Memorial Day

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What Memorial Day was: in the beginning, a century and a half ago, a commemoration of the Union and Confederate dead in the Civil War. It was called Decoration Day, because its ritual heart was remembrance of the war dead by visiting and adorning their graves. There were distinct days in the South and North; eventually they merged into a single national holiday instituted in hopes of bringing reconciliation after the shattering carnage of the conflict’s four years.

What Memorial Day became: a broader commemoration of the fallen in our wars. The name began to be used in the late 19th century and was made an official federal holiday after World War II.

Memorial Day commemoration, Kearney, Nebraska, 1910. Photo courtesy of US Library of Congress, American Memory.

What Memorial Day often is: a celebration of all who have served in the armed forces of the United States, though there is a day set aside for that purpose every November, Veterans Day.

What Memorial Day should never be: a celebration of war itself. True, some conflicts were forced upon us, advanced human liberty, and had their moments of nobility. Defending our homes, hearths, and freedoms is just. But merely saying a war is right doesn’t make it so, and as painful as it can be to realize, the spilled blood of one of our own doesn’t automatically make the cause just, either.

It seems those who know war best hate it most. Those who merely fancy they know war, from the pages of books or from great deeds projected on silver screens, often seem the most eager to plunge their country (but not themselves) into that hell.

And it is a hell. Even a just war kills, mutilates, and destroys, sowing seeds of cruelty, disease, and ruin. Neither warriors nor civilians truly escape its scourges.

We’re often told Memorial Day is a day of gratitude, a day when we thank those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom. I know that’s what we’re supposed to think. It’s politically correct, in the true meaning of political correctness: it’s the most comfortable interpretation of this holiday, from the standpoint of those who’ve had the power to send our young people off to fight, and used it.

And sometimes, I agree, “Thank you” is the most fitting sentiment. But I don’t know that anyone has the right to tell us as Americans what to think and feel. Maybe sometimes the words that come from deep down are “I’m so sorry.” And, sometimes—always, really—the words written on our hearts, the only words that really matter, are: “We love you, we miss you, and we remember.”

Ninety-eight years ago this month, the English soldier-poet Wilfred Owen wrote these verses about a fallen soldier whose comrades move him into the sun, hoping he will recover under its warmth.

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Owen entitled this poem “Futility.” Two months after writing it, he suffered a gunshot wound to the head. Four months after that, as the “Great War” we call World War One was ending, Wilfred Owen died. He was twenty-five years old.

Pablo J. Davis

Halloween y Día de Muertos: miedo y comunión

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por Pablo J. Davis

Nos encontramos en el brevísimo intervalo entre el gran festejo norteamericano de Halloween (31 octubre), y el Día de Muertos (1 y 2 noviembre) asociado primordialmente con México, aunque celebrado en diversos países latinoamericanos. Es buen momento para reflexionar sobre cultura, sobre similitudes y diferencias.

La Calavera Catrina, genial creación del artista mexicano José Guadalupe Posada, ya lleva un siglo como el ícono por excelencia del Día de Muertos.

Es común la creencia, en Estados Unidos, de que el Día de Muertos es esencialmente “el Halloween mexicano”. Pero, ¿será cierto? Al igual que la palabra ‘amigo’ en español y friend en inglés, que se ubican una al lado de la otra en los diccionarios bilingües y sin embargo se refieren a realidades bastante distintas (lo mismo podría decirse de familia/family, fiesta/party y sinnúmero de otras duplas culturalmente significativas), Halloween y Día de Muertos comparten algunos símbolos y la misma época del año pero constituyen fenómenos culturales bien diferenciados.

Feliz Navidad, Felices Fiestas y otros saludos festivos

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Cuando un joven guitarrista de 25 años, oriundo del histórico pueblo puertorriqueño de Lares (cuna del movimiento independentista de la Isla en el siglo 19), grabó una placa de musica navideña, Feliz Navidad (RCA Victor Latino, 1970), logró varias cosas.

