spanish on their tongues
The art I engage with/in is my activism. I approach the work I do from my lived experience, be it as a womyn, as a person of colour, as an immigrant, as a queer womyn, as a daughter…and all the other identities I grapple with. My voice has been for me a place of both privilege and hardship; at times I have not had the courage or skill or words to speak, and yet at other times (in the later part of my life), my voice has granted me the ability to express parts of me I didn’t know were in need of expression, until that very moment.
Because of this, this assignment was both a pleasure and a challenge. The challenge presented itself mostly in the technology being used rather than the content. This is of course because I have never used garage band, or any other type of similar software before and have never edited an audio recording and/or added sound effects/music. The hardest piece was not the recording itself, or getting my parents to do their parts (because it seems they both had a lot to say, which I had to edit out!), but rather the blending of music with words and ensuring my voice was audible at all times. Choosing the right blend of Spanish and English music to match with the theme of the piece was essential to the “success” of the assignment because I wanted it to it serve the purpose of setting the mood as well as adding additional elements to the piece that were based on something other than words. For example, I wanted the initial response from the listener to be one of familiarity with North American/English speaking culture, hence why I chose to begin with ‘sweet dreams’ by the Eurythmics. I feel the listener will be surprised by the content of the piece because s/he will have made assumptions re: what this is about, assumptions about the mixing of cultures, assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant. It was also strange to hear my own voice sharing a story that I myself wrote and lived, although this felt a bit like an out of body experience for me, adding myself to my work is how I want to work.
The content of this piece was in some ways the easier part, this is because the words I share in this piece are part of a larger body of work I have been engaged with over the last year. However, in prior readings/presentations of this material I have not involved the use of background music, recordings, or editing (great addition for future presentations). Although the story I share is real and is an area of my life that I struggle with (the duality of language and having to translate for my parents from a very young age), because I have written and processed this relationship to language and my parents over the past while, it felt good to tell the story, to put words to it, to reclaim the pain of migration.
While this piece is not in line with the theme you asked us to explore (dusk to dawn), I had the need to put this story in this piece because I see it as a continuation/connected to the video project, and something I wish to continue to explore; language, migration, love. The connection I can make to your suggested theme is that often between dusk and dawn is when my mind is most active with creative energy and it is actually when I do most of my creative work. So although I strayed away from the theme, I can honestly say this assignment was conceived and actualized between dusk and dawn, when my mind is searching for ways to make sense of the world and my place within it.