My three songs from Spell 31

Explanation of water

I am finishing knitting a blouse that I started five or six years ago. A white blouse that I knitted in the same year that I started listening to the Ibeyi. I know this because I remember my back leaning against the wall of a barbecue at the Cerro while listening to River. I can't knit quickly, I only knit when I want to forget things, and that is always a slow process, it is done with the discreet emotion of rivers, with the longing to finally flow into a landscape that breaks.

I don't know exactly why I like the Ibeyi so much, but I don't know why I like knitting so much either. I listen to them and I feel softness inside. The easy answer would be: they are good. They have a clean voice. They are the riverbed and the sea and the rock and the sun that splits the landscape in two. 

And it is true. But there is a deeper answer and I don't know it, just as I don't know why the sea soothes me or why the sound of the river resembles the sound of the veins. I don't know the explanation of water. I cannot know it. I don't want to know it. 

Listening to Ibeyi is a journey inward, a convulsion of honey and colors and memories, a medicine against the falling world. The music they play at the end of movies, when the collapse is inevitable... That music that sweetens the catastrophes, that gives beauty to the fall. Then, for a few minutes, the world is less bad, and one believes again in the peace of sounds, in the primitive harmony that constitutes a praise. In the sea that looks at us with its tremendous eyes while we believe that we are the ones looking at it. 

I was introduced to their music -some years ago- as "religious music". I don't know to what extent I see it that way. For me it is music of faith, and they are different things. I also believe that all music of the soul is music of faith. It is not the chanting that has to be done, it is not the ceremony, but the pure surrender, the instinct. It is not the Lord's Prayer that has to be prayed, but the prayer of a grieving mother, of a child giving thanks, that prayer that comes out with nameless words and has a lot of weight. All the weight.

It has been five or six years since that barbecue. Today I heard Spell 31his most recent album. Today I picked up that blouse. Today the sea is far away and they brought me a certain explanation of the water and I seem to be weaving the rivers with my hands. 

*** 

Sister 2 Sister 

It's not a song to cry, it wouldn't have been if I hadn't listened to it late at night, if it had a different title, if I hadn't said Sister, hold me close. 

But my sister left a few months ago and I thought about childhood, and I thought about the hugs that are suddenly given, I thought about the belly, about the desire to embrace at all costs that half of a song called Fernanda. It is not a song to cry, no. Surely it is a happy song, and if you cry let it be of joy. But no one ever told me with which songs to unweave my sadness. So Sister 2 Sister was the soundtrack of nostalgia. And that's okay because, even if they swear to me that it's a happy song, I'm still going to think of a faraway place, of the snow that takes us away, of a flight that brings her back for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, or however many seconds a hug can last. 

[Sister, hold me close]

Every song is a prayer. 

*** 

Sangoma [Strange island ]

It has the color of the furious sea, of the sea that sings, of the sea that invites, of the sea that heals and breaks and laughs. 

[The mountain...]

The sea laughing is a tremendous thing. 

[A church in open air...]

Every song is a prayer. 

I have nothing more to say about it.

*** 

The dead - Ibaé 

Cith their dead I remembered my own. I remembered them with the cadence of a weaving: softly. I remembered them with peace. I recited their names in silence and my own song arose, the one that is born in the seas of the spirit. And I was accompanied by a calmness that turned to prayer, and I felt that the dead, my own, were greeting me from above. I continued weaving the infinite blouse, as if life were also infinite, as if after death came a fabric of another color. Perhaps that is what it is all about, to rest in a different color. To believe that death is nothing more than a painful stitch, to weave in the soul the names and the facts, to keep forever. Ibaé. My dead are in memory, in the cheerful fabric of a summer blouse, in the gentleness with which I remember. Death does not dwell as long as memory dwells. The dead are at peace as long as a girl knits and remembers them. As long as the memory is so true that it even seems like an embrace. 

*** 

When I was a child I would ask my grandmother how to pray. Masses were tedious for me, who was a distracted child. And she would say: Close your eyes and ask..., ask and thank with your words. 

Music, consequently, became just that. Words of our own. To ask and to thank. Music is the religion I turn to when the dead ache. Music is my Ibaémy altar and my offering. My way of letting it all go with my own purity. An exercise of humanity. 

I also remember Father Jesús Belda saying that singing was praying twice. He was right. Singing is a double prayer. The voice and faith... Faith in something: a distant love, a sea that wants to cross, a version of the facts, one's own version of the facts. And the Ibeyi discovered the union between singing and praying, the formula of a weaving, which resembles the formula of water.

*** 

Of course I listened to the whole album, but I don't want to talk about the whole album. I want to talk about the three songs with which I weaved the best, with which I remembered the most. I don't want to talk about the quality of the sound, the color of the vocals, the years and the achievements, even though that seems transcendent to me. The whole album is very water, the whole album is very Ibeyi, a nostalgic prayer. And of course I went to other songs like River and OyáOf course I remembered that barbecue and that first stitch. Of course I closed my eyes in my childish prayer. And I prayed for me, I prayed for my own ibeyi, I prayed that the music would never end, just as the weaving never ends. Three songs were enough for me to put my feet in the water and recover my prayers.

***

One oxygen atom, two hydrogen atoms. Adhesive qualities. I know perfectly well why water is water, I know why snow is snow and why steam is steam. I know why it goes up to the sky when the molecules separate. It is chemistry. It's not magic. But water is water when I dip my feet in the sea. When the Ibeyi sing their honey. When they say Sister, you're too close And I feel the embrace of my sister, who right now is playing in the snow as the molecules come closer. And I hug her and we become solid for I don't know how many miles. The miracle arises when we unlearn the explanation of water and miles. When someone sings and takes us back to a world less evil, less cold, less molecular. When the embrace transcends the physical. 

***

I am finishing knitting a blouse that I started five or six years ago. I pick it up very randomly. I don't want to finish it. Maybe I'll make a tablecloth or a giant curtain or a scarf. Maybe I'll just knit without purpose. Today I listened to Ibeyi and opened the suitcase to finish my weaving [out of superstition, out of stubbornness, out of mania]. Today I hugged a lot, I cried a lot, I wove a little. Today water is more than the sum of hydrogen and oxygen. More than the formula. Water is a prayer. A blouse. A voice in French and a ibaé ancestral. Today water is the ceremony of voices. A weaving without purpose. Today the water became a voice. 

And that's all the explanation I need.