LIKE A RING ON THE FINGER
I was brooding over an indignation that gnawed at my peace of mind, when just a column of the lucid and always documented fell into my hands. Weildler Guerra Curvelo, published in the newspaper El Espectador and titled ‘Cosmopolitan provincials’.
It is not surprising that many times when we read, we find in the author’s verb, just the words we need for some referent that we have in mind. A communion and empathy arises because we feel that whoever writes picks up the right feeling of what we want to say at that moment.
The column of the guajiro intellectual refers to the fact carried out by the mayoress in charge of Cartagena, the Bogota Ana María González and her humiliating and proud ways of putting the powers of the Andeans above those of the Caribbean: we are very provincial to govern , was the foolish message from the official who will go down in history for such a clumsy way of taking advantage of a popcorn of power. Guerra Curvelo sees this as a “poorly concealed whiff of despotic centralism”, He also thinks that “This type of centralism is assumed as civilizing, it leads some to act as officials of a distant metropolis in their colonial possessions.
A NON-ISOLATED CASE
The Guajiro anthropologist also warns that this is not an isolated event. That is exactly what I want to refer to. The day before, I experienced the same indignation that Guerra referred to before a Bogotá official. This is Amparo Bello, manager of the cultural agency of the Banco de la República de Valledupar. Paradoxically, the same entity for which Weildler Guerra worked for several years.
The facts are as follows. About two months ago, I was contacted to be the moderator of a discussion organized by the Banco de la República in Valledupar, entitled ‘Jugglers and troubadours, women in the vallenato’. The bank employee who contacted me told me that my name had been recommended to them because of my experience moderating various events on this subject. I have done it in Riohacha, at the Simón Bolívar University of Barranquilla and the UPC University of Valledupar, in addition to being the only vallenato researcher who has published a book on the subject of gender representations.
Days before, I was contacted (always through officials who were not the manager), about the topics to be discussed with the invited interpreters: Loraine Lara, Karen Rodríguez and Jadith Muegues. A virtual meeting was arranged to agree on the questions, which was later cancelled. However, reading about the purposes of the event, I wrote a battery of questions that I sent to the organizers. I never received an answer, but days later they sent me about seven questions, very journalistic style, written by the manager Amparo Bello.
THE MANAGER’S FLAT
Almost on the date of the event, I had a conversation with another official in which we reached an agreement that such questions were for me to identify the broad lines along which the conversation should be conducted. When the date arrived, upon arriving at the venue of the event, the first contact was a scolding from the manager, allegedly for my tardiness, when I arrived before the start time, when the organizers were hardly there and not even the interpreters had arrived.
Prior to the conversation, the manager called me to give me instructions on how to guide the event. Her attitude was that of a censor: “You can’t say this, don’t do this, I don’t think so, limit yourself to what I tell you”. Even so, I always thought that, as I had done in the dozens of events that I have moderated in various departments, I had the freedom to include my own contributions and questions in the contest.
In the brief chat, I had the impression that if the manager knows little about something, it is Vallenato music, due to the number of inaccuracies into which she fell.
of the questions that “prescribed” the manager, I took four, I integrated another and some happened to me from the interaction. In the end, the comments from the public were encouraging, and many people came up to me to congratulate me on the depth of the questions. Oh surprise!
The manager, Amparo Bello, called me aside, redder than a tomato, enraged that I had not followed her script of questions fully. He criticized the fact that I had mentioned the word “boom” when referring to the emergence of a new generation of interpreters and because I should never have referred to commercial vallenato (actually I don’t know contemporary vallenato that is not commercial and the invited artists recognized that).
ARE WE PROVINCIANS INCOMPETENT?
The manager’s attitude was outrageous to me and typical of a colonizing attitude and so I let the readers know. If she is the expert in vallenato and she would be in charge of writing the minimum that I had to say, then she did not need an expert but rather an announcer or presenter.
The Bank of the Republic organizes many talks with intellectuals, academics and writers. I can’t imagine them receiving a script from Amparo Bello with the questions they should ask their colleagues. Is it that the Bogota woman thinks that, because we come from the province, we don’t have the minimum skills to moderate a female vallenato event? Was it necessary to take me from Maicao to read some questions that she, “expert vallenatologist”, predetermined? Is any contribution or context that I can make to the topic not relevant to you?
As I finally replied: if I had known that they hired me just to read the questions that she was going to give me, I would refuse the very pyrrhic fees paid by the Bank of the Republic.
The lived experience, fits precisely in what Guerra Curvelo bares. Even in these times, the colonialist mentality prevails in the center of the country to the detriment of situated knowledge; The presumption prevails that we are the intellectual elite, at point zero and that in the province we are not capable of autonomous thought.
I imagine that the next events on vallenato music that the Banco de la República schedules in Valledupar will bring rolo vallenatologists.
ABEL MEDINA SIERRA/SPECIAL FOR THE PYLON