9 april

japanese keiko and the cuban “nueva trova”

Apr 09, 2021

As it happens, most of the music that I hear is from the so called “nueva trova”, a group of singsong writers from Cuba who in the early years of the revolution aimed at reinvent “la trova”, which, words more words less, was the current expression of that long existing traditional singer, the trovadeur. What the cubans did was to keep most of the form, so simple melodies, a guitar and a singer, adding heavily politicised lyrics, mostly about their own successful revolution.

It is not so that I am ashamed of my musical preferences, but it is so that ever since the horror of Chavez and Maduro destroyed Venezuela, the country that once saved me and my family from other monsters, there is a voice saying that I should not like that much the music of people that is still making propaganda for a regime that in the end has proved to be as destructive as the dictatorship that it replaced. Yet I would not be myself if the songs of Silvio Rodriguez and also Joan Manuel Serrat from Spain and why not, George Brassens from France, would not bring me back to a time long past, a time where the cuban revolution was not a source of tyranny and oppression but a source of inspiration.

More or less by chance, few days ago I found myself seeing a talk given few years back, on the role of keiko in the practice of Iaido. The title is fairly innocent. Keiko is a japanese word normally translated as training, and Iaido is the martial art that I practice, the use of a japanese saber, or katana. In principle there shouldn’t be much new to say about training in a martial art, should it? I mean, if you practice anything physical, sport or else, you gotta train, right? But the talk was given for a congress of philosophy. So I wonder, and I looked at it.

The speaker started on the word keiko. And so I learned that this word, that for a few years I had understood as “a proper session of training”, perhaps with a component of companionship and shared enterprise, is much more than that. In the interpretation of the speaker, the concept keiko is formed by joining the ideas of being in contact with the past and reflecting and perhaps learning. I knew already that in Japan in general and in Iaido in particular, the past, the ancestors that brought the body of knowledge through time to us are important, and remembered and honored. But I did not realize, at least not with my head, that every session of training is an act of connection with the past.

It has to be said that I have no capacity whatsoever to look at those concepts critically. I am but a beginner in this martial art, and I speak no japanese, let alone read its ideograms or being confortable with its philosophical traditions. So there is no way for me to assess the accuracy of the exposition. But do you know when you hear something that rings true? Have you ever been in that moment that something is said and it somehow makes sense, somehow fits in a picture that you are still making, that you will still change and improve and perhaps even discard... but is still there?

So then, when I hear Madre from Silvio, or Pauvre Martin from Brassens, and my eyes blurr and I feel the anger that I have known since a long past, I realize that that anger is not only at the crimes of the oppressors of old, the genocidal regimes that Silvio accussed and the landowners that Brassens exposed, but it is so that I am also angered at my past self, at that young man that bought in just another regime of ruthless power abuse. And my eyes are blurred again when I think in those that were less lucky than me, and loosed their life in what they thought was the good fight, that fight that we know now it wasn’t.

So perhaps it is true that trovador, that ancient word that also means to turn and to find, is also a form of keiko. And that the only way to turn and to find ourselves again is not with a sword in hand, but with music in our ears.

Madre, Silvio Rodriguez