I felt very intensely our coming together, a feeling of meeting again and resonating as we always did. Were we meeting for the first time?
If not our bodies, our waters knew. And I wanted to share an expression that resonated while we were together around the fire and in my days after our gathering:
Kachkaniraqmi,
A word of Quechua chanca (a variety of Southern Quechua spoken in the Ayacucho Region, Peru), that I came to learn watching a documentary of the same title in Lima by Javier Corcuera, a musical journey through the different territories of Perú, the lands I was born to. An expression used when greeting someone after a long while of not seeing when finding them on the roads.
Because there is no singular or plural in Quechua, Kachkaniraqmi means at the same time:
I am/we are still - Still me/us - I am/we are still here.
The salt never left the bodies, the salt of your bodies talks to the salt in mine. Like when we meet Sari.
Salty waters making waves together. When listening to you all, and hearing the waters in Patricia’s writing to us, telling us about her grandmother, the Kawésqar people - our peoples still are and are still here.
Being together with you, that is the feeling I had, we were letting ourselves know we are still, we are still here, seguimos siendo.
This makes me think of Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of spiritual activism…
“With awe and wonder you look around, recognising the preciousness of the earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings - somos todos un país. Love swells in your chest and shoots out of your heart chakra, linking you to everyone/everything… You share a category of identity wider than any social position or racial label. This conocimiento motivates you to work actively to see that no harm comes to people, animals, ocean- to take up spiritual activism and the work of healing” - Gloria E. Anzaldúa (“Now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner work, public acts”, 2015).
We have talk about octupuses, kelp, sweet potato too!!!! - We are eating our connection!
-After thoughts-
It was crucial to talk about our sea cultural lives, past, present and future since they are all entangled together.
While we talked about the relations of the past towards, and with, the sea, something moved me deeply, maybe a sense of rupture from the past, a broken feeling, of a process in which vital tissues of life are strangled. Because when we speak of the present we speak of the past, I think while talking, we went back to seeing the water represented in our skins, our art, our homes, our huacas (ceremonial, sacred places in Quechua). We went to the times when the sounds of the waves echoed in them. How did they start to fade from the walls of our huacas as from our bodies?
Hearing Vei and Gina talk about the spirits of their Elders finding the sea after death, echoes the sea again in their bodies.
My father is a man from the coast, from the north coast, a hot zone, a beach is called Huanchaco, Guaukocha which has the meaning of a beautiful lagoon with golden fish. The Moches also bathed and fish there. The Moches erected a citadel by the sea with mud and water, birds and waves were the meanings that ran through the walls of those temples.
In the body and in the huacas the sea resonated.
The sea for the Moches was called Ni and the moon Si, the moon moving the waters. I would love to know more about how ancient peoples called these two.
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Sari and Vei, talked about ourselves as custodians, we ought to be. And I recognize in myself a long way ahead.
Here I feel the different sea and their different frequencies in its peoples too. Ways of being.
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I think of what brought me to these shores... I escaped a house on fire to find another place, but this one was also burning - This is something similar to what Reynaldo Arenas said in one interview in the 90s.
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How do we write South-South imaginaries in sound?
Weaving the thread of words into worlds that are worth living.
s o u n d
c ay ay yay
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