This one
goes out to all the dreamers, the idealists… the “undocumented”. Undocumented. I always felt the DJ was talking to
me when he played songs he knew would “connect” with a certain type of audience.
Maybe there were teenagers of my same age all over Havana who felt he was addressing
them, too. We were all in a way, undocumented. Not like the millions who,
according to the news on the telly, lived invisibly and illegally in the US. No,
my undocumented status owed more to the crepuscular zone that surrounded my
teens like a magic mesh. Neither old enough to have a proper ID card nor too
young to avoid being stopped by coppers constantly. Especially when wearing my
hand-me-down skinny jeans tucked inside my military boots, my oversized shirt
and my ‘fro.
However, having almost completed the first
stage of my journey from childhood to adolescence, I sometimes felt in those
years as if I had overstayed my visit to this strange land, this
infant/child/teenager archipelago, long after my tourist visa had run out. As
if I was a transgressor. An undocumented with few rights. Childhood was meant
to have all the signs of happiness stamped across it (even if mine had patches
of pain). But adolescence? At fourteen the back of my ears was still too wet
for me to understand my surroundings. And the period between my fourteen and fifteen
birthday was like a cloud that had me checking a metaphorical sky before
venturing out into the world. I never knew which way the rain was going to come.
That evening the DJ played “O Que Será (À Flor da Pele)” by
Chico Buarque. It was December and the Havana International Film Festival was in
full swing. And at the Riviera cinema on 23rd Avenue Dona Flor
e Seus Dois Maridos (DonaFlor and her Two Husbands) had queues going all the way around the corner and
reaching as far as Calixto García Hospital.
Chico’s song was part of the movie’s soundtrack. I saw this as a good omen.
Are you sure you want to do this, mulato? Yes, I replied. You and I look
similar, don’t we? No one will notice, I insisted. What if you get caught? I’ll
lose my ID and possibly get a fine, too. It’s OK, I know how to do it. My tone
grew more convincing. I’ve done it
before, I lied and he knew I was lying. All right, then, but if you get caught,
you’ll have to say you stole my ID. Oh, and enjoy Sonia Braga’s breasts! She spends half the film in the buff. A lascivious smile appeared on his
face. That’s not the reason why I want to watch the film. I love Brazilian
cinema. Yeah, right, he answered, and I love Sputnik magazine.
I blame the parents. Or my parents, rather, I said
to myself as I turned from O St. onto 23rd Avenue. My folks should
have given me an older brother so that I didn’t have to beg my best mate’s
brother for his ID. I checked the document again. Does he really look like me? Do I look like
anyone? Do I look my age? No, in school they still say I look younger than my
years. Damn, what if I get caught? But you’re on this boat now, so, sail on, my
boy, sail on!
At the Vita
Nuova pizza parlour, on the corner of I St. and 23rd Avenue, I ran
into El Plátano, camera slung on his
shoulder. One of these days I’ll finally ask him how he got his nickname. What
do bananas have to do with photography? He was standing almost in front of the
queue by the takeaway window. We exchanged greetings. What are you up to? He
asked me. I’m off to the Riviera cinema. Sonia Braga? The look in his eyes had
a certain mocking “Tu quoque, Brute” about it.
I didn’t know you were sixteen. I felt like saying I wasn’t but instead changed
the topic quickly. Where are you off to? Santiaguito’s playing at La Casa and I’m covering the concert. He
tapped his camera. Santiaguito at La Casa
de las Américas? If my risky enterprise fell through, I could swing by.
