Moon, Sun, Freedom: Artist Names for Peace

How many of us actually like our names? My own father, despite scoffing at his parent’s poor taste, always presents himself with his given name of Wayne. Rarely do we stop to consider, what would I choose for myself if I could?

Salvadoran parents give their children more wiggle room with their names. They get four: two first, two last. A given María Elena, for example, can introduce herself as María, Elena, María Elena, Malena or Mari depending on her mood. Moreover, during the civil war (1980-1992) guerrilla fighters and their families invented names for themselves to protect their identities from being discovered by the murderous Salvadoran army. Today these guerillas veterans alternate between their nom de guerre and their given first or second name, all which makes it very difficult to remember the names of twenty people that presented me the first time as Jose or Tomasa and the second as Salvador or Santos.

I’ve always been fascinated with names, ever reading Anne of Green Gables, where the heroine laments her bland name and creates for herself an alternate identity as Cordelia. My name was boring too! Once I started reading poetry and found that Pablo Neruda had actually been born “Neftalí Reyes Basoalto” and Gabriela Mistral’s parents baptized her as Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga (whoa) I decided to take the plunge. I started signing my work Madeleine Breton in honor of the surrealist poet. In El Salvador, jealous of all my friends with their flexible name situations, I christened myself Jennifer Azucena in honor of Monseñor Romero, the Salvadoran martyr born on August 15th, the day of Saint Azucena.

In my first day of the theatre workshop I attend at the University of Central America, our teacher had us go around the circle and say our names . Once we had finished, she said, “Good. That’s the name your parents gave you. Now pick your artist’s name. It can be a childhood name, a name you’ve always loved, something that identifies you with your inner actor. Now present yourselves again.” Brilliant.

I decided to bring this to our workshops ABC (Art, Wellbeing and Creativity) at FUNDAHMER. The first day, I asked them to go around the circle and say their names. Rolled eyes. “ Come on Jenny, “We work together every day!”
“Great.” I said, “That’s your name outside of our ABC workshops. Now pick your artist name.” I was terrified that they all would refuse, but as we went around the circle again, they beamed as they introduced themselves as “Luz(Light), Luna (Moon), Mar (Sea), Libertad (Freedom), Nube Gris (Gray Cloud), Mariposa (Butterfly), Kamila, Charrango (A Peruvian guitar), Campanilla (Morning Glory), Linda (Pretty). We drew portraits of our artist selves, and made colored nametags which we wear each time we meet as a group.

Our recent challenge has been naming our group. We’ve narrowed it down to two: Aroma Natural (Natural Aroma) and Baúl de Los Tesoros (Treasure Trove). Unfortunately, during our Wednesday meeting, 6 voted Aroma and the other 6 Baúl. I’ll keep you posted on which Mar (Sea) chooses once he returns from his conference in Guatemala.

Because our ABC workshops are held in our office, our artist names help us to separate our work space from our art space: the one place where my colleagues can fully detach themselves their grueling non-profit work schedule (6-7 days a week, 9- 10 hours a day), and responsibilities taking care of their kids or aging parents. With each meeting, it becomes easier and easier to incorporate our inner artists into our repertoire of identities, allowing us to live and work more creatively in our fight for social justice in El Salvador.

Introducing the Poets of FUNDAHMER

I. Upon mentioning to my colleagues that in our first ABC (Art, Creativity and Wellbeing) workshop we’d be writing poems, I heard a chorus of groans. I shuttered. But why? Their reaction didn’t make sense. In El Salvador, where martyred poet Roque Dalton is a national idol, why would my colleagues be so opposed to poetry?

I asked this question to the Charrango (the motorist) and Linda (the secretary) one morning as we sat down to sweet bread and coffee. “Oh Poetry, ” groaned Charrango. “None of us get excited about poetry because it was boring when we studied it in school. All we did was memorize poems for homework and recite them in front of the class like parrots.”

“But didn’t you analyze the poems in class? Talk about the rhythm, the metaphors, the feelings the poet conveyed through his words? ” I asked. He shook his head. I continued, “And the teacher never assigned you to write poems?”

“No.” sighed Linda. “We copied poems from books and memorized them. That’s all.”

