Baby, no I Don’t Remember What a Chronotope is

Written By Carlos Egaña
 

Danny Ocean haciendo una extraña seña en el Flow Fest 2019. Unmasked Theories/Wikipedia Commons.

*Author’s note: This text was originally presented at the 13th annual Hispanic Studies conference at the University of California, Riverside.

**Para leer este texto en inglés, haz clic aquí.

It’s the fifth time one of my WhatsApp groups shares the video: Yulimar Rojas, who has just broken the world record for the triple jump, looks to the sky and raises her right fist with a medal around her neck. Tears brush against her mask: the Venezuelan national anthem has only been heard a few times at the Olympics. Except, during this award ceremony, the beginning of the song is quite different. Instead of gloria al pueblo bravo, dembow can be heard, along with some synths and a kind of invocation: Ba-Ba-Babylon girl, Ba-Ba-Babylon girl. I laugh each time it finds me, each time I see it, but I also wipe a silent tear from my eyes. 

The song in question, “Me Rehúso,” catapulted Danny Ocean to fame and is still making people around the world dance. With more than 1.6 billion views on YouTube—or almost 60 times the population of Venezuela—it’s not that it’s the most popular reggaeton song in the world from my country—it’s the most popular song from my country, period. And although the catchiness of its chorus—“Baby, no / Me rehúso a darte un último beso, así que guárdalo”—is enough for some non-Spanish speakers to bust a lung while shaking their asses; for us, the lyrics that repeat with each verse capture a cruel nostalgia, a fate we did not choose which has forced us to leave home. Danny Ocean’s hit single is a statement on exile, diaspora—a synthesis of the complicated pain that we feel when our hearts yearn for the past. 

Almost six million of us have fled since 2015. We’re on par with the number of refugees from the Syrian conflict: in 2016, five years after the crisis began, a similar number of Syrians had been forced to leave. It should be noted, however, that there is a fundamental difference between the two crises: Syria was ravaged by war, by bombs, by government officials from the Middle East and major world powers; meanwhile, in Venezuela, the precarity and shortages of medicine, food, and other basic services—reasons for the departure of many, according the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees—are a consequence of the policies enacted by a party that has been in power for more than 20 years.

 
 

Moreover, Venezuelans of any class or racial background suffer from xenophobia wherever they try to rebuild their lives—in some cases, at the urging of politicians or leaders. The words of Claudia López, the mayor of Bogotá, the city where there are more Venezuelan refugees than anywhere else, are striking: “We have very violent acts by Venezuelan migrants. First they murder, then they steal. We need guarantees for Colombians…Venezuelans have everything offered to them, what guarantees do we Colombians have?” In June, 56 Venezuelans in Chile were collectively expelled because they had “entered Chile in a clandestine manner;” despite the United Nations having clear guidelines against such deportations, as these “require a case-by-case determination of their international protection needs.” And how could we forget the song “Las venecas” by the Peruvian band Son de Tambito: On the weekend, you get drunk / with the city’s Venecas / they say they love you, but it’s a lie / they want your money and nothing more?  Obsessively thinking about the past with tears in your eyes is a pastime of my fellow Venezuelans that shouldn’t surprise anybody.

You don’t need to be too smart to put two and two together and link this context with Me rehúso: the verses are very explicit. The dedication at the beginning of the song and Danny’s raspy voice provide enough framing: “For all the lovers who were forced to be apart.” Connecting this with the beginning of the first verse—“Tell me how do I explain to fate that you’re not there anymore”—, we can see an emphasis on the lack of freedom and choice when thinking about a doomed relationship. We can also notice an oppressive undertone, with no democracy to uphold the possibility of multiple options that could impact the joint development of two hearts. The person being sung to from afar has vanished unwillingly, at the mercy of a power that abandons its own. When Danny speaks of destiny, when he refuses to forget, he does so because the separation he stages was caused by emotions other than the desire, happiness, and hopes of the lovers. And in the context from which the singer emerges, as we have stated previously, those factors are political.

I believe that academic discussions on how culture and ideology foreshadow our ways of seeing and being in the world are increasingly better received and more advertised. ​It seems extremely valid to me to ask: how many expressions and words did we not know for the first time when seeing a cartoon?

It’s not necessarily a rhetorical question. Decades ago, although the drawings were not animated, there were those who thought about the connections between what our spirits and minds consume, and what we can literally consume: our daily bread, the clothes that wear out on us over time. I think we then have to highlight Karl Marx. Although his writings and he himself have been used as a reference for inefficient, even criminal, governments—Chavismo quotes him often; as they do Bolívar, even though the author of Capital was a public critic of him—, I think his ideas have been historically distorted: while Marx was clear that his ultimate goal was to abolish the State, many autocrats have used his fame to expand it. I believe this is evident in many academic spaces dedicated to the humanities and social sciences; in Marx’s criticism of his era’s social hierarchy, the effects of which we still feel today, there are excellent insights, which differ from the Marx who is obsessed with describing his world’s misery, and the Marx who has been manipulated to define other worlds.

In any case, we can take from his words that what is represented—no matter how much influence it has on the narratives that we take as true in our society’s images and relationships—has a starting point. And that starting point is material. It may seem like too much to quote so much from the preface to the Critique of Political Economy, but each sentence is necessary to show the clarity of his vision:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

And the awareness of Danny Ocean, in this case, reflects material conditions in which production is non-existent, and inequality between the rulers and the ruled is such that seeking to be exploited in other countries, where we are not wanted, seems like the most sensible thing to do. 

I find it particularly relevant that “Me rehúso” was released in 2016, since many institutions dedicated to reporting on the crisis in Venezuela take the previous year as the moment in which the diaspora became critical from a global perspective. Thus, we can think about Mikhail Bakhtin and the concept of the chronotope