imagery

The power of an image. We will all nod our heads in vague agreement, but we stop there, afraid of what it means to recognize something that is truly powerful. We tilt our heads and bite our lower lips when set before some photograph or painting that creates a vocabulary of its own to describe a split second in our sloppy human condition. And nobody disagrees with the outrageous injustice that advertising as an elusively Big-Brother-esque institution does for society (another word that we spout off when the rot in our heart lies to have us believe that bemoaning existence might make it go away). The indigenous peoples of the Americas occupied an entire concept of the universe centered in the image, relaying what we try to call ‘absolute truth’ through these images that remain open to interpretation, recognizing that each viewer might see a different version of the same story. Memory was a beautifully chaotic performance of dance, music, and images, or perhaps some colorful knots on a string or plated silver adorned by a youth. Westerners arrived with their written word and obsession with precision, and they feared these people of the image. They prohibited their images and incarcerated their memory in languages that were never made for such a realm of mystery and imagination. They burned their pages and punished their dances, forcing upon them images of a glorified virgin mother and verbal submission to the invisible powers behind the rising sun. They took their culture captive and injected it full of that disease called Progress, then complained at the inconvenience that its limp body lying on the floor caused for their efficient gluttony. But they did not eliminate the image, and dance has not been stilled. The poison of that western hatred mutated these forms of expression, these once-glorious ways of being, into a murderous fiction. I walk through the streets or glance at a television through a window, and see this land’s fictitious identity lying through its teeth to a captive audience. “We are white, we have blonde hair and straight teeth,” she says. “We have sculpted bodies and smile as we bow to the gods of consumerism,” he chuckles. I have seen in my own country the damage that idealized figures in advertising and pop culture have caused to a world craving a God to worship, but what amazes me even more here in Latin America is that these images are borrowed not only from an invented reality, but from an invented reality of another world. In the same way that indigenous spirituality was slowly strangled by the cult of Christianity, the Latin American image of self is held hostage by a European ideal. They are exhausted from trying to find God in the gold-plated cathedrals where the plaster eyes of a dead virgin and the soft hands of a plump bishop seem only to laugh at their pain, those houses built in God’s name with bricks borrowed from the devil. Since they do not find God here, they turn to these lying images, these blonde beauties who assure them that they will never be allowed the luxury of beauty. Their sleek dark hair and softly rounded noses deem them uncivilized; they enslave themselves to the images and the lords of consumerism who mockingly offer indulgences. “Perhaps,” they tell them, “if you buy into these things, and if you can lose who you really are in a cup of pisco, then perhaps you will become who I want you to be.” Speak English, mimic a world apart. The evil spirit that inhabited the invading Europeans thought it expelled the image, but it merely turned it into a lie.