“Just wait,” I promised them both. “I promise you that you both are poets.” They shrugged their shoulders.

That Wednesday morning, after finishing our beans and plantains, the 10 staff members/artists and I sat down in a circle to embark on our poetic journey. We began with an activity called “Unwording our names,” which consisted in jumbling the letters of our “Artist name”(to be explained in a future blog) and saw which words we could form using the same letters. For example in my artist name “Azucena” (Lily) I can form “Cena” (dinner), “cuna” (crib), “Caza” (to hunt). Once we had found all the words hidden in our names, we had to stitch the words together into a verse.

The Kindergarten teacher Kamila found that her name unscrambled into “Mermaid,” and wrote—

In sand, The mermaid Is a sand-less frog.

The scholarship student coordinator Ana Luz found the words, “Light” and “Path” in her name, and composed—

I will be a path, A blue path. I will be light.

While most of my colleagues looked smug about their poetic findings, a couple of them still looked at me skeptically, their faces asking, “Nope. Try all you want but I’m never going to like poetry.”

II. I ignored off their pessimism and handed out copies of Pablo Neruda’s famous poem, “Ode to my sock,” and we entered into the mystical world of the famous Chilean who celebrates a pair of socks given to him by a friend. “I don’t like it,” spattered Ana Luz. So we read it again, and began discuss the significance of finding beauty in ordinary things until she admitted, “Oh. I like it. It’s pretty.”

Next they scattered with the assignment: 1. Find an object FUNDAHMER office 2. Sit down and “talk” with it for 5 minutes 3. Write an ode celebrating this object.

In the 20 minutes that followed, I witnessed many frightened scowls soften into pensive grins. We reconvened in our circle, and one by one, the artists of FUNDAHMER read their odes: “Ode to the Coconut Tree”, “Ode to the Flowers”, “Ode to the String Bean”, “Ode to a Shell”, “Ode to a dried Rose”.

Linda explained that as she was looking for an object to write her ode about, she felt the time ticking away, and so she wrote an “Ode to the Watch”. The youth group coordinator Miguel “Guevara” Gris chose a picture of Monsignor Romero, (the Salvadoran Archbishop who was murdered by the U.S supported army in 1980 in response to his human rights work) and wrote an “Ode to America” which begins with the verses:

Poor America.

Why did the Spaniards have to come?

Poor America.

They robbed you of everything:

Women, gold, silver, etc.

Poor America.

You were subjected to slavery.

How unjust!

Charrango, perhaps inspired by the poems I put up in the bathrooms, closed us out with his “Ode to the Toilet,” where he put personified the john as a supportive, hard working friend who always supports our efforts. Unfortunately, citing those verses in this blog would be inappropriate.

III. Our final activity was Newspaper Poetry. I threw down a stack of last week’s newspapers in the center of the circle and asked, “What do you think of the news in this country.”

“Lies!” “They just show violence and consumerism!” “Death death death!”

I gave each of them a pair of scissors with the assignment to pick an article that angered them, cut out at least 10 words from the article, and use those words to write a poem.

Kamila wrote about the price of beans (a staple food in El Salvador whose price tripled in the past year from 50 cents to $1.50). She explained how the newspaper just talks about the price, but never explains the roots of the price increase: poor harvests due to hurricanes and droughts caused by climate change.

The executive director Luna wrote about the exploitation of mining companies in the rural areas. The education director Libertad responded to an article which explained how the United States continually refused to import the “Flor de Izote” the national flower of El Salvador, due to food safety standards., Ana Luz came out with a biting critique of the cell phone companies in El Salvador in response to a Movistar ad which nearly received a standing ovation.

They rob you without compassion.

They make you believe

That they give you double phone credit

So that you can call anywhere in the world,

But they’ve already charged you.

It’s a farce, a trick,

They don’t give you anything!

Instead, you make them rich

Buying minutes with your puny salary.

In our final activity, I taped a blank sheet of paper on everyone’s back and asked them to write a compliment in the form of a verse of poetry on each of their colleague’s backs. We finished with a group hug, and I smiled watching them head up to their offices reading their papers. They finally believed what I had been telling them all along: that they could write poetry. That we all can.