Comparative Anthems: What the Subaltern Sings
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Será mejor hundirnos en el mar que antes traicionar
Pablo Milanés.
1.
When
I was a 5 year-old child in Cuba, every Friday morning I was persuaded “to run
to combat” so that “the homeland stares proudly at you.” I needed not “to fear
a glorious death,” of course, because “to die for the homeland is to live.”
It was not only me. Not only my
classroom. Not only the whole elementary school, which like dozens of schools
and factories in Cuba were rebaptized after the Vietnamese martyr Nguyen Van
Troi (1940–1964),[2]
a young man who was shot with his eyes blindfolded against his will, shouting
political slogans to the very end. We were told that Van Troi refused to accept
the absolution from a Western priest and, according to the huge mural painted at
the entrance of our homonymous school, he uttered this phrase ―I haven’t found it
in any other source―: “If there is life after death, I will keep on fighting.”
We were reminded of his sacrifice on each
political session before classes, the
matutino. At those early hours, when dreams were still terrorizing our
minds, we also learned that the Cuban flag couldn’t touch the ground under our
feet, or it would have to be burned to ashes for the sake of honor. And that the
red color of our uniforms and handkerchiefs, like the red color of the triangle
in the national banner, stood for the blood shed by martyrs not so remote like
Nguyen Van Troi, but young Cubans like we were supposed someday to be.
These were not metaphors for us in
our patriotic ―and life― initiation, particularly during the intonation of the Cuban
national anthem. These were facts: there was a real “combat” waiting for us “to
run to”. There was a real “homeland staring proudly” at us, who really needed
not to fear a “glorious death” because to “die for our homeland” was not
literarily but literally “to live”.
This necroculture was not only endemic
of my land, as I chauvinistically thought. Like many national anthems in our
hemisphere, the Cuban one is a living fossil from the colonial XIX century. In
a sense, most national symbols were born colonial. Ours is called La bayamesa.[3]
The gentilic bayamesa refers to women
born in Bayamo, a city in Eastern Cuba where this song was composed in October 1868,
almost in the battlefield, a few days after the onset of the first independence
war against Spain.
The author of La Bayamesa was eventually captured by the Spain authorities and executed
by firing squad, in August 1870. His name was “Perucho” Figueredo, and dozens
of schools and factories in Cuba inevitably also bear it. Before being shot, he
electrified his executioners by shouting one of the lines of his composition: morir por la patria es vivir (to die for
the homeland is to live).
Such a radical embodiment of a text
remained sacred in Cuban cultural field, both throughout the Republican period
(1902-1959) and after Castro’s revolutionary overtake on January 1st
1959. But, at a not well determined point in the early 1980s, a young Cuban
poet ―a writer of comedian scripts too― dared to write down and read aloud in
Havana this tautological appropriation of our national anthem: Morir por la patria no es vivir / es morir
por la patria.[4]
The scene was then open for a number of
more or less respectful resemantizations of Cuban national songs. But, with the
collapse of the socialist system in East Europe and the Soviet Union, the
survival instinct of president Fidel Castro instituted a death downpour upon
Cuba: he announced his new slogan Socialism
or Death in 1991, as a necrologic coda to his classic Homeland or Death from 1960. And only in 2010 a Cuban musician versioned
the Cuban anthem again, in this case as a lullaby: a nana.[5]
A late touch of tenderness in the times of totalitarianism: the historical bloodshed
was finally washed out by the love for our little ones to inhabit a less
fossilized future: Yes, wake up, my
little girl, wake up. / I was watching over the track of the torment. / If you
had seen it when I opened the door: / not even the least weeping was heard. /
It has ceased falling, it has already stopped. / What seemed to be dead is now
alive. / Come and listen to sounds of the street / and let's go outside running
the two of us.[6]
The name of the poet and writer of
comedian scripts is Ramón Fernández-Larrea, he lives now exiled in Miami. The
name of the musician is Alejandro Frómeta, he lives now exiled in Madrid. Only
Fidel Castro remained until his death in Cuba in November 2016, fostering his own
state (and taste) of necrocubanness and posting online to the very end, warning
the world about the imminence of apocalypse: “It would disappear the human
species like the dinosaurs have disappeared. Perhaps there would be time for
new forms of intelligent life or maybe the sun’s heat will increase until melting
all of the planets of the solar system and their satellites, as many scientists
agree.”[7]
2.
“Can the subaltern speak?,” asked
twice Gayatri Spivak from the very title of her paradigmatic essay, originally
published in 1988[8]
and then rewritten before its republication in 1999.[9]
The answer is not a Boolean variable which must be responded with Yes or No, because Spivak was concerned with words as much as with “measuring
silences,” those symptomatic silences of the subjects “marked” by any “epistemic
violence,” including “law and education”, at a “margin” that “one can just as
well say the silent, silenced center”.
Spivak’s rationale could have also raised
the question of whether the subaltern can do anything else but, precisely,
speak. The hegemonic Other may silently record or discard the speeches of
subalternity. And, although it’s also true that is “only in their death that
they enter a narrative for us, they
become figurable,” like in a ceaseless ancestral melody, the subaltern subjectivities
still keep an aura of orality upon them. Whether half-illiterate or half-illustrated,
illegal or untouchables, with tongues endangered or already going extinct, the
subaltern can only speak. By hearsay or by heart, the subaltern speaks like
singing a parental, patriotic repertoire.
Clicking around the internet I found the
website National Anthems,[10]
a digital page with the goal “to offer the most comprehensive source on anthem
information on the Internet.” It conforms a collection of “over 400 anthems
past and present, as well as anthems of other entities”, plus a brief “background
on the history of the anthem,” including “the anthem’s title, its lyricist and
composer, year the anthem was adopted, first used, or length of use, sheet
music (if available), a music file in MP3 format, and lyrics (usually with an
English translation as well).”
The editors of “National Anthems” are
eager to declare that “the information provided here is done so as a scholarly
study on anthems.” To avoid misinterpretations, they claim academic neutrality:
“The inclusion of a particular anthem should not be taken as an expression of
political beliefs of the editors of the site. We strive for the information on
this page to be fair and balanced, even in the dealing of anthems some may find
‘controversial’”.
How can national anthems be
controversial? On which grounds: melodic or linguistic? Do anthems reverberate
in the heads of the people as much as in their throats? Did the editors receive
political pressures against the inclusion of a specific country? Even if a digital
domain can be assumed as a non-national niche, are they still subject to the practice
of methodological nationalism?[11]
“We truly believe that knowledge of
other nations and cultures will help lead to further peace and understanding in
the world, and learning about other anthems is a good beginning.” This digital
mea culpa of National Anthems web is their
eloquent Ansatzpunkt, to employ the
terminology of Erich Auerbach.[12]
With this rather intransitive beginning, as Edward Said would call it in his
book devoted to analyze literary beginnings,[13]
the webmasters use anthem ecumenism as a handle to deal with the whole spectrum
of lyrics and necrolyrics.