What time’s the concert start? I asked him. At 8. It should wrap up by ten,
then, I thought. And I wouldn’t break my ten o’ clock curfew. That’s if the coppers don’t get heavy with me and my
false ID. It was El Plátano’s turn in
the queue. You fancy some pizza? I knew El
Plátano didn’t make much money and I’d heard stories about him begging for
scraps sometimes. But the eighty cents in my pocket was the right change for
the cinema. I accepted his invitation. I grabbed the pizza slice, shook his
hand, shouted out a “See you later” and carried on to the Riviera. The picturehouse was on the next block. The queue was
long. I could see other “undocumented” lining up. We all swapped guilty glances
quickly and pretended not to see each other. On one of the glass doors I spotted
the gigantic movie poster with Sonia Braga sandwiched in between two men. They
were all facing away, their backs staring at us. To her left José Wilker
totally naked with a leaf strategically placed to cover his butt. To Sonia’s
right, Mauro Mendonça, who played Dr Teodoro, the husband she married when Wilker’s character (a handsome, erotic,
gambling, philandering good-for-nothing) died suddenly. I went around the
corner and walked a couple of blocks before joining the end of the queue. As
the seconds became minutes and the minutes turned into an hour I began to fret.
What if I get found out? What if one of my teachers happens to be on the same
queue? Already the prospect of seeing Santiaguito at La Casa looked more appealing than getting into trouble with the
cinema management or, even worse, the police. But the crepuscular zone that
surrounded my teenage years had cast its magic mesh tighter and I couldn’t
think properly.
It was finally my turn. I headed for the box office.
I anticipated the questions. How old are you? Don’t you know that this film is
rated 16 plus? I slotted my hand in through the small semi-circular hole that
served as the only port of communication between punter and box office and
tendered my money in. The small, serrated, rectangular piece of cardboard with
the price, date and name of the cinema on
it fell into my hands. I swivelled around and headed for one of the glass
doors. Almost there! I felt relief. My ticket was torn into two at the entrance
and I was given half of it. As I made my way towards the big double doors
leading into the dark hall, I heard a voice behind me: “Excuse me, could I see your ID, please?” Paralysed with fear, I
stood there motionless, spinning in what seemed to me to be slow motion. I saw
his face. He was frowning. No uniform. Not a copper, then. Part of the cinema
management, surely. He repeated the request. May I see you ID? I carefully took
my mate’s brother’s identity card from my back pocket and handed it over. I
tried not to shake. He studied the document carefully. He looked at me and looked back at
the ID. You look older in this photo, he said. That’s because I shaved tonight,
I replied without missing a beat. He smiled. OK, he said, you can go in. And
enjoy Sonia Braga, she is a very good actress. His last words, including his
lecherous grin, echoed in my head as I entered the dark room. I sat in the cinema’s penumbral auditorium and the DJ’s words came back to me: “This one goes out to all the dreamers, the
idealists”. And the undocumented.
© 2013
Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections, Music and Dance”, to be
published on Sunday 24th March at 10am (GMT)
Showing posts with label cubans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cubans. Show all posts
Wednesday, 20 March 2013
Sunday, 10 March 2013
Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music
The current issue of New Humanist carries a very interesting interview with the philosopher John Gray. I am familiar with Gray’s work through his book reviews for The New Statesman and The Guardian. This time, though, the guns, or should I say, the mike was turned on him and the ensuing conversation was quite interesting. Especially when read and discussed on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee in hand.
The interview was a tie-in for John’s latest book, The Silence of Animals, in which he explores man’s alleged slow self-annihilation. To Gray civilisation is a pretence which, when challenged by reality, falls away.
I confess to having felt somewhat uncomfortable at the beginning of the article. I’m a pragmatist with a 99.9% realistic view of the world. But that 0.01% left over counts for a lot. It counts for a romanticism and idealism that have kept me believing in my fellow humans for many years, atrocities notwithstanding. Gray’s initial comments were coloured by a pessimism which I’ve noticed is typical of certain Western authors. His notion that human beings will never be able to “progress beyond their primordial, animalistic, selfish instincts” is not an opinion I share. And yet, he does have a point in what he says. It’s just that the point is muddled up by so much negativity.
I agree with John that many of us, human beings, have for many years striven for a utopia-like state. This can be a collective, external experience brought about through a socioeconomic political system like communism or an internal one supported by performance-enhancing and recreational drugs. However, as Gray avers, there has been no utopian society and probably there never will be. Marx’s belief in the dictatorship of the proletariat as the solution to society’s woes and the neo-conservative vision of the free market as the answer to our straitened economic times are mere illusions.
