and at times confusing. I have no control over the words. I can try to create a somewhat linear format for you to follow, but I can’t promise much. The best for which I can hope is for you, the reader, to understand what I experienced and be a witness to another side of war.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Papaya


Miss Lulu and I
 
“There is a very distinct sound a bullet makes when it ricochets off stone.”
 
A quick, metallic sharp slap
Preceded by a whistling “whoosh”
Cutting through the suffocating, wet air
Thick with the smells of
Papayas, aguacates, tamales, frigoles
And mi gente.
You hear the first “pop” while walking down the Mercado aisles
Filling your empty stomach with the sweet smell of ripe papayas
You hear the ping as you hit the floor so fast you don’t care
that the damp, grimy, smelly floor is going to ruin your only good skirt.
Your eyes are closed before you even touch the ground
Time slows down and a few seconds turn into a lifetime
as the air is cut with the shower of accompanying bullets.
 
More bullets bring more screams
As your arms pointlessly attempt to drown them.
Your senses absorb the chaos around you
Your brain expands to take in all that it unravels.
Chickens panic and become free
Too stupid to know that it’s safer to lay low
Rather than jump around
You wish you could bury your face against someone’s breast
As you hear the muffled cries of children clinging to their Mothers
Instead, you taste the dirty floor mixed with your tears and snot.
Your mind’s eye becomes a movie projector
Translating all the sounds into perfect images.
You wish your mind weren’t so inquisitive
Because you’d rather not know.
You’d rather not know, or see, or hear
the shared terror and awareness
that soon you will take your last breath
with your face plastered on this filthy floor full of chicken shit.
 
And time stops…
 
And you see Tete’s smiling face closing in to kiss your forehead for the last time
before disappearing into the plane
And your dog, Miss Lulu, happily sharing a piece of your last tortilla yesterday morning
And you wish you hadn’t told Cecilia she was dirty for having lice
And not teased Esperanza because she’s a Jehova’s Witness
And wished you’d let Jorge put his hand higher up under your skirt
“for just a little touch” before he was disappeared
And you remember your first kiss
Even as you wish it had been from Jaime and not his brother Adan
And you wonder if your Mother will know that you’re dead
because she won’t be home long enough to notice that you’re gone before she leaves again
And you try to remember if you told your Abuelo you loved him when you saw him last
And you wish you had the memory stick you made together now
But you can’t remember where you put it.
And you try to send your Father a telepathic message
Like he taught you to do before you broke your promise
To tell him “perdoneme”
But you can’t because there is no bright star inside the Mercado
And you won’t dare look up anyway.
 
Slowly, time resumes...

You become aware that your crotch feels wet
And you wonder if you messed yourself
And as you wait for the coldness to come.
You feel someone’s warm breath against your arm
And his weight over you
And you don’t care that he smells bad
because you feel protected
And everything feels calm now
And you wonder if you’re dead
But you know you’re not because you smell your own piss
And rough hands lift you off the ground
And pry your arms from around your head
And the ringing in your ears vaguely lets you hear, “ya pue’ ya esta bien, ya paso.”
And you dare open your eyes now
And as he gives you a cracked papaya from the floor, you whisper, “Gracias Maestro”
And you remember that you’re hungry so you don’t tell him it’s not yours and you take it
As you start to get control of your legs you notice that your skirt is stained with blood
but you don’t want to know who it belongs to
so you start to make your way out
As children are sent to try to salvage their Mother’s produce off the filthy floor.
 
You don’t look back as the women wash off the blood
left behind by the bodies being dragged ahead of you.
Your trembling legs carry you to the main gate of the Mercado
while you pretend that you don’t see the uniformed men and their rifles
or hear them telling you how much they’d like to bite your budding breasts
as they lick their lips while they rub the cocks over their pants
Once outside, you put one foot in front of the other
And walk to Cecilia’s to trade half your papaya for a tortilla so you can feed Miss Lulu.
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