I wonder if this message is a bottle
of bytes for the inhabitants of the future. How will the newer generations read
the National Anthem album of
atrocities? What will they think of their ancestors, compelled to sing as an identity
and idiosyncratic ritual, in order to announce allegiance to a given territory elevated
to the category of homeland?
3.
“¡República o muerte!” is the shout
that startled me when I randomly started my search with the national anthem of
Paraguay, in a failed attempt to evidence the exceptionality of my Cuban
childhood and its cult to a glorious death in which no adult believed, but to
which all children are exposed. Written in 1846 by Francisco Esteban Acuña de
Figueroa (1791-1862) ―and officially adopted that year by Paraguay―, this anthem
made the slogans of Fidel Castro look like a devaluated version of necrolyricism.
Like in most of its fellow hymns, the independence thanatic raptures seem to
emerge here from the landscape itself: Let
it sound the cry “Republic or Death”! / Let our chests exhale it with faith, / and
their echoes be repeated by the mountains / like giants arising.[14]
Acuña de Figueroa was also the lyricist
of Uruguay’s anthem, which was officially adopted as early as 1833. He was
already an enthusiastic author with the use of exclamation marks: Eastern landsmen: our country or the grave!
/ Freedom or with glory to die! […] In
the battle we shall clamor for liberty / and, yet dying, liberty still![15]
His original lyrics included a passage ―not sung anymore― where the redemptive
sacrifice is legitimized by making it emanate from the grave of Inca Atahualpa
(c.1502-1533), a “tomb that is opened” given “the battle blast all around”, and
then the “skeleton” of the hero itself “blows with wrath the palm trees” as he
“screams for vengeance.”[16]
The music of the Uruguayan anthem is
typically epic, as in a number of Latin American anthems of operatic nature, in
this case “reminiscent of works by Italian composers Donizetti, Verdi, Bellini
or Rossini”, according to National
Anthems website. Like many others, it was composed by a foreigner,
Francisco José Debali (1791-1859), a Hungarian who moved to Uruguay in 1838
after having served as a military band master in the Piedmont area of Italy. The
exalted magnificence of its music made this anthem uncomfortably long to
perform, even when only one of the stanzas is officially sung nowadays: with 105
music bars and almost five minutes in length, the Uruguayan anthem constitutes the
longest of all compiled by National Anthems.
The concert of South American neighboring
countries tunes in the same line. The Chilean anthem, for example, repeats several
times: Either you’ll be the tomb of the
free / or the refuge against oppression.[17]
While in the Argentinean are not the palms but another tree the one evoked for
the sake of victory (or else, death): May
the laurels be eternal / the ones we managed to win. / Let us live crowned in
glory… / Or let us swear in glory to die![18]
The classic heritage of the laurel recurs in at least eight of the national
anthems of the American hemisphere, including Brazil.
The music of the Bolivian anthem,
composed by the Italian Leopoldo Benedetto Vincenti (1815-1914), again
resembles an Italian opera. Eurocentric emotions demonstrated to be effective to
stir the secessionist spirit against Europe. This lyric, written by José
Ignacio de Sanjinés (1786-1864) gives little space for specificity, beyond the gross
generalities of necrolyricism: And, on
its altars, once more we shall swear: / to die rather than to live as slaves.[19]
And then it recycles the invocation of the sacred dead, in this case no less
than “El Libertador” Simón Bolívar (1783-1830): For the sons of the mighty Bolívar / have sworn thousands and thousands
of times: / to die rather than to see humiliated / the Homeland’s majestic
banner.[20]
Regarding the “mighty Bolívar” and
the power he could confer to those who invoke his spirit, many are still
shocked by the images of former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (1954-2013),
with most of his ministers, during the exhumation of Simón Bolívar in July 2010,[21]
with the pretended purpose of finding out if Bolívar had been poisoned to death
two centuries before, and also to reconstruct with more forensic accuracy his
face, in order to paint a perfect portrait for Chávez’s presidential office in
Caracas. Chávez posted in his Twitter account back then that he broke into
tears, for he could feel the “flame” of Bolívar’s “sacred skeleton.”[22]
In the national anthem of Ecuador is God
himself who saw and accepted the
holocaust, and the blood was the fertile seed / for other heroes whom the world
in astonishment saw / arising in thousands around you.[23]
The lyrics by Juan León Mera (1832-1894) included a stanza[24] ―not sung anymore― where the notion of
holocaust is to “prevent the death of the Homeland and all of her sons” under
the rule of those who might be “preparing the new chains” with “injustice of
barbarian fate,” a prayer then launched to the “mighty Pichincha” volcano, for
it to “suddenly sink deep in your entrails / whatever exists on your land,” so
that “the tyrant cannot tread but on ashes, / while in vain looking for traces
of any being around you.”
How not to remember here as Cuban (my
Cubacentrism, like Spivak’s warning about her not being a South Asianist, is
only because “I have some accident-of-birth facility there” too) the epigraph ―or
epitaph― which opens this approach (see footnote 1)? A morbid memorandum from
one of the ballads by Pablo Milanés, the world-acclaimed Cuban troubadour: It will be better to sink ourselves under
the sea / rather than betraying / the glory that we have lived.[25]
In the rest of Latin America and the
Caribbean a similar impulse prevails throughout the national anthem’s anthology.
From the Colombian “land of Columbus soaking in the blood of heroes”[26]
to the Mexican “War, war! Let the homeland banners / in waves of blood be
soaked”[27]
to the Salvadorian “day when on its lofty banner / it was written with blood: Liberty!”[28]
From the Guatemalan “people, with a fierce spirit, / that would rather die than
be enslaved”[29]
to the Dominican “invincible coat of arms, as our right; / with its motto: to
be free or to die”[30]
to the Honduran “we shall march, O Homeland, to death. / Generous shall be our
fate / if we die thinking of your love.”[31]
Can we envision now such a trans-national
army of children, singing simultaneously this cult of dying not without causing
death first? Latin America may then be interpreted as a musical war zone, where
all of our national anthem’s commonplaces, from El Río Bravo to La Patagonia,
explain much better the despotic populisms, corrupt democracies, and criminal
dictatorships of the region.
Is this the long-sought dream of
Ernesto “Ché” Guevara (1928-1967): to create not one but “two, three or many
Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their
immense tragedies”.[32]
Namely, to create not one but a thousand martyrs like Nguyen Van Troi, each one
uttering “if there is life after death, I will keep on fighting.” No wonder
then that the mortal remains of Ché Guevara were also disinterred, like
Bolívar’s, in this case in 1997 and following instructions given by Fidel
Castro in Cuba, who brought back the skeleton to a holy memorial at the
geographical center of the Island.[33]
Whether or not there is life after
death, millions of Latin American future citizens will keep on singing
altogether, irrespective of ideology and political economy, in a continent congenitally
choral.
4.
You can hear
their brains rattling in their skulls.
God! It’s become
like a national anthem!
J. Hartley Manners.[34]
Besides being a synchronic phenomenon
of modernity in the Americas, are national anthems modern at all in our hemisphere?
