Antigona 404 - Tenemos Explosivos
Apr. 29th, 2024 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dornishviperxStraightforward journaling about what has been my favorite song for almost 3 years now.
I heard Antigona 404 for the first time at some point in 2020, when a friend of mine uploaded it to his Instagram story. I have always, always loved Antigone, since the first time I read the Sophocles play in high school and especially later after reading Anouilh's version a year or so later, which is my favorite version of the story and character. Even now, Anouilh's version of Antigone has a special place in my heart because I feel like it really emphasizes Antigone's rebellion: she's fighting a losing battle, she knows she's going to die, but she knows she needs to do it anyway and assumes the costs. This is because he's deliberately trying to parallel Antigone's story with the French resistance during WWII, etc everyone knows all that. Anyway, when I saw my friend shared a song with that title, I immediately added it to my playlist without even listening to it, because that's just how strongly I feel about the character. I listened to the song a couple times when it came up on shuffle and didn't really think too hard about it until one very specific moment.
One thing about me is that during 2020-2021 I was heavily involved in solidarity work with political prisoners, part of which included going to put together boxes of food and hygiene items for prisoners that were then handed to their families to give to them during a weekly visit (this is something every incarcerated person here is entitled to, legally speaking, which is something that the prisoners definitely need because prison food is awful and they otherwise don't have access to toothpaste/shampoo/soap/etc, but is also a financial burden on the family). So it was a spring day, probably mid-October in 2021 when I was riding my bike to the spot where we'd put together these boxes, and Antigona 404 came up on shuffle.That's the first time I ever really paid attention to it.
Now, the thing about the album that this song is on - Derrumbe y Celebración - has a very specific thematic thread, which is that it creates parallels between Greek tragredies/mythological figures and Chilean history, specifically historical memory of the dictatorship. So, on the surface, Antigona 404 seems to be a song about Antigone's story:
Y me pongo a sus pies,
Pues el hijo del Rey ha muerto.
Y ha caído en las manos de su propio hermano.
Y ha caído en las manos de su propia sangre.
Yo sólo quiero enterrar, enterrar su cuerpo.
[And I lay at his feet / For the King's son is dead / He's fallen at the hands of his own brother / He's fallen at the hands of his own blood / I only want to bury, to bury his body]
But, much like Anouilh subtextually connecting Antigone with the French resistance, Tenemos Explosivos connects her with the political processes that were taking place in Chile in the 90s. That time period is usually referred to as the transition period between the dictatorship and the current democratic regime, and it involved the newly-established, pacted, custodied democratic governments cracking down on the political organizations that had previously fought the dictatorship, primarily the MIR, the FPMR and the MJL, because a large part of these organizations weren't fighting to restore democracy, they were revolutionaries fighting for communism or socialism. Of course, the re-establishment of democracy caused internal strife in all these groups, because some of the militants did think it was necessary to deescalate military confrontation in the context of a democracy while others didn't, but all in all, there were still at the very least fractions of these groups still engaging in armed confrontation with the state through the 90s.
This crackdown was one part of the transition process, while the other was to try to turn the page as quickly as possible. The first president of the new democracy said a rather famous phrase about how he would seek "justice, as much as possible", which really shows that the priority was establishing order and "peace" more than it was to achieve any real amount of change vis-a-vis the actual conditions established under the dictatorship (this is also obvious if you look at the pains the new democracy went through to uphold Pinochet's neoliberal economic policies). This passage makes it very clear to me that they're specifically talking about the need to establish order through turning the pages of history as quickly as possible:
Dicen que hay que comentar a contar los muertos,
Convertirlos en números y hacer una
Aproximación epistemológica del dolor
[They say we have to begin to count the dead / turn them into numbers and do an / epistemological approximation of the pain]
It hits like a gut punch every single time, and I've easily heard this song upwards of 100 times. Count the dead, turn them into numbers. This is how you turn the page. But despite the efforts of those in power, there's still a latent memory there, people remember what happened and who they lost. What they lost. This became clear in 2019, with massive protests across the country where people were openly embracing the legacy of the FPMR and the MIR, decrying the dictatorship and still asking for justice 30 years later, fighting against those very policies that he put in place that were later upheld by the new democracy. This happened even though the 90s crackdown tried to establish the idea that the people who kept on fighting through the 90s were just terrorists and extremists (which is exactly what the dictatorship said about those same groups). I think this passage really highlights how it's impossible for this narrative that they tried to impose to really erase the pain and the truth of history:
Y hasta que puedas separar el dolor
De la herida que deja el sonido intenso
Y las trampas para sangrar.
