Symbolismo...

I deal with symbolism everyday on a regular basis. Among the Spanish Poetry, Short Story and Afro-Peruvian Slave Narrative classes I'm taking, all we do is talk about the implied, the indirect, the symbolic. Let me just say that a little directness never hurt anyone. However, I must admit that when the prof asked me to "profundizar" my statement about the silencing of the "black voice" in the works we've read so far, I took it like a dog to a frisbee and ran with it. I went on about how history is written by the winners, the oppressors and the elite and in many cases pertaining to our class, the white male. Continuing on with incredible profundity, I discussed the importance of reaffirming and reclaiming this voice as a part of restructing and redefining one's cultural and ancestral identity and validity and to a certain extent the collective memory of a given country. The use of symbolism is just one strategy of the reclamation process, which simultaneously resurrects the past while cementing its presence in the future. This applies directly to the case of Peru, who had the greatest number of imported slaves in all of the Latin American countries at the time (as it was the centre of the S. American colonial universe) menos Brazil (which is a different matter entirely) and whose population of the ancestral slave body goes virtually unacknowledged, entirely sin voz until very recently.

That was a tangent, but I do have a point. Symbols take many forms and in a world where words define us, symbols remain the quiet, passive representatives of the things we simply cannot, or will not, put into words. Whether it is a house key to your lover's home or a lock-shaped icon that allows one to read otherwise censured blog entries, these are all symbols of one thing or another.

Where the tricky part lies, my friends, is in the interpretation of said symbols. That is an art in and of itself. In the symbol lies the intrigue, which is what we all love the best and now we're back where we started.