Are there modernist patterns identifiable in their lyrics or in the imported sumptuousness
of their music? A national anthem is conceived to suit a newborn nation but,
aren’t they more akin to the Ancien Régimes they claim to overcome? Are
national anthems the first of a series of post-imperial melancholic returns to
the Metropolis?
In a 2012 book, the Australian music historian
Jane Southcott says that “patriotic songs and national anthems have been a
staple of school musical activity since the inception of the modern school
approximately two centuries ago.”[35]
In the same book, professor Carlos Abril[36]
explains that “national anthems function as malleable and dynamic symbols of
the collective unity of a country” and that “unlike more static national
symbols that have clearly defined boundaries, such as monuments or flags,
anthems are dependent on the interpretation and realization by a performer or
performers.”
Southcott believes that
“demonstrations such as flag flying and the singing of the national anthem are
designed to inculcate patriotic fervor in the citizens of the future.”[37]
Yet, she mentions that in her country Australians “no longer have school
ceremonies with quasi-militaristic overtones” and they “do not salute the flag”
nor “pledge allegiance” to symbols. Still, they do keep singing the national
anthem with enthusiasm.
Kari Veblen[38]
adds the idea that “it is commonly believed that a national anthem indicates
what is important to a society and elicits feelings of patriotism and unity.”
And then she quotes Ehud Bodner and Avi Gilboa in extenso:[39]
“it is commonly held that people react to the playing of their national anthem
with feelings of patriotic pride,” so “that anthems have a unifying power, so
much so that people singing or listening to their anthem will connect to
similar images, feelings and associations, and that this contributes to
national socialization. Music is known to act as a unifying factor in many
social contexts and national anthems seem to be a powerful demonstration of
this function.”
Matthew Perry[40]
in his student’s piece National Anthems:
A Call to Arms, remarks that this is so because national anthems bring the
“message, sometimes hidden, at other times quite obvious” that there “is no
greater honor than to lay aside all that you love to do, as your ancestors did
before you, and fight for your country,” thus giving “people sense of something
larger than life,” and being “able to link the individual with the collective,
to make one feel part of the whole.” To fulfill this transcendentalist role, “war
has the power to unite countries unlike anything else, and many countries have
capitalized on that fact and used war in their anthems.” Certainly, this “can
be compared to instilling guilt in many ways,” for “to hear what those men long
ago did to insure your freedom today” bounds you as a listener to the moral
mimesis that now “it is your duty to risk your life for those who have yet to
come.” This would explain the abuse of “words such as glorious, tyranny, liberty, bravery, victory, noble” in order to “give a chivalric image
of one’s country.”
As Eugene Dairianathan and Chee-Hoo
Lum[41]
conclude, “songs, like the pretexts, contexts, and subtexts that comprise them,
acquire iconic value, to transcend situation, context, space and time. Songs
fulfill the two chief senses of the word burden
as used by Spivak [in The Burden of English,
1993], and have relevance for the perception and reception not only of the
music within the community but also among diverse communities.” And to
support their viewpoints they quote Ron Eyerman:[42]
“Songs are more than texts… they are also performances… This gives more force
to music as carrier of collective memory, tradition… with meaning more than the
cognitive, literal level… can empower, help create collective identity, a sense
of movement, in an emotional and almost physical sense.”
A national anthem embodies the need of
a border for each nation. Thus, their universality is illusory, for they
operate only within the limits of their respective nationalisms: a sort of
musical anti-Weltliteratur. They occupy the local and, at most, they conquer
the neighbor by making it indistinguishable from their own melody, just as
Edward Said describes that a “colonial space must be transformed sufficiently
so as no longer to appear foreign to the imperial eye.”[43]
In a way, part of the power of
national anthems relies on this intrinsic untranslatability, on their reluctance
to translation. We can then imagine the sonic map of national anthems as walls of
words, as well as waves that melt into air ―for sound is air in motion, energized―
while they perform their function of bringing certain people together by
putting certain people apart.
National anthems are also mnemotechnical
machines: it seems so easy to sing ours by heart, while it’s a tour de force to sing others in a naturalized
manner. This hyper-territorialization condensates geography around them, even
when they all employ the same basic bricks in their composition: it is as if
their uniqueness were a product of their mutual predictability.
Of course, all anthems are openly methodological
in their nationalism. They are the last proof “that the nation/state/society is
the natural and political form of the modern world,”[44]
to employ the terminology of Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller. Despite
the “dramatic statement that ‘we are all migrants now’” quoted by these authors[45],
it remains “true that 95 per cent of the people of the world are not migrants,”
just as “despite global media and rapid flows of information, national
identities remain silent in many localities around the world.”[46]
Here it lays largely the captive and very vulnerable audience for the pandemic
persistence of national anthems: those who, in turn, can only sing as a mode of
participation.
Wimmer and Schiller value the impact
of “long distance nationalism” nowadays, an effect/affect that “links together
people living in various geographic locations and motivates them to action in
relationship to an ancestral territory and its government,” in a sort of
“trans-border enterprise” made up by “a fragile, but vocal trans-border
citizenry.”[47]
These diasporic subjects are reached by their respective national anthems for the
reconstitution of local rituals abroad, mainly through televised and webcasted events
like international sports, diplomatic ceremonies, changes of government back
home, official funerals of national personalities, global success of local
celebrities, and others hallmarks of belonging to and longing for.
5.
Is there a predetermined body posture
to listen and sing the national anthem assigned to you at birth? Are we bound
by law ―or is it just a domestic tradition― to stand up and hold our right hand
on the left side of our chest, in order to anticipate the circulation/emanation
of blood as we listen and sing?
On August 30th 2016, the
editors of National Anthems posted in
their Facebook page a note[48]
about “the trending story” of “an American (gridiron) football player named
Colin Kaepernick who refused to stand for the US national anthem at a game that
he was playing in.” As Kaepernick declares to be African-American, “his stated
reason for doing so was to protest the oppression of African-Americans in the
US,” and therefore “he does not wish ‘to stand up to show pride in a flag for a
country that oppresses black people and people of colour’ according to comments
he made.”
The editors added that “probably the
most important fact we can contribute is that there is no law in the United
States that requires one to stand up, place the hand over the heart, or to show
another sign of respect to the national anthem (though it may be considered in
bad taste to not do so).” As “the US officially lacks any disciplinary system,
possibly because of the concept of free speech that is one of that country’s most
cherished rights, which includes the right to protest,” for the National Anthems editors “Kaepernick
cannot be charged with any law. However, performing these protests as an
employee of a private company (the National Football League), he could face
sanctions and/or fines from the league; which, as of yet, has not happened.”
The keyword for the web editors is respect. They emphasize that “we mention
that all national anthems, regardless of your thoughts of the nation that it
represents, should be treated equally and with respect.” And, although “Mr.
Kaepernick has stated that he has no respect for the nation the anthem
represents, prompting him to sit during the anthem, his protests so far have
been relatively respectful, as he has not hindered those who wish to stand for
the anthem by booing or causing a disturbance during it.” Their conclusion
“after this incident,” is that “in an action of protest, respect is still being
shown at this point by both sides for whichever side they are taking, as
Kaepernick is free to protest, and his teammates that choose to are free to
still stand and respect the anthem.”