Por más que quieras seguir fingiendo que todo esto ha sido bueno
Y son sólo asesinos los que han arrojado al mar.
[And until you can separate the pain / From the wound that leaves behind an intense sound / And traps to bleed / No matter how much you want to keep pretending that all of this has been good / And that only murderers were thrown out to sea]
But what I like the most about the song is that it emphasizes the doomed nature of Antigone's quest and the need that she has to do it anyway:
Yo sólo quiero enterrar, enterrar su cuerpo.
Ya no quiero llorar mis muertos.
Y fingir que no sé
Que todo el dolor se va a transformar en venganza.
[I only want to bury, to bury his body / I don't want to weep my dead aymore / And pretend that I don't know / That all the pain will transform into revenge]
Y dicen que es locura lo que me tiene así,
Limpiando un cuerpo frío, gélido,
Aunque más gélido por dentro está aquel que
Atenta contra la vida de su propio hermano,
Y se justifica en conceptos tan vacíos como la
Patria la iglesia o la protección de la propiedad privada.
Sin embargo, dicen que es locura lo que me tiene así,
Realizando un acto de inmolación extrema voluntaria,
Dando mi vida por una causa que se supone ya está perdida de antemano.
[They say it's insanity that's got me like this / Cleaning a cold, frigid body / Although the true frigid one is / He who makes an attempt on his own brother's life / And justifies himself with concepts as empty as / Patriotism, the church or the protection of private property / But they say it's insanity that's got me like this / Committing an act of extreme self-immolation / Giving my life for a cause that is supposedly lost in advance]
These parts of the song strike such a deep chord with me, because I think that any of us who are militants in a political project must feel like this at times. Everything around us would insist that we are doomed to lose; that's sort of the narrative that gets propped up every single day (it isn't true, there are active revolutionary movements right now that are not only resisting but actively gaining territory in several parts of the world), but we have a responsibility to persist with our work nonetheless. That's kind of what I assume the militants of the 90s were feeling, too, throughout the transition process. Insisting on the revolution at that time must have been almost an unbearably heavy weight to carry.
I feel like this at times now, as we experience a sort of mass movement reflux post-2019 where political activity has almost stagnated here (in terms of the Chilean mass movement, the Mapuche movement is a completely different story), that I must seem crazy for insisting on this. But I don't feel crazy, I feel like those who would turn the page on dozens dead, hundreds mutilated and tortured in the span of a couple of months, thousands dead and disappeared and tortured over two decades are the crazy ones. Those who would ensure that we live miserable lives paycheck-to-paycheck, with no possibility to retire are the crazy ones. It's not a surprise that this song finally hit me during October 2021, two years after the October 2019 uprising, while I was directly dealing with the consequences of it, just as the fact that there were (an are!) political prisonners from October 2019 still in prison was beginning to fade out of the public conversation. Sometimes, and understandably so, that frustration with the state of the mass movement and with the absolute impunity with which repressive forces carry out horrific amounts of political violence, generates a desire for vengeance (Que todo el dolor se va a transformar en venganza). Whether that's the right thing to call for, the right motivation for a political action is... a subject for a much more profound debate I think, but as a desire it's completely understandable.
These have been some quite messy thoughts. But that song is such an emotional rollercoaster for me, and these are only some of the reasons. I didn't really talk about how impeccable the music is to fit the vocals, to amp up the emotion as the singer calls for revenge, or how the switch from singing, to screaming and to spoken word really underscores the intent behind it (the part about counting the dead is in spoken word, for example, to emphasize how clinical the callous call to turn the dead into numbers really is), but this will do for now. I needed these thoughts on a page because this song touches such a raw, still-bleeding part of me whenever I hear it.
[To be very clear when I say the militants of the 90s must have felt a heavy weight and that they were fighting a losing battle, and then I say that I often feel like I am fighting a losing battle in relation to thesame bit of lyrics, I don't mean that I'm carrying out armed actions against the state the way they were in the 90s jhskdhskdf I am talking about the general experience of far-left militancy and how hard it can be to keep up morale during difficult times.]