This is a hard-to-swallow message because it goes against our idealism and idealism is a human trait. We need it to make sense of the world, especially in the face of adversity. John Gray’s response to this dilemma touches upon both meaning and why we, humans, need a reason to live. In his own words “One of the chief reasons human beings need meaning – which is different from knowledge – in a way that other animals don’t seem to is that humans are conscious of their own mortality. We have a sense of time that other animals don’t have. If we have an idea of our mortality, then we see our lives in a different way because we think we see them as a whole, and we want them to be a single coherent story.”
To me this is the reason why children don’t have a clear concept of time and space. Mention to a little one that in a week you’ll take him or her to the zoo and they will ask you again ten minutes later. The “are we there yet?” question that children ask on road trips constantly will be familiar to most parents and John’s theory is the basis for it, in my opinion. Same with teenagers, for instance, who lack that sense of mortality Gray mentions in the passage above. Adolescents’ reckless and erratic behaviour can be traced back to this absence of a single and coherent story, more specifically, one that has not got the word “future” in it.
This situation, however, changes in one’s 20s. Well, in most of us, anyway. We couple up, we settle down, we get a job, we start planning for the future. Suddenly there’s a “meaning”. There’s also an awareness of death. For the first time, our personal history is not a random collection of moments and experiences but a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. We might even experiment with the order, and yet there’s still a clear structure.
What this whole unconscious/conscious affair offers us, human beings, is a vast and rich field of possibilities. Unlike animals which have no self-realisation of their trajectory towards death, we use those interim years on Earth to tell our stories. By this I don’t mean the sitting-around-a-campfire-and-I’ll-tell-you-a-tale type of scenario, welcomed as it is. I mean it in the way we interact with each other and leave our mark (more often than not consciously) on places and people. Hence language and our ability to communicate with one another not just at a primal level, but also at a sophisticated one. Whilst animals’ communication acts on elements such as self-preservation, basic needs and danger, humans can include the intellectual aspect.
The upshot is a world that can combine at any one time both the creation of nation states and marvellous architecture. Although John Gray’s interview looked gloomy at the outset, by the end of it I was smiling.
© 2013
Next Post “Killer Opening Songs”, to be published on Wednesday 13th March at 11:59pm (GMT)
The interview was a tie-in for John’s latest book, The Silence of Animals, in which he explores man’s alleged slow self-annihilation. To Gray civilisation is a pretence which, when challenged by reality, falls away.
I confess to having felt somewhat uncomfortable at the beginning of the article. I’m a pragmatist with a 99.9% realistic view of the world. But that 0.01% left over counts for a lot. It counts for a romanticism and idealism that have kept me believing in my fellow humans for many years, atrocities notwithstanding. Gray’s initial comments were coloured by a pessimism which I’ve noticed is typical of certain Western authors. His notion that human beings will never be able to “progress beyond their primordial, animalistic, selfish instincts” is not an opinion I share. And yet, he does have a point in what he says. It’s just that the point is muddled up by so much negativity.
I agree with John that many of us, human beings, have for many years striven for a utopia-like state. This can be a collective, external experience brought about through a socioeconomic political system like communism or an internal one supported by performance-enhancing and recreational drugs. However, as Gray avers, there has been no utopian society and probably there never will be. Marx’s belief in the dictatorship of the proletariat as the solution to society’s woes and the neo-conservative vision of the free market as the answer to our straitened economic times are mere illusions.
This is a hard-to-swallow message because it goes against our idealism and idealism is a human trait. We need it to make sense of the world, especially in the face of adversity. John Gray’s response to this dilemma touches upon both meaning and why we, humans, need a reason to live. In his own words “One of the chief reasons human beings need meaning – which is different from knowledge – in a way that other animals don’t seem to is that humans are conscious of their own mortality. We have a sense of time that other animals don’t have. If we have an idea of our mortality, then we see our lives in a different way because we think we see them as a whole, and we want them to be a single coherent story.”