Primero, gracias a la sencillísima pero pegajosa canción epónima “Feliz Navidad,” ese muchacho, José Montserrate Feliciano García – José Feliciano a secas, para millones – se volcó a la fama mundial como músico y cantante.

Segundo, en la percepción pública de su arte, se vio atrapado por ese éxito: la mayoría del público consumidor de música popular ignora el virtuosismo de Feliciano como guitarrista anclado en la tradición clásica-española (como en modo similar, los sucesos del pianista Nat Cole y del guitarrista como cantantes pop hicieron que el gran público mundial desconociera su magistral dominio de sus respectivos instrumentos).

Y tercero, y relacionado más de cerca con esta temporada de fiestas, el éxito de la canción de Feliciano hizo que el saludo de ‘Feliz Navidad’ deviniera una de entre un puñado de frases en español que prácticamente todo angloparlante (ni hablar de nativos de otros idiomas) conoce.

Pero “Feliz Navidad” no es el único saludo intercambiado en el mundo hispano a esta altura del año.  La más ecuménica “Felices Fiestas” también es común.  Esto puede llegar a sorprender a quienes, en los Estados Unidos, ven (y se lamentan) en ese tipo de saludo y su equivalente en inglés, “Happy Holidays”, una insulsa secularización de una sagrada fiesta religiosa, secularización que imaginan como claudicación reciente por parte de una cultura cristiana mayoritaria, hasta hace poco cómodamente dominante en los Estados Unidos. Tal vez se imaginarían, también, que la cultura hispano/latinoamericana no ha experimentado una tendencia similar.

El Día de los Muertos y Halloween, dos fiestas comparadas

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Calaveras sonrientes, pálidos esqueletos… caramelos, pasteles y otros dulces… Ya casi ha llegado Halloween y también el Día de los Muertos. A estas fiestas las separan tan sólo dos días: en el 2012, Halloween cae en día miércoles (31 octubre) y el Día de Muertos el viernes (2 noviembre). Al parecer, se trata de equivalentes culturales muy cercanos. ¡Sin duda alguna, se ‘traducen’ clara y correctamente una a la otra!

 

Pero, ¿será cierto? Al igual que la palabra ‘amigo’ en español y friend en inglés, que se ubican una al lado de la otra en los diccionarios bilingües y sin embargo se refieren a realidades bastante distintas (lo mismo podría decirse de familia/family, fiesta/party y sinnúmero de otras duplas culturalmente significativas), Halloween y Día de Muertos comparten algunos símbolos y la misma época del año pero constituyen fenómenos culturales radicalmente diferenciados.

Cinco de Mayo not the ‘real’ Mexican national day?

The sense of shared identity that binds an immigrant group together in its adopted home is no mere transplanting of old-country customs.  It involves creativity and innovation—and a dual process of celebrating ancestral ties while affirming group emergence into the fabric of life in the new country.

Calabrians, Sicilians, Tuscans, Abruzzians and other immigrants from the Italian Peninsula began to draw together in the late-19th-century U.S., just when a unified ‘Italy’ was being born.  Columbus Day, Oct. 12 (also, later, ‘Día de la Raza’ or ‘Day of the Hispanic/Latino People’) grew by the 20th century into an Italian-American affirmation.  For the Irish, whose history of mass immigration here is a half-century older, St. Patrick’s (St. Paddy’s) Day plays a similar role, as has Oktoberfest for German-Americans.

So, curious Americans’ periodic discovery that Cinco de Mayo –the Fifth of May—isn’t the ‘real’ Mexican national holiday (that would be Independence Day, Sep. 16), somewhat misses the point of the day: the affirmation of Mexicanness in a new land.

