MC Quixote

What One Says with Silence Part 18

Ana Tijoux is one of my heroes. She's Chilena but her family was forced to leave Chile back in the 1970's because a brutal military dictatorship took over her country. It turns out her family lived in exile in France for over two decades. I think she might have been born in France, so I guess she's French / Chilean.

I first saw her on a Mexican music video program and I was immediately taken by the images and the sounds. It's strange how you can feel close to someone you've never met, someone who lives thousands of miles away, someone who comes from a different background, a different culture, and yet, feel intimately tied to them.

I was watching this video for her song, "Shock", and it hit me like a club between the eyes. This was last year. I was a junior in high school, reeling in the alienation, marginalization, and an all-around teenage angst that seems to come with this time of storm and stress.

And at this same time, I was free in some ways. Free-floating, going through the motions of public education in the United States. Here, public education is mandatory and sometimes I wonder if that has caused education to lose its value. It's kind of like a supply and demand type of thing. If it's free and everyone must do it, then people don't value it. If people don't value education; it loses its power.

I get that notion in school up here; it seems like the students don't understand the opportunity they have to go to school. They don't ask questions, don't do homework, don't even take their books home. A lot of the students here play this game of,

"What is the least I can do to get the grade?"

They don't get the idea,

"You only get as much out of something dependent on what you put into it."

They're fooling nobody but themselves.

I don't want to sound self-righteous; I've been there too. I don't know how to describe it, in a rut, turned off, bored, bored with myself, in a state where I needed some sort of Shock. Thanks Ana!

Back to the Shock video. It uses a lot of documentary footage from Chile in 2011 with images of students who have taken over the public schools throughout the country. Desks and chairs are stacked into walls barricading students inside the schools. Students occupy the schools, living in them as a form of protest. Students shut down major traffic routes, hold press conferences, stage hunger strikes, go without food for days, weeks, all in the fight for public education, all in the fight for affordable education, all in the fight for quality education.

These passionate, young activists captured the hearts and minds of their fellow Chilenos by crying out for access to decent public education.

And I'm here in Salt Lake, a junior in high school, and the students around me are doing everything in their powers to get out of going to school. I see them skipping class, dropping out, just turning off to the whole idea that school and education are important.

So along comes Ana Tijoux, and I'm in! I want to join her art movement. She uses art to bring about positive change, to go beyond her own interests, to promote justice and empowerment. I get the sense from her music and her videos that she believes these things can only come through education. She sings and creates music to that end, and it seems that education is, at the same time, her muse.

And here, is where these two completely different worlds will collide, because Ana Tijoux is going to play at The Living Traditions Festival in Salt Lake. And just like public education here, it's going to be free. I can't really believe it's going to happen. It gives me hope that someone in Salt Lake would even book Ana Tijoux. That alone makes me smile.

Time passes, I end up going to the festival with a new friend I met at school this week, David Morales. I start to wonder if all this could really be happening. Someone pinch me cause this whole thing seems so dreamy.

We gather near the outdoor stage that's out in front of the historic City/County Building and I'm in awe of it's beautiful red stone architecture from the late 1800's. It's twilight, the sun has gone down, but the sky is still lit with a scattering of pink clouds and I just look straight up and twirl around, drunk on the whole scene.

Suddenly, Ana comes out and hits it hard. The way she sings projects the passion she has, something I rarely see in people. As the sound of Ana's voice and the DJ mixing beats with a funky bass track start pushing me further and further into a trance state. I just keep dancing, moving, taking it all in, the skylight, the architecture, the almost full moon, and the sound waves moving everyone and everything around me.

It's a perfect moment, an epiphany. Which, if it could only last longer, if I could sustain it through time, I'd ride that wave, I'd be there. But I know it's temporary. I've come to understand that one can find pockets of these type of "sublime" experiences and it seems they exist outside of time. The ticket for this sublime ride is "process", the process of doing some type of "play", like making art, playing basketball, if you get into the zone of it, you transport outside of what we've come to know as "time".

Ana Tijoux live, here, this time, this place, singing, dancing, enraptured and sharing everything she has to give. I'm entranced by the music, uncontrollably moving, breathing, my whole body pulsing in a state of dance.

I heard it said, "What do you do when you're facing the great abyss?" "Dance!" It's a foil to the unknown, to existential angst, to fear, nothing can touch you when you're dancing. In a state of dance, we move outside of time and into a state of grace.

So my hero, my mentor, my model for living, has taught me something about how art can be a vehicle to connect people, transporting us beyond the time/space continuum. Sometimes art transports us beyond time and space, and that's what it is to be free. And at the same time, this dance completely embraces present time, and this place, and a communion with these beautiful people around me, who give me hope, hope humans will keep dancing together.           

Ana finishes an awesome set and the crowd of 200-300 people are ecstatic and she says she'll be signing C.D.s next to the stage. I'm in shock, what do you say to your hero?

So I go over to her merch booth and buy her CD to have her sign it and kind of use the CD as prop to overcome my nervousness. While waiting in the line to meet Ana, I'm trying to open up the CD, but I can't get the plastic wrap off. I'm almost face to face with her, and nervously I put the CD in my mouth and tear into the plastic with my teeth and finally get the plastic wrap off now standing in front of Ana Tijoux and she says,

"Pica Mucho?" ("Is it spicy?")

I giggle, wipe my slobber off the CD, and hand it to her. She opens up the CD case with a delicate hand and I'm just staring at her in awe.

She signs the front of the paper insert and I say,

"I don't really know what to say to you but thank you for being my model for living."

I stutter something else and she says,

"Thank you." And then she says

"Muchas thank you."

And I just stand there, she knows I want to say more, but I can't. After a long awkward pause, she says,

"Sometimes silence is more."

I smile and walk away looking at her signature on the CD. I open it upand see that the first song is titled, "Silencio", and I think about what one says with silence.