As their Facebook post continues, “comments
on social media” ―as well as those that I heard in the establishments of Saint
Louis where they show several footballs games at a time― “have people divided
with some supporting his taking a stand, and others angry that he is not
showing respect for the country that he lives in and is a citizen of.” In those
days of late August 2016 I had just landed in Saint Louis, from faraway
Iceland, where I had ended up as refugee with a literary scholarship[49]
after a season of political repression in faraway Cuba. It was a scorching
month in Missouri. In many gardens I could read not only the world-known motto Black Lives Matter, but the much more compelling:
We Must Stop Killing Each Other.
During my first weeks in the city I
found extremely difficult the act of breathing. It could have been the weather,
too dry. It could have been a friend who committed suicide in Cuba, the poet
Juan Carlos Flores (1962-2016). It was my first long-distance death mediated by
Facebook, not glorious at all, like his arid anti-lyrical verses:[50]
But liberty is one per, though among militarized
camps.
I soon found that Kaepernick was not the
first case. In July 2009, for example, in his article Honoring the Anthem or Free Speech?,[51]
Scott Jaschik mentions the former football player Jacob Bond, who filed a
lawsuit against Macalester College, charging that he was “kicked off the
football team there in 2006 for refusing to remove his helmet while the national
anthem was being played ―an act he says was an act of protest over the Bush
administration’s war in Iraq.” According to Jaschik, “Bond said that he kept
his helmet on and turned away, as an act of protest, leading Babcock [his
coach] to scream at him: Why do you always have to be different?” And “the next
day Bond was off the team.”
Jaschik then quotes a number of norms
that must be respected (norms that the National
Anthems web editors obviously ignore): “United States Code specifies how
people should act when the Star-Spangled Banner is played: ‘All present except
those in uniform should stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand
over the heart; men not in uniform should remove their headdress with their
right hand and hold the headdress at the left shoulder, the hand being over the
heart…’ The uniform in question is military, not athletic.”
Likewise, Carlos Abril[52]
refers to the Code for the National Anthem of the United States of America
(2005),[53]
with norms that “can be viewed on at least two levels: the musical and the
behavioral”. The first ones are: “triple meter, moderate tempo, an
unembellished and unaltered melody, simple harmonies, singing accompanied by a
traditional ensemble (i.e., orchestra or concert band), and English-language
lyrics.” And the second ones are: “standing as a sign of respect when the music
is playing, facing the US flag or a sound source, singing along to the melody,
and expressing solemnity and respect through facial affect and appropriate body positioning.” All
this stems from a 1942 Code for the National Anthem of the United States of
America, which was created by a committee with members of the Music Supervisors
National Conference, the U.S. military, and music industry representatives
―said Code regained visibility in 2005 when the National Anthem Project website
was launched (see below).
Perhaps a series of incidents like
these guided the founders of the National Anthem Project,[54]
chaired by Laura Bush and supported by military and corporate sponsors: a “public
awareness campaign launched in 2005” as a major initiative of the Music
Education National Conference [MENC], which “boldly declared” their intention “to
revive America’s patriotism by educating Americans about the importance of The Star-Spangled Banner ―both the flag
and the song―,” and “what it means to our nation’s heritage.” A goal which
later changed to: “restore America’s voice through music education” (after the
2016 presidential campaign this reads in my head as a sort of “make America
sing again”).
The MENC executive director John
Mahlmann believes that “learning patriotic songs helps our children form bonds
with their communities and instills pride in the American ideals we all hold
close to our hearts ―freedom, liberty and equality.”54 MENC could also have been reacting to a Harris
Interactive survey, which in 2004 detected that “nearly two out of three
Americans (61 percent) are unable to recall all of the words to The Star-Spangled Banner, and three in
four Americans indicate that school is where they learned the anthem and other
patriotic songs,” while “only 39 percent of Americans could complete the third
line of The Star Spangled Banner
correctly.”54
The National Anthem Project toured
the United States in 2006-2007, making Road Show stops in every state of the country,
with music performances by student bands and interactive education centers with
advocacy materials. Visitors were encouraged to sing The Star-Spangled Banner and the best singer in each town was rewarded
with $1000, to donate it to a local school music program. It has been estimated
that only the “Grand Finale” of the tour, celebrated in the capital of the
United States, “garnered more than 220 news stories, reaching 26 million
people.”54
Obviously, The National Anthem
Project has been subject to criticism. To begin with, to place “emphasis on the
patriotic and historical music genre, and one song in particular”, could be “displacing
study of other areas such as peace studies, multiculturalism, and international
education.”54 Following Amy
Beegle’s 2004 documentation of musical propaganda in U.S. schools during World
War II, it has been raised the question that music educators should “reflect
upon the experiences of past generations,”[55]
while in 2006, Jere Humphreys stressed that “the National Anthem Project sends
questionable messages during this time of controversy during a foreign war and
the reduction of civil liberties at home and abroad.”[56]
Carlos Abril publicly warned that most of said Project’s initiatives “propel
absolutist views in which declared truths take a front seat to divergent
understandings and discoveries.”[57]
And Estelle Jorgensen in 2007 wrote that “selecting The Star-Spangled Banner as the focus of a national campaign to
teach the nation to sing can be read as too narrow an objective in that it
forwards the limited claims of nationalism to the exclusion of building
international and local affiliations and identities.”[58]
The book Patriotism and Nationalism in Music Education,[59]
edited in 2012 by David Hebert and Alexandra Kertz-Welzel ―dedicated “to all
the young people throughout time who were persuaded through the power of music
education to sacrifice their lives for governments that never offered them
freedom to enjoy the creative pleasures of music and life that we so greatly
appreciate”―, studies different countries regarding their patriotic songs:
Germany, Australia, Taiwan, South Africa, Singapore, Canada and the United
States of America. In the Foreword by
Simon Keller,[60]
patriotism is defined as “a passionate, emotionally driven commitment” involving
psychological issues that one “does not simply choose to possess.” Therefore,
“to make a person patriotic, you need to affect her passions, and her manner of
thinking about herself, her country and the world.” Hence the importance of “music
teachers,” given that “through shared musical experiences, many think,
emotional attachments to a country can be formed and nurtured, and identities
can be created and expressed.”
Talking about the evolution of the meanings
of the word “passion,” Erich Auerbach[61]
recalls that “for us, the passions are violent, heated affairs. For this
reason, they are also always attractive,” and he demonstrates how in different
historical moments “passion” has been used in opposition to both “praxis”
(action) and “reason” (thought). Passions, then, must be handled with
precaution when it comes to nationalism.