It commemorates not Mexico’s winning of independence from Spain (1821) but a more complex historical moment: Liberals’ 1862 military victory in the Battle of Puebla over French invaders and their Conservative allies.  Starting in the mid-1840s, Mexico was wracked by a sequence of horrors unimaginable to most Americans—half of national territory lost in the U.S.-Mexican War; prolonged civil war triggered by the Liberals’ (most famously Benito Juárez’s) anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic reforms; a British-French-Spanish triple invasion, ostensibly to collect debts from a land bled dry by war; and finally a full-blown French occupation in alliance with the civil war’s defeated Conservatives.

The Mexican triumph at Puebla, against a superior French force double in size, forms an imperfect and contradictory part of the larger historical story.  Ironies abound in its celebration.  For one thing, after Puebla the French actually prevailed, ruling Mexico for three years.  Also, a key figure at Puebla, young Gen. Porfirio Díaz, later became a dictatorial president whose endless, corrupt reelections eventually triggered the Mexican Revolution.

There are more ironies: the French had long dreamed of achieving footholds in former Spanish America. 

Feliz Navidad, Felices Fiestas, and other greetings of the season

Enlace para español/Link here for Spanish

When a 25-year-old guitarist named José Montserrate Feliciano García, from the historic Puerto Rican town of Lares (birthplace of the country’s 19th century movement for independence from Spain) recorded an album of Christmas music released by RCA Victor Latino in 1970, he did a number of things.

First, thanks mainly to the extremely simple but catchy title track, “Feliz Navidad,” he vaulted to worldwide fame as a recording artist.

Second, in the public perception of his artistry, he became trapped by that success: most music fans are unaware of Feliciano’s breathtaking mastery as a virtuoso of the guitar (much as pop singing success obscured the vast musical talents of artists like Nat Cole and George Benson).

And third and most importantly in this season, young José Feliciano made the Christmas greeting ‘Feliz Navidad’ one of the small handful of Spanish phrases that virtually every English speaker—not to mention speakers of other languages around the world—knows.

But Feliz Navidad is not the only greeting widely exchanged in the Spanish-speaking world at this time of year.  The more ecumenical Felices Fiestas (Happy Holidays) is also commonplace.  This may come as a surprise to some who see—and lament—in ‘Happy Holidays’ a bland securalization that they imagine to be a recent departure from a more comfortably dominant Christian culture in the United States, and who might assume that Hispanic/Latin American culture has not experienced a similar trend.

Día de los Muertos, Halloween, and translation

Grinning skulls, jangling skeletons… candies, cakes, and other sweets… Halloween is almost upon us, and so too is the festival known in Mexico as ‘Día de los Muertos’ or more simply ‘Día de Muertos’.  They are just two days apart: this year, Halloween falls on a Monday (Oct.31) and el Día de los Muertos –  often rendered in  English as ‘the (Mexican) Day of the Dead’ – on Wednesday (Nov.2).  Surely these are two near-identical cultural equivalents! Surely they ‘translate‘ clearly and correctly one to the other!

 

But do they really? Just as the Spanish word ‘amigo’ (or ‘amiga’) and English ‘friend’ may be side-by-side in bilingual dictionaries, yet tend to mean quite different things to the people using them – and the same can be said for familia/family, fiesta/party, and countless other culturally significant word pairs – so Halloween and Día de los Muertos share some key symbols and the time of year but are radically different phenomena.

The (often unsuspected) differences between what many people think of as equivalent holidays is not quite what is meant by the term  ‘false friends’.  The latter term refers to words that appear to the foreign speaker to mean one thing, due to their similarity with a familiar word in her language, but that in fact mean something different.  An English speaker, on reading in Spanish that ‘Gómez sufrió repetidas injurias a manos de Pérez’, may imagine that Pérez repeatedly assaulted Gómez, causing him physical injuries; when in fact, Spanish ‘injuria’ means insults, lies, slander, and other sorts of verbal attacks.  False friends can be tricky, but ultimately are fairly easily caught and corrected by speakers with good mastery of both languages.

Not so cultural phenomena.  There the differences are more subtle, may not even be captured by the bilingual dictionary.