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Today was the last day of classes, which means in five days we take final exams, and in five days I leave Argentina.
A month is a cruel amount of time to be in a country. During the first few weeks, you keep discovering how you don't belong, but in the last week, you realize it's all too soon to leave.
Yesterday, the director of my study abroad program invited me to play flute at a welcome event this morning. She didn't give me many details, simply asking me if I had learned a song she shared with me (through this video). Since I had, I agreed to perform at this event.
What I didn't realize is that it was a welcome event for all the new international students at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, so it was more formal and had far more people than I'd imagined. Luckily, I had twenty or so minutes to absorb this before a woman invited me onstage to perform.
Before calling me onstage, she introduced the theme I was about to play as music typical of the Northern part of Argentina. The part of my mind that wasn't busy smothering the flames of my pre-performance nerves (which, por suerte, were minimal) appreciated the irony of it all: While preparing to leave the country, I was welcoming foreigners by sharing a part of the culture to which I, too, am foreign.
Yet that's something I love about music. Though my interpretation of "El condor pasa" was far from an interpretation of musicians from the North playing traditional instruments, there's a world within the rhythms and notes that doesn't elude even a foreigner who's never experienced the sights and sounds that inspired this music. Still, if I had the time to travel to Salta and Jujuy north of Córdoba, I wonder if my performance would be "better" or more authentic in any way. I know that what gives life to a performance is generosity, imagination, and creativity, but I wonder if such an experience could somehow make my imagination and expression more vivid.
And then I wonder, how much of my performance belonged to the Andean region, and how much belonged to myself? The notes and rhythms definitely came from further North, but the sound was my own, as well as my decisions about rubato, articulation, tone color, and even which parts of the song I played (I condensed the video above into 1-2 minutes). Furthermore, how much did those decisions reflect the Western music tradition that taught me I could make such decisions?
Regardless, it was a gift to be able to welcome them in this way. A few hours later, I had another opportunity to perform music from the North.
A couple days ago, my friends and I ran into a fair in the Plaza San MartÃn. One of the stands belonged to an organization of indigenous people. The man invited us to a festival on August 1st, el DÃa de la Pachamama (Day of Mother Earth), so after class today, we took the bus downtown to attend.
We came to a park, where in the far corner we saw a small crowd of people standing amid a faint cloud of smoke and dust. Drawing nearer, I heard drum beats and the voices of women chanting. A long line of people led to a small hole in the dirt, from which climbed wisps of smoke, and around which were gathered various fruits and drinks. The seller who had invited us there began to explain the ceremony: people were lining up to pour food and drink into the hole, thanking the Earth for nurturing them and asking to be cleansed of any evil. Beside the hole stood the musicians, who had been singing all day. Next to the line was a table of snacks and drinks for everyone.
I asked for water, and then stifled my mortification when the woman sitting at the table picked up a used cup, poured juice into it, and gave it to me, as they didn't have water. Yet I drank anyway, since I was thirsty; and when I put the cup back onto the table, a man poured something else into it and drank.
So, as you may recall, I am in the middle of a research project that involves interviewing musicians of Argentina. I found the prospect of interviewing the musicians at this festival irresistible, because this was a genre I had never encountered in person before. Yet every time I approached the woman at the table to bring up the possibility of interviewing her (the man had told me she was a musician), she would get distracted with greeting all the people who came to the table.
After three attempts, I became uncomfortably aware that in the back of my mind, she was just a box to check for my research project. So when she blithely told me to go closer to the musicians currently performing, I didn't press any further for an interview. The musicians were taking a short break, so I went up, introduced myself, and asked about the music.
Somehow, within a couple minutes I found myself holding a drum, realizing that I was to repeat what one of the musicians sang and played on the drum. By repetition, she taught me four coplas, or chants of four lines. It was certainly an experience, letting my voice travel through the dust and air of that small crowd, accompanied only by my own drumming. For the most part, I was able to recognize the words of the coplas (mostly about singing), but there were moments where I was blindly copying the sounds, without a clue of what words I was singing.
It wasn't nerve-wracking; for the most part, people weren't listening too closely, focusing more on the offering and talking amongst themselves. The other musicians seemed excited to see a foreigner learning to perform their music. Before I left, one of them offered me a bottle of beer that was being passed around. It was a mighty second before I took a sip (with my host mom and her friends, we pass around a straw to drink mate, but this was another level), but I felt that more than a bottle of beer with germs, he was offering me a gesture of welcome.
In the end, I left without an interview but with the experience of learning this music from the people who create it. When I got home, I picked up a pamphlet I'd bought a couple days ago at the fair. It contains transcriptions of hundreds of coplas. On the cover, it reads,
"Coplas norteñas
No tienen dueño
Solo tienes que cantarlas"
("Coplas of the North. They have no owner, you have only to sing them.") I love how generous they were in teaching me their music. I wonder if the same phrase could be applied to the music I performed earlier this morning.
I've started reading the coplas. They appear in columns, page after page. While a column of coplas might share a few words or content, their tones vary wildly: in the same page, I might move from a lovesick copla, to a mocking one, to a light-hearted one, to a philosophical one. I love how vivid the language is, especially since the form is so short. Stylistically, the coplas couldn't be more different from Silvina Ocampo's poetry, but both contain worlds to explore within the Spanish language and poetry (though it confuses me that neither use voseo).
Regarding poetry! I realize I never shared the bilingual poems I alluded to in the last entry, but in truth, they need far more time and revision before they're fit to be shared. I spontaneously wrote another bilingual poem yesterday morning, but it's gotten late, and to share it here would entail another hour or two of revising. Later in August, when I'm back home, you can be sure that this blog will go back to being more of a creative writing blog, as I'll be sharing the poems I've started writing here.
I also wrote an entry about my trip to Mendoza this past weekend, but I never got around to finishing it; so that, too, will be posted after I return.
How strange to think that in five days, I will be in Chile, and in a week and a half, I will be back in California. In less than a month, I start my junior year at CMU. When people here ask me how I feel about leaving Argentina, or about returning to the US, I suddenly become aware of a hard and dull sensation inside of me; in other words, I become aware that I feel nothing, or that I don't know what to feel.
It hurts to think about leaving so soon, but there's a part of me that dreads and yearns to go back home. Yet if I could, I know that I would return to this country — with all that I don't understand, with all I haven't seen, and with all that I've received from its people, its culture, and its land — in a heartbeat.