David Hebert and Alexandra
Kertz-Welzel, in their Introduction[62]
to this 2012 “international-comparative” compilation, expressed their
“contention that there is an appropriate time and place for patriotic music,
and that music of this kind may serve as an important form of cultural
heritage,” but they acknowledge that “patriotism has often been inappropriately
used as a rationale or objective for music teaching,” leading to “the emergence
of erroneous assumptions and related
pressures.” In their Conclusions and
Recommendations, these authors “assert that rather than embracing a
socially assigned role to fan the flames of nationalism through patriotic songs
(particularly during war time), music teachers should alternatively consider
offering music lessons that entails the promotion of reconciliation in the relationships between ethnic groups or
nations that share a history of political tensions or even hostility of armed
conflict.”[63]
The chapter dedicated to Germany[64]
recalls that “Hitler strengthened music education in public schools,” and that
“the main music education philosophy during the III Reich, the Musische Erziehung, proclaimed similar
visions about changing and redeeming the world through the power of music,” even
by “referring to Plato’s ideas about music as a means of transforming human
beings and society,” in a trend revisited by writers like Thomas Mann, who “emphasized
in his novel Doktor Faustus the
demonic power of music and the German tendency to irrationalism.”
After decades of apartheid, and as a strong
sign of “reconciliation, tolerance and intercultural understanding,” South
Africa managed to adopt two national anthems since “the proclamation by the
first democratically-elected president, Nelson Mandela, in 1994 that both
anthems would serve as the national anthems of the country:” Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika and Die Stem van Suid Afrika (for practical
reasons, nowadays both are unified in “a shortened, combined version” of each
original).[65]
Carlos
Abril[66]
explains how “after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, a
patriotic fervor swept the country” and some states of the Union even “passed
laws requiring a US flag in every public school classroom and many school
districts expected children to show reverence for the flag and be led in
reciting the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ and/or singing the national anthem each
school day.” In “many schools, music teachers were expected to do their part by
teaching the national anthem” and “school boards that failed to comply with
patriotic teachings and behaviors were labeled un-American or communist by
some.”
English language and American
nationalism are much more allied than expected for a society that hosts massive
number of immigrants every year, and that promotes multicultural values.
English language can certainly be quite more difficult to forget than what has
been hinted by some thinkers, who has posed the question of “can humanism ever
be monolingual?,” after discussing how “the social situation (and power) of
English worldwide” allows this language to “assume an aura of universality and
transparency,” thus functioning as a “vanishing mediator.”[67]
The bridge between English and Nation
in the U.S. was manifest in 2006, when a Spanish version of The Star-Spangled Banner was recorded,[68]
and “quickly many expressed their opposition to a translation of the song.” President
George W. Bush himself “issued an statement soon after its release, saying: ‘I
think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, I think people who want
to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English, and they ought to learn
to sing the national anthem in English’.” President Bush was not alone in this Anglophone
crusade, for also in 2006 the “US Senator Lamar Alexander[69]
introduced a resolution in the Senate that the anthem should only be sung or
recited in English,” while a public poll[70]
conducted at the time “reported that 69 percent of US citizens said it is only
appropriate to sing the national anthem in English.”
It would be interesting to explore if
the monolingualism of national anthems is what makes them so persistent, even when
their lyrics might be mispronounced in the worst possible way: in the case of the
Cuban national anthem, for example, a large number of people during their whole
life pronounces the expression “oprobio sumido” (subjected to opprobrium) as
“lo propio sumido” (subjected to one’s own), making a very funny short-circuit out
of the stiff belligerency of La bayamesa.
Curiously enough, other translations
of the The Star-Spangled Banner do
exist in the U.S., and several examples throughout history are provided by
Carlos Abril:66 “given
the number of German immigrants in the U.S. at the time, the song was
translated into German in an 1894 version called Das Star-Spangled Banner,” while “in 1919, the U.S. Bureau of
Education commissioned a Spanish version of the SSB called La Bandera de las
Estrellas,” and it has even been translated into the American Sign Language
(ASL).[71]
Besides, without any scandal similar to the 2006 Spanish remake, in many
mainstream newspapers the American national anthem with frequency is criticized
in its broader context, where “most national anthems are lousy music.”[72]
It is true that the lyrics of the 2006
Spanish version[73]
of The Star-Spangled Banner encompass
less poetical density than the original in English by poet Francis Scott Key
(1779-1843). In some passages, the
Spanish ballad might result reminiscent of a Hispanic musical hit, as those listed
in the most commercial Latino billboards of the United States. In fact, Nuestro Himno (Our Anthem)[74]
was “an unlikely collaboration between dozens of pop stars you may never have
heard of,”[75]
including the Mexican pop star Gloria Trevi and several reggaeton stars from
Puerto Rico: so that in compliance with the political correctness that aims to
the inclusion of differences, “where the original version described, among
other things, ‘the havoc of war’ (as any patriot zealous enough to have
memorized the third verse could tell you), the new version evokes a nonviolent
struggle for freedom, not a war.”
According to the New York Times collaborator Kelefa Sanneh, the only explanation
that “President Bush and others object to Nuestro
Himno, it’s not because of the lyrics but because of the language.” Namely,
Spanish. Maybe that’s why “Jimi Hendrix’s[76]
famous instrumental version of The
Star-Spangled Banner,” a “version with guitar pyrotechnics echoing the
battlefield pyrotechnics in the lyrics” but without any singing during its
performance in the late 1960s, “was once seen as a provocation” while “now it’s
often treated as an exuberant expression of patriotism.”[77]
Sanneh concludes that “in a different context —in a Florida detention center
filled with Cuban dissidents praying for refugee status, for example— a
Spanish-language Star-Spangled Banner
might have a very different political meaning,” for “the power of protest songs
usually has more to do with context than content” and “what matters more, most
times, is who’s singing the song, and to whom.”
I wonder who those imagined Cuban
dissidents are. I know and I have collaborated with most of them and, on the
verge of 2017, I still haven’t heard of any “praying for refugee status” in any
detention center in the U.S. or elsewhere. Those who do it are mainly common
citizens who escape from Castro after having being complicit of Castro their whole
lives. But this is another debate on the
topic of re-presentation versus self-representation of the Cuban Revolution and
its Exile, as subtitled by The New York
Times.
6.
In 2006 there were two other moments
of “inappropriate” appropriations of national anthems, both of which I would
like to describe with some detail, since they constitute interventionist
interpretations of a cultural product —national anthem— which is over-semantized
to the point of becoming an empty signifier. The first example comes from the
European Union music scene, and the second one is from the United States
cinematography.
