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Lagrimas de Sangre / Tears of Blood

• http://youtu.be/a8xoy2Bx3OE

A few weeks ago I helped produce a video that I feel gives rich voice to the tragic violence that rips apart the lives in our barrio. Look for my name there in the credits.

Douglas, former-thug-now-set-on-fire-for-Jesus rapper, put to song a requiem for the youth killed in our barrio, and a plea for a more peaceful future. It’s titled “Tears of Blood,” a chronicle of people gunned down on the streets of La Carpio. It’s not an objective report; it’s personal. These are the images of the young guys killed, their friends and family, and those who remember them. At least four of them were familiar smiles on our street. One was a grandson of the family I lived with, like a second cousin to me.

Visually, there is a lot of anger and grief in the video. Lyrically, there is a testimony in honor of the lives lost. There is a plea for those who remain alive to think twice before picking up guns and using violence to solve problems.

This song is not for you to enjoy. I happen to like the beat and the lyrics, but it might not be your style. It’s to give voice to the pain. To plea for peace. To generate strength and resilience to steel oneself to the pain of the past and move on.

You don’t have to like it. But respect it.

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Korda and his iconic photograph

Alberto Korda, the photographer made famous by his iconic image of Che Guevara gazing resolutely into the distance, considered the photograph a stroke of luck. Korda covered the Cuban revolution and became Fidel Castro’s personal photographer for ten years. Yet the image that changed him, that impacted his thinking and caused him to dedicate his life career to covering the revolution, is the transfixing photograph he took of a young girl cuddling a piece of wood as a doll.

 “The photo I took that has been published throughout the world and is considered the most famous photograph in the history of photography is the photo of Che Guevara. But for me, in my heart and in my feelings, the most important photo is that of Paulita.”

~Alberto Korda

Today I felt like I was in a movie. The part where minor innocent bystanders are suddenly and traumatically wiped out by whatever the huge natural disaster is that’s threatening humans worldwide. The scene where unexplained catastrophy falls from the sky and confused citizens scatter helplessly.

Nothing big happened, really, it’s just that as I was casually having a conversation in a bus heading downtown, I suddenly noticed several police cars with lights flashing, and heard people in the bus shouting “¡Cierren las ventanas! ¡Abejas!” Shut the windows! Bees! And sure enough, right swarming above road right by the crosswalk at Centro Commercial del Sur was a huge mass of bees. The air was thick with them. Why? Well, I don’t know. The bus kept going and I never found out.

Attack of the killer bees. I was there.

You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone. You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

~Garden State

One never reaches home. But where paths that have affinity for each other intersect the whole world looks like home, for a time.

~ Damien – Hermann Hesse

The same thing that makes me feel at home in a place is the same thing that will eventually grate on my nerves more than anything else.

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