Con qué se alegran mis penas (bullerengue pa' bailar)
Con qué disipo mi llanto (bullerengue pa' bailar)
No hablo de la vida ajena (bullerengue pa' bailar)
Y me alegro por mi canto (bullerengue pa' bailar)
Petrona Martínez
Coming back to my home country was a process of grieving and rebuilding life. Multiple griefs happened, having to leave behind friendships, a relationship, a cat companion that showed me that my understanding of bonding with animals was still narrow until we met, the idea and project of me I was building and couldn't be anymore, the beautiful and complex land that did become a place I called home.
After long days of silence needed to grieve, I sought music to bring comfort. This has always been a resource personally. In this transition, one year ago, bullerengue resonated the most. I returned to the town where I grew up and met an unusual group of women who introduced me to healing practices I hadn't tried before. Among those was an experience of healing from medicina tradicional mexicana, a healing practice that comes from the Mexica peoples, a type of knowledge that has transformed with time as a consequence of colonization but is still presently mixed with other beliefs. This ritual allowed me a place to regain energy, to cast part of the shadow of grief out, and start preparing the soil for something else to grow. However grateful I was, I knew not here, not Mexico City, which had been home for decades, were the places I felt where home was now. In all of this, bullerengue was accompanying me. Then, I started looking for places that I could see myself living in. Places where nature is abundant, less noisy and safer than where I grew up, smaller than Mexico City but not as small as the town in Canada I had left, and where there is an interest in art and culture. Then, I found one town where every step I took felt easy and right. A few months after moving in, I felt the urge to dance in community again and searched for a class. One of the synchronicities I'm most grateful for happened. There was an Afro-Colombian dance class in town (bullerengue is one of these dances).
Not only was I lucky enough to find an Afro-Colombian teacher willing to share the dance, but who doesn't hesitate to be critical of the "whitening process" that has happened with Afro-Colombian music and culture now that they are gaining worldwide recognition and how the dances' origin often isn't mentioned. Bullerengue is a testament to the resistance of the descendants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade survivors in the Colombian Caribbean area; she was born in los palenques (fortified communities founded by runaway African slaves as a refuge) and preserved by oral tradition, is practiced in community, sung mainly by older women, and played with traditional handmade drums.
My search for re/connection with self and others came with an example and reminder of how art has been, in different ways, a tool for bringing comfort, processing grief and hardship, and carving belonging. Dance and music, once again, were a resource, a way of relearning how to be with others when I was still unsure about how to be with myself, a way of reconnecting with my body that had been impacted by grieving and didn't felt quite familiar, to be able to give a different perspective to all the reflective process that was happening as part of the healing process, to do as I preach by placing care for myself at the center as best as I could (with gentleness and patience) while also being grateful and enjoying that in here I get to do what I love in person, opening my art therapy practice.
A part of me was calling inside the grief storm. Dance, books, community, rituals, poetry, and music were the keys that helped reconnect me to myself and acted as reminders that joy can exist at the same time as grief, dance (and any type of art really) can transmute the heaviness in your heart, that examples of this and resistance are multiple, at every level, and all around us, we just have to know how to look for them. That grieving can be held collectively, and in these parts of the world, we have that embodied knowledge intertwined with art and creativity so naturally.
It has been a little more than half a year since I moved here and started dancing; we had our first dance presentation last November. I made this art piece after it with a set of Beam washi paints that arrived in the mail just a few days after I had to leave Canada. At the time, it felt like the perfect parting gift, yet it carried deep pain. When I got them, I decided to use them until a special occasion arose and that felt like the perfect moment.
It reads in it "Bullerengue of fire, vibrant flowers and pain intertwined, alive within me."
Finally, let me end by sharing two of the Bullerengues that sustained my spirit during 2024:
"Las Penas Alegres" (The Joyful Sorrows) in the voice of Petrona Martinez.
"Madre Fuego" (Fire Mother) by Bulla en el Barrio.
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