Volk:
a monosyllable that sounds like a gunshot and it means “people” in German and
“wolf” in Slovene. Volk: the seventh
studio album by the Slovenian industrial music band Laibach,[78]
recorded in 2006 in collaboration with another Slovenian band: Silence. Volk: a “collection of thirteen songs inspired by national or
pan-national anthems, plus the anthem of the NSK State, a virtual state to
which Laibach belong.”[79]
As credit is given to Wikipedia as the sole source of the national
anthems featured, are these songs occupied, vandalized or revitalized by the
four members of Laibach: Eber,
Saliger, Dachauer and Keller? They have declared that “Laibach does not believe in originality” and that in consequence no
other imitator/competitor band could “steal much” from them: furthermore, they
assure being “glad” with the “legitimate process” of their music being an inspiration
for others, for thus they have “proven once again that a good ‘copy’ can make
more money on the market than the ‘original’.”[80]
Laibach in their 2006 album Volk[81]
included the following 14 tracks of national anthems: Germania (Das Lied der Deutschen,
Germany), America (The Star-Spangled Banner, United States
of America), Anglia (God Save the Queen, United Kingdom), Rossiya (The International, Union of Socialist Soviet Republics), Francia (La Marseillaise, France), Italia
(Il Canto degli Italiani, Italy), España (Marcha Real and El Himno de
Riego, Spain), Yisra’el (Hatikvah and Fida’I, Israel and Palestine, respectively), Türkiye (Istiklâl Marsi, Turkey),
Zhonghuá (March of the Volunteers, China), Nippon (Kimi ga Yo, Japan),
Slovania (Hey, Slavs, former Yugoslavia), Vaticanae
(Inno e Marcia Pontificale, Vatican
City), and NSK (the national anthem
of a sovereign self-proclaimed nation called Neue Slowenische Kunst[82]
—in German: New Slovenian Art—, where the musicians of Laibach claim to belong beyond any other nationality, in an imaginary
communion and collective commitment that, since the 1990s, have maintained
consulates in several cities and has even issued passports and postage stamps).
In the hendrikje1966 YouTube channel, it is posted that “Laibach are uncovering a common ground
linking the nations, a shared patriotic sentiment based around the bloody and
violent foundations of nation,” so that “by reinterpreting the music and translating
the lyrics of each anthem, the band have not only shown us this common ground,
they have also offered up a very pertinent comment on today’s political situation
and a warning for future.”[83]
The intertextual intentions of Laibach installs a very incisive insight
with the new lyrics of each national anthem “sequestered.” All of political
palimpsests from their album Volk can
be freely consulted on the internet.[84]
It is noticeable their criticism to the globalized logic of inter-imperiality,
from the old colonial powers, like Spain —
Gloria, Gloria, crown of the poor. / Brave is your Jesus, El Toreador. /
Gloria, Gloria, crown of the poor. / Dark was your Jesus, El Conquistador—
and England —So, you still believe you
are ruling the world, / using all your tricks to keep the picture blurred?—,
to much more recent reigns and Reichs, like Italy —Avanti Italia, / Italia from dusk till dawn. / Where is now / your
Victory? / For God made you / the slave of Rome—, the United States —How blind can you get / for your country,
right or wrong. / America, the melting pot: / praise the Lord / and praise the
Holy Spirit / to save us from your freedom— and Germany —There will be no memory / or there will be
no home. / It is the lesson you have to learn / now and in the future. / Do you
think you can make it, Deutschland?
For Laibach, the national anthems of Turkey and of the former
Yugoslavia somehow embody two opposing faces at the limits of their polipatriotic
battleground. From the East —in the melancholic Istanbul at the crossfire of
civilizations—, the West may be armored
with steel, / but we have the faith and belief. / Freedom is my people’s right.
/ We worship God and seek the might. While from the West —in Slovenia’s
capital city, Ljubljana, which under German domination was denominated precisely
“Laibach”—, we stand alone in history, /
facing East in sacrifice.
The second 2006 appropriative moment —“momentum”
mathematically means “mass multiplied by speed”— is a radical representation of
The Star-Spangled Banner in the American
film Shortbus,[85]
a polemic fiction written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. Its final
script was the result of an audition website which “elicited half a million
hits and 500 audition tape submissions,” so that “the film's characters and
story were created collaboratively over 2.5 years through improvisation
workshops with the cast,” including that “40 people were called in for improv
auditions and nine actors were cast, all before there was any story in mind.” It
was, before the beginning, an exercise of summing up subalternities, brought
from the cosmopolitan margins to the spotlights of cinematographic focus.
Only after this collection process,
the director “wrote the screenplay from the raw material generated by the
workshops and rehearsals,” resulting in an fiction-documentary artwork who
employed real-life characters, dozens of cameos with New York underground
celebrities, and “a variety of explicit scenes containing non-simulated sexual
intercourse with visible penetration and male ejaculation,” to deploy a plot
that “revolves around a sexually diverse ensemble of colorful characters trying
desperately to connect in New York City.”
According to its director, Shortbus attempts to “employ sex in new
cinematic ways because it’s too interesting to leave to porn.” His poetics deals
with “the ethics/politics of sexuality” and the “issue on homosexuality’s
existence in laws and in the political sphere,”[86]
engaging more in self-representation
that in re-presentation, to use the distinction
of Edward Said[87]
(dealing with “some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent
itself”) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty[88]
(comparing “the distinction between Western feminist re-presentation of women
in the third world, and Western feminist self-presentation”), as well as similar
approaches of Homi Bhabha[89]
(in his re-reading of the ideas of Fanon and Derrida about the representational
speeches of otherness).
In a climactic scene in Shortbus, the young gay couple of James
and Jamie meet an ex-model and aspiring singer named Ceth, and soon they go
into a sexual relationship, unknowing that their encounters are monitored by an
across-the-street voyeur, Caleb. Jamie, “in a particularly playful gay
threesome scene, leans over and asks Ceth: This
is the first time someone sung the national anthem in your ass?”[90]
For he had just been inspiredly singing no less than The Star-Spangled Banner using Ceth’s intestines as a sort of
inverted loudspeaker, for the amusement of the three lovers, and the panic of
the voyeur from the next building. An ecstatic Ceth then joins the choir using
James’ penis as a microphone, while they rouse one another into climax.
I haven’t found any reaction of the
National Anthem Project to the film Shortbus.
Does the crossing-over of The
Star-Spangled Banner and analingus implies disrespect to the song, or to
sexuality? Doesn’t this interpretation ―interpenetration― introduce us to the
pride of being oneself in a nation where open windows, open mouths, and open bodies
shouldn’t lead to stigmatization, prison, and death penalty? Could this be a
different lust/love/life song to America, despite the fact that one of the
lovers ―James, virgin just until that night― is self-shooting a video-diary
intended to be his suicide note? (Spivak’s essay Can The Subaltern Speak? is like a recurrent curse cast upon the
subalterns, who again use their silence or their decease as a manifesto.)
In this minimal orgy, what was
supposed to remain repressed within the ambit of personal intimacy, is spread ―like
real semen is spread in many somatic sequences― and it is projected aloud as human
voice, a capella over the
dehumanized/dehumanizing neighborhood. This is why Christopher Frizzelle finds
that “the movie’s prevailing theme is the relationship between interiors and
exteriors, and it’s filled with characters stuck somewhere in the middle.”[91]
The link between both spatialities is reconstituted thanks to the readily
recognizable lyrics of the U.S. national anthem and its political potential
through the wide-open window of the apartment: a substantive sign of
emancipation that, like “the politics of the climactic scene near the film’s
end, meant to symbolize liberation and a new beginning”, in a “deliciously,
transparently naïve” fashion.90
Bodies are always naïve. Only language is capable of perversion, salvation, and
other planetary mythologies.