To me this is the reason why children don’t have a clear concept of time and space. Mention to a little one that in a week you’ll take him or her to the zoo and they will ask you again ten minutes later. The “are we there yet?” question that children ask on road trips constantly will be familiar to most parents and John’s theory is the basis for it, in my opinion. Same with teenagers, for instance, who lack that sense of mortality Gray mentions in the passage above. Adolescents’ reckless and erratic behaviour can be traced back to this absence of a single and coherent story, more specifically, one that has not got the word “future” in it.
This situation, however, changes in one’s 20s. Well, in most of us, anyway. We couple up, we settle down, we get a job, we start planning for the future. Suddenly there’s a “meaning”. There’s also an awareness of death. For the first time, our personal history is not a random collection of moments and experiences but a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. We might even experiment with the order, and yet there’s still a clear structure.
What this whole unconscious/conscious affair offers us, human beings, is a vast and rich field of possibilities. Unlike animals which have no self-realisation of their trajectory towards death, we use those interim years on Earth to tell our stories. By this I don’t mean the sitting-around-a-campfire-and-I’ll-tell-you-a-tale type of scenario, welcomed as it is. I mean it in the way we interact with each other and leave our mark (more often than not consciously) on places and people. Hence language and our ability to communicate with one another not just at a primal level, but also at a sophisticated one. Whilst animals’ communication acts on elements such as self-preservation, basic needs and danger, humans can include the intellectual aspect.
The upshot is a world that can combine at any one time both the creation of nation states and marvellous architecture. Although John Gray’s interview looked gloomy at the outset, by the end of it I was smiling.
© 2013
Next Post “Killer Opening Songs”, to be published on Wednesday 13th March at 11:59pm (GMT)
Sunday, 8 April 2012
Sunday Mornings: Coffee and Music
One of Elton's more thoughtful songs and one whose message we would do well to heed. I hope you're having a relaxing Sunday.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Urban Diary
I reach the end of my road gasping for breath. It feels as if I'm walking with weights around my ankles. It's been tough making it as far as the Turkish shop today. The snow that fell so heavily last night is still about five inches deep. At the newsagents, the chap who runs it signals to me through the dirty glass door to indicate that The Observer has not arrived yet. His gesture is also a way of saying that I needn't bother coming into his shop, thus, letting the cold air in, even if it's just for a fleeting instant. I turn around and cross the road. As I head for another newsagents, I take my earphones off to capture better the sounds of the recent snowfall. Roy Ayers and the Nuyorican Soul's Sweet Tears are paused momentarily. An eerie silence descends upon me as I forge ahead, each foostep leaving a clue as to my shoe size on the white carpet.
The silence is interrupted intermittently by laughter and cries coming from children playing on the road and on the pavement. Hard to say which is which now. Snowmen are quickly propped up and eventually knocked down. The main thoroughfare, usually a combination of potholes and bumps, looks pristine and levelled under the slate grey light of the nowhere-to-be-found sun. A car drifts by, its engine a soft, muzzled roar, its dipped headlights dimly illuminating the road ahead like the eyes of an owl looking out from a tree.
I finally get to the second newsagents. The guy, who also knows me, opens his large arms widely and shrugs his shoulders. No paper there either. I turn around and make my way back home. En route, I walk past the new pub - the third one on the same spot in less than ten years - with its promising menu and enticing discounts, more groups of children having snowball fights and black African women with patterned headwraps and dressed to the nines on their way to church. I put my earphones back on and welcome the melodic voice of Roy Ayers as he wraps up Sweet Tears.
© 2012
Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 26th February at 10am (GMT)
Image taken from flickr groups
I finally get to the second newsagents. The guy, who also knows me, opens his large arms widely and shrugs his shoulders. No paper there either. I turn around and make my way back home. En route, I walk past the new pub - the third one on the same spot in less than ten years - with its promising menu and enticing discounts, more groups of children having snowball fights and black African women with patterned headwraps and dressed to the nines on their way to church. I put my earphones back on and welcome the melodic voice of Roy Ayers as he wraps up Sweet Tears.
© 2012
Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 26th February at 10am (GMT)
Image taken from flickr groups
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