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.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

The sin of man


The world is made up of lonely individuals who feel isolated and separate from one another.  We seek others in an attempt to fill the void felt by the echoes of our own uniqueness and eccentricities. We make others feel rejected by our own sense of solitude which we aggrandize with a false sense of superiority derived from the fragility of our convictions.  We allow the reality of our insignificance close of the world around us for fear that we might be forced to face this reality and become aware that our self-righteousness is closely related to gratifying our own need for validation rather than be the best human being we can strive to be.  At best, we follow the path of least resistance, as most of nature does, to attempt and feed our inclination towards immediate gratification. At our worst, we delay or not allow ourselves to take pleasure of the moment by our drive to possess and extend the length of what is meant to be enjoyed in the now.  We allow the past to take our present being hostage for fear of truly feeling the pain which needs to be experienced. We drown ourselves slowly in the memories of yesterday and limit our presence in experiencing the reality of today. We put our energy into creating a future based on suppositions that we will be the same person tomorrow that we are today, depriving ourselves of living this minute, today.  We give our power away by allowing our singular insignificance define the strength of our convictions and how we exercise them.  We fail to see that by not being truly and honestly present we close the door to the possibility that change occurs with the self first and ripples to the rest of the world like aftershocks.  We use the “weight of the world” to not look inward and take stock of our values, virtues, strengths, and gifts which can be used every day, at every moment to inspire a better society. We allow our tunnel vision deny compassionate living and we close our hearts to those who need our love the most.

The greatest sin of man is to not allow ourselves to be emotionally present today.
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