According to the author of a 2009
op-ed, “what this means then, is that Shortbus
practices what it preaches; genuine curiosity, sex-positivism and a shot at
redemption. I wouldn’t be surprised if even those conservatives, so ashamed
about having secretly enjoyed their sneak-peak at the wild side, could get in
on the redemption thing.”90
Thus, this columnist is convinced that many viewers of Shortbus ―like repressed people which in turn become repressors― are
in practice like the voyeur of the film: a role that results critical after
“the line ‘voyeurism is participation’ served up as a profundity.”[92]
Commenting the “connection between
sexual gratification and patriotism,” in a post from 2016[93]
it is proposed that with their singing of the national anthem during sexual
intercourse “they’re not mocking patriotism but embracing it, incorporating it
into their other world. They are rediscovering the sense of freedom and abandon
that was lost when the planes struck the towers. Mitchell wants the audience to
understand, sex can be more than the pursuit of an orgasm. Sex can be
transcendent, transformative. Physical intimacy doesn’t have to be contained or
restricted by physical, emotional, or social boundaries. Sex can be an expression
of lust, love, identity, and even patriotism.”
However, other commentators have
found this scene to be counterproductive. One argues with irony that “there are
underprivileged people in third world nations who have no one to sing American
patriotism up their bum when you, in such a highly privileged nation, are
swimming in rimjob giving patriots.”92
While other takes it personal to “understand that Mitchell wants to argue that
sexually experimental individuals are good citizens [but] if I was being given
a rimjob by a person, and he started singing The Star-Spangled Banner into my ass, I would not be filled with
sex-positive patriotic fervor. I would politely ask him to stop, because it
would be weird”.92
Some scholars[94]
have approached Shortbus from the
perspectives of Trauma Studies, as the “pervasive affliction in the post-9/11
environment” of New York establishes a link “between the individual struggles
of the characters on the one hand, and whatever affliction is affecting the
city as a whole on the other.” For “it is at this intersection of the personal
and the social where a collectively shared experience of a singular traumatic
event is registered” and where “the notion of permeability” arises in its
relation “to fear and redemption”: “fear has driven people to become
impermeable, led them to cocoon themselves in a protective shell that blocks
all interpersonal connections” and makes them “cultivating a culture of
impermeability.” It is indeed significative that James is penetrated —physically
and emotionally— only during the anthem interplay. Before that night, between the dawn’s early light and the twilight’s last gleaming, even “in
reference to the adoration showered on him by his partner [Jamie], James says: It stops at my skin. I can’t let it inside
me.”
Others, like Bevin Yeatman in 2008,[95]
rationalize on the relief effect of laughter, specifically during the
intonation of the national anthem, for it is a scene that “does generate a
level of humor, both through the awkwardness that many of us can identify with
in the initial meeting of any relationship of desire, heterosexual or homosexual,
and through the dialogue,” which is a unique moment of convergence that
“positions the audience” to “laugh with the characters (it is the only time
when the characters seem to laugh without control).” Such laughing “could be
identified, using Paton’s[96]
term, as transgressive, in the sense that what is viewed has a multiplicity of
transgressive representations.”
I clandestinely spied, sobbed and smiled
with this sexual supernova played in the quasi-Calvinist Castro’s Cuba: a
country considered impenetrable and military uniformed for nearly six decades,
with the consequence of camouflaging all basic biological impulses; a social system
built on guilt as the basis of governance (communism is much about keeping
citizens in the closet). When I wrote about these New York nightmares and
miracles in Old Havana, I became the target of the G-2 State Security ―the
Cuban effective epigone of Soviet KGB, German Stasi, Romanian Securitate, etc.
Ultimately, my unwanted writing led
me by force to exile, and exile led me by choice to this recapitulation, over a
thousand miles away from the men and women who in Cuba committed their
existences to delete my literature from the cultural field, and to displace my
biography from the national map. Dictatorships are much about deletion and
displacement, concepts explored by Kenneth Goldsmith in his experimental
approach to translation theory.[97]
In this sense, dictatorships are a terminal type of translation, where bodies
are regurgitated to the rhythm of a revolutionary anthem, dissected into
compartmentalized functions ―each organ belonging to an organization―, so that
singing is attached to vowel strings and not to bowels, for example, just as
pleasure is tied to reproduction and not to redemption, for example, just as history
loses all of its human histology.
7.
What was the
body but a vessel,
and what was the
store but another, bigger, vessel?
The keys sang in
my numb fingers.
The flag
applauded in the wind.
Kevin Prufer.[98]
Night is the territory of the
anti-national. The body prevails at night, with all its daring, endangering,
endearing desires. At night the nation seems to be sunken under the individual
impulses of spirit: light-years away from the socializing sun and our more or
less oedipal childhoods. Dusk and dawn are much like frontiers that open and
close to the unknown human soul, to its animal avidity. No wonder that the word
lunatic refers to the moon, the Lune
―a mirror that reflects what’s left from the civilizing daytime during the
no-nation of the nights.
A Latin proverb that has been
appropriated by many thinkers and men of action ―isn’t thinking the first of
our actions?― says: Man is Wolf to Man.[99]
At night every creature on Earth recalls their cosmic nature, their anguish lost
in language: the hidden wolves that dwell within us, disguised as dreams,
desires, despairs, dementias, différances
from our diurnal self. If we were to force “Man is Wolf to Man” into the musical
cut-ups of the German-inspired Slovenian band Laibach [wolf, people], could we translate it now as Man is People to Man?[100]
Man not as an island, but as infinitude: the infinitesimal multiplicity of each
individual, which the Nation-State homogenizes and humiliates with its
totalizing symbols: one foundational narrative (including or excluding the
notion of one good god), one flag, one anthem, and the invention of one
national calendar.
After decades of daily discipline, with
the nocturnal death of Fidel Castro on a 2016 November Friday, the remains of
the Cuban Revolution are now ready to inaugurate an era of “post-revolutionary melancholy,”
in analogy with the post-colonial[101]
and post-imperial[102]
melancholies referred for other geopolitical contexts. In such a sudden post-Castro
vacuum, I can foresee a sort of Castroism hüzün,
to use a term in Turkish from the Literature Nobel Prize Orhan Pahmuk about his
native city Istanbul,”[103]
making reference to that “communal feeling” of “deep spiritual loss” and
“worldly failure” in a people who “simply carry on with their lives amid the
ruins,” “as they resign themselves to poverty and depression” but “with an air
of dignity”: it’s the vision “of everything being broken, worn out, past its
prime” and, in the case of Cuba today, past its Prime Minister.
This inertial “illness,” this “poetic
license to be paralyzed,” is not the “melancholy of a solitary person but the
black mood shared by millions of people together,” and in my country is already
being fostered by the fascination of foreigners when they travel to Cuba as ideological
flâneurs ―including academics in the
search of archeology―, as well as by the solvent foolishness of Cuban exiles experiencing
extreme nostalgia.
In turn, if Pahmuk feels that in
Istanbul “the hüzün is so dense you
can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over its people and its
landscapes,” in Havana I felt this uprooted belonging by films smuggled into the
Island from abroad, in digital format. That’s how I watched Shortbus in 2008 and immediately I decided
to post a parody in my blog[104]
about Cuban natio(a)nal anthem and the night as a last redemption from the
Revolution.