I heard Antigona 404 for the first time at some point in 2020, when a friend of mine uploaded it to his Instagram story. I have always, always loved Antigone, since the first time I read the Sophocles play in high school and especially later after reading Anouilh's version a year or so later, which is my favorite version of the story and character. Even now, Anouilh's version of Antigone has a special place in my heart because I feel like it really emphasizes Antigone's rebellion: she's fighting a losing battle, she knows she's going to die, but she knows she needs to do it anyway and assumes the costs. This is because he's deliberately trying to parallel Antigone's story with the French resistance during WWII, etc everyone knows all that. Anyway, when I saw my friend shared a song with that title, I immediately added it to my playlist without even listening to it, because that's just how strongly I feel about the character. I listened to the song a couple times when it came up on shuffle and didn't really think too hard about it until one very specific moment.
One thing about me is that during 2020-2021 I was heavily involved in solidarity work with political prisoners, part of which included going to put together boxes of food and hygiene items for prisoners that were then handed to their families to give to them during a weekly visit (this is something every incarcerated person here is entitled to, legally speaking, which is something that the prisoners definitely need because prison food is awful and they otherwise don't have access to toothpaste/shampoo/soap/etc, but is also a financial burden on the family). So it was a spring day, probably mid-October in 2021 when I was riding my bike to the spot where we'd put together these boxes, and Antigona 404 came up on shuffle.That's the first time I ever really paid attention to it.
Now, the thing about the album that this song is on - Derrumbe y Celebración - has a very specific thematic thread, which is that it creates parallels between Greek tragredies/mythological figures and Chilean history, specifically historical memory of the dictatorship. So, on the surface, Antigona 404 seems to be a song about Antigone's story:
Y me pongo a sus pies,
Pues el hijo del Rey ha muerto.
Y ha caído en las manos de su propio hermano.
Y ha caído en las manos de su propia sangre.
Yo sólo quiero enterrar, enterrar su cuerpo.
[And I lay at his feet / For the King's son is dead / He's fallen at the hands of his own brother / He's fallen at the hands of his own blood / I only want to bury, to bury his body]
But, much like Anouilh subtextually connecting Antigone with the French resistance, Tenemos Explosivos connects her with the political processes that were taking place in Chile in the 90s. That time period is usually referred to as the transition period between the dictatorship and the current democratic regime, and it involved the newly-established, pacted, custodied democratic governments cracking down on the political organizations that had previously fought the dictatorship, primarily the MIR, the FPMR and the MJL, because a large part of these organizations weren't fighting to restore democracy, they were revolutionaries fighting for communism or socialism. Of course, the re-establishment of democracy caused internal strife in all these groups, because some of the militants did think it was necessary to deescalate military confrontation in the context of a democracy while others didn't, but all in all, there were still at the very least fractions of these groups still engaging in armed confrontation with the state through the 90s.
This crackdown was one part of the transition process, while the other was to try to turn the page as quickly as possible. The first president of the new democracy said a rather famous phrase about how he would seek "justice, as much as possible", which really shows that the priority was establishing order and "peace" more than it was to achieve any real amount of change vis-a-vis the actual conditions established under the dictatorship (this is also obvious if you look at the pains the new democracy went through to uphold Pinochet's neoliberal economic policies). This passage makes it very clear to me that they're specifically talking about the need to establish order through turning the pages of history as quickly as possible:
Dicen que hay que comentar a contar los muertos,
Convertirlos en números y hacer una
Aproximación epistemológica del dolor
[They say we have to begin to count the dead / turn them into numbers and do an / epistemological approximation of the pain]
It hits like a gut punch every single time, and I've easily heard this song upwards of 100 times. Count the dead, turn them into numbers. This is how you turn the page. But despite the efforts of those in power, there's still a latent memory there, people remember what happened and who they lost. What they lost. This became clear in 2019, with massive protests across the country where people were openly embracing the legacy of the FPMR and the MIR, decrying the dictatorship and still asking for justice 30 years later, fighting against those very policies that he put in place that were later upheld by the new democracy. This happened even though the 90s crackdown tried to establish the idea that the people who kept on fighting through the 90s were just terrorists and extremists (which is exactly what the dictatorship said about those same groups). I think this passage really highlights how it's impossible for this narrative that they tried to impose to really erase the pain and the truth of history:
Y hasta que puedas separar el dolor
De la herida que deja el sonido intenso
Y las trampas para sangrar.