It was called Cantar el himno en tu culo.[105]
I uploaded the column around midnight, the time span where I could sneak into an
illegal internet connection with less risk of being detected by the authorities
(which do not offer private internet service at all). A few days later, in March
2009, I was taken to a police station for an interrogatory with two officers of
the Cuban Ministry of Interior.[106]
They warned me that they were considering filing judicial charges against me,
for desecration of the Cuban national anthem. Then, as the closest conceivable
readers of my counter-revolutionary literature, as they called it, they notified
me that, if trialed, I could be sentenced up to two years in prison for “state
of dangerousness.” And, once in prison, as they casually commented between them,
they both would personally make sure that some other prisoner did sing the
Cuban national anthem inside me, exactly as in the film Shortbus that I was so enthusiastic to write about.
According to the categorization of Joseph
Kahne and Ellen Middaugh,[107]
this rape threat goes beyond all “active” and “constructive” patriotism to fall
into what they define as “blind” and “authoritarian” patriotism: the “unquestioning
endorsement” and “loyalty to a cause determined by a centralized leader or leading
group,” “denying the value of critique and analysis and generally emphasizing
allegiance and symbolic behaviors.” It was an elementary lesson of limitless
literacy for me as a Cuban intellectual: first, Power teaches People its
symbols as early as possible in life (I see myself singing the national anthem
at age 5, almost willing to terrorize the others); second, for the rest of life
Power uses said symbols to terrorize those People whose initial learning goes
far beyond their control (I see myself in a putative prison, in a rape
reenacting scene of Shortbus with copyright
by the Cuban State).
8.
Several months after his first
national anthem protest, the American football star Colin Kaepernick still keeps
kneeling during the public performances of The
Star-Spangled Banner. Other athletes have joined him. But some press
reports are now calling this protest as “anti-police, anti-military and
anti-American,” while pondering the possibility that the National Football
League should “pass an NBA-style rule mandating all players stand for the
presentation of the flag/anthem” or even to have “Kaepernick and other
protesting players kicked out of the league — unless they stand for Old Glory
and The Star-Spangled Banner.”[108]
When
asked in a press conference about the T-shirt of Fidel Castro with Malcom X
that Kaepernick was wearing, which bore the phrase “Like minds think alike,” he
ended up saying: “One thing that Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest
literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do
in their prison system.”[109]
I really read that Kaepernick’s statement with
satisfaction. Regardless of the pertinence of his civic demonstration, for me he
was just opening a perverse perspective for comparative subalternativies: what
poses as dissent within one national niche, passes as despotism within another national
niche, and vice versa.
[1] It will
be better to sink ourselves under the sea / rather than betraying / the glory
that we have lived.
[2]
Nguyen Van Troi from images. Bui Hue
YouTube channel. Published on February 11, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF1tWznOLNU
[4]
To die for the homeland is not to live / it is to die for the homeland. Ramón
Fernández-Larrea (personal communication by e-mail, raferlarrea@hotmail.com, November 2nd
2016).
[5]
Bayamesa 2.0 (Himnana). Boris
Larramendi Música YouTube channel. Published on January 6, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_0tvNb8BfE
[6] Sí, despierta, mi niña, despierta.
/ Yo vigilaba el paso a la tormenta. / Si lo vieras, cuando abrí la puerta: /
ni el más mínimo llanto se oyó. / Ya cesó de caer, ya paró. / Lo que parecía
muerto ahora está vivo. / Ven y escucha en la calle el sonido / y salgamos los
dos a correr.
[7]
Castro, F. El pueblo cubano vencerá. CubaDebate,
La Habana, 19 Abril 2016. http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2016/04/19/fidel-castro-el-pueblo-cubano-vencera
[8]
Spivak, G. C. Can the Subaltern Speak? In:
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture
(Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L., editors). Macmillan Education: Basingstoke,
1988, pp. 271-313.
[9]
Spivak, G. C. Can the Subaltern Speak?
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[14] Suene el grito: ¡República o muerte! /
Nuestros pechos lo exhalen con fe / y sus ecos repiten los montes, / cual
gigantes poniéndose en pie.
[15] ¡Orientales: la Patria o la Tumba! / ¡Libertad o con
gloria morir! […] Libertad en la lid clamaremos. / ¡Y muriendo, también
libertad!
[16] Al estruendo que en torno resuena / de
Atahualpa la tumba se abrió, / y batiendo sañudo las palmas, / su esqueleto
“¡venganza!” gritó.
[18] Sean eternos los laureles / que supimos conseguir. /
Coronados de gloria vivamos… / ¡O juremos con gloria morir!
[19] Y en sus aras de nuevo juremos: /
¡morir antes que esclavos vivir!
[20] Que los hijos del grande Bolívar /
hayan mil y mil veces jurado: / morir antes que ver humillado / de la Patria el
augusto pendón.
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[23] Dios miró y aceptó el holocausto, /
y esa sangre fue germen fecundo / de otros héroes que, atónito el mundo / vio
en tu torno a millares surgir.
[24] Y si nuevas cadenas prepara / la
injusticia de bárbara suerte, / ¡gran Pichincha! prevén tú la muerte / de la
Patria y sus hijos al fin; / hunde al punto en tus hondas entrañas / cuanto
existe en tu tierra, el tirano / huelle sólo cenizas y en vano / busque rastro
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[27] ¡Guerra, guerra! Los patrios
pendones / en las olas de sangre empapad.
[28] Desde el día que
en su alta bandera / con su sangre escribió: ¡Libertad!
[29] Que tu pueblo con
ánima fiera / antes muerto que esclavo será.
[30] Y es su escudo invencible, el
derecho; / y es su lema: ser libre o morir.
[31] Marcharemos, Oh Patria, a la
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Amanece, ¿lo veis a la luz de la aurora / lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al
caer? / Sus estrellas, sus franjas / flotaban ayer / en el fiero combate / en
señal de victoria. / Fulgor de lucha al paso de la libertad. / Por la noche
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las cadenas). / Por la noche decían: “¡Se va defendiendo!” / Oh, decid: ¿despliega
aún su hermosura estrellada / sobre tierra de libres / la bandera sagrada? ENGLISH TRANSLATION (translated from Spanish by Orlando Luis Pardo
Lazo): It’s sunrise. Do you see by the
light of the dawn / what so proudly we hailed last nightfall? / Its stars, its
stripes / yesterday streamed / above fierce combat / as a sign of victory. / The
gleaming of battle marching along liberty. / At night they proclaimed: “We are defending
it!” / O, say, does its starry beauty still wave / over the land of the free, /
the sacred banner? / Its stars, its stripes. / Liberty, we are the same. / We
are brothers, it’s our anthem. / In fierce combat, as a sign of victory. / The
glory of battle / (my people fights on) / marching along liberty / (the time
has come to break the chains). / At night they proclaimed: “We are defending it!”
/ O, say, does its starry beauty still wave / over the land of the free, the
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