Por más que quieras seguir fingiendo que todo esto ha sido bueno
Y son sólo asesinos los que han arrojado al mar.
[And until you can separate the pain / From the wound that leaves behind an intense sound / And traps to bleed / No matter how much you want to keep pretending that all of this has been good / And that only murderers were thrown out to sea]
But what I like the most about the song is that it emphasizes the doomed nature of Antigone's quest and the need that she has to do it anyway:
Yo sólo quiero enterrar, enterrar su cuerpo.
Ya no quiero llorar mis muertos.
Y fingir que no sé
Que todo el dolor se va a transformar en venganza.
[I only want to bury, to bury his body / I don't want to weep my dead aymore / And pretend that I don't know / That all the pain will transform into revenge]
Y dicen que es locura lo que me tiene así,
Limpiando un cuerpo frío, gélido,
Aunque más gélido por dentro está aquel que
Atenta contra la vida de su propio hermano,
Y se justifica en conceptos tan vacíos como la
Patria la iglesia o la protección de la propiedad privada.
Sin embargo, dicen que es locura lo que me tiene así,
Realizando un acto de inmolación extrema voluntaria,
Dando mi vida por una causa que se supone ya está perdida de antemano.
[They say it's insanity that's got me like this / Cleaning a cold, frigid body / Although the true frigid one is / He who makes an attempt on his own brother's life / And justifies himself with concepts as empty as / Patriotism, the church or the protection of private property / But they say it's insanity that's got me like this / Committing an act of extreme self-immolation / Giving my life for a cause that is supposedly lost in advance]
These parts of the song strike such a deep chord with me, because I think that any of us who are militants in a political project must feel like this at times. Everything around us would insist that we are doomed to lose; that's sort of the narrative that gets propped up every single day (it isn't true, there are active revolutionary movements right now that are not only resisting but actively gaining territory in several parts of the world), but we have a responsibility to persist with our work nonetheless. That's kind of what I assume the militants of the 90s were feeling, too, throughout the transition process. Insisting on the revolution at that time must have been almost an unbearably heavy weight to carry.
I feel like this at times now, as we experience a sort of mass movement reflux post-2019 where political activity has almost stagnated here (in terms of the Chilean mass movement, the Mapuche movement is a completely different story), that I must seem crazy for insisting on this. But I don't feel crazy, I feel like those who would turn the page on dozens dead, hundreds mutilated and tortured in the span of a couple of months, thousands dead and disappeared and tortured over two decades are the crazy ones. Those who would ensure that we live miserable lives paycheck-to-paycheck, with no possibility to retire are the crazy ones. It's not a surprise that this song finally hit me during October 2021, two years after the October 2019 uprising, while I was directly dealing with the consequences of it, just as the fact that there were (an are!) political prisonners from October 2019 still in prison was beginning to fade out of the public conversation. Sometimes, and understandably so, that frustration with the state of the mass movement and with the absolute impunity with which repressive forces carry out horrific amounts of political violence, generates a desire for vengeance (Que todo el dolor se va a transformar en venganza). Whether that's the right thing to call for, the right motivation for a political action is... a subject for a much more profound debate I think, but as a desire it's completely understandable.
These have been some quite messy thoughts. But that song is such an emotional rollercoaster for me, and these are only some of the reasons. I didn't really talk about how impeccable the music is to fit the vocals, to amp up the emotion as the singer calls for revenge, or how the switch from singing, to screaming and to spoken word really underscores the intent behind it (the part about counting the dead is in spoken word, for example, to emphasize how clinical the callous call to turn the dead into numbers really is), but this will do for now. I needed these thoughts on a page because this song touches such a raw, still-bleeding part of me whenever I hear it.
[To be very clear when I say the militants of the 90s must have felt a heavy weight and that they were fighting a losing battle, and then I say that I often feel like I am fighting a losing battle in relation to thesame bit of lyrics, I don't mean that I'm carrying out armed actions against the state the way they were in the 90s jhskdhskdf I am talking about the general experience of far-left militancy and how hard it can be to keep up morale during difficult times.]
Y ya no puedo separar el dolor de la herida que deja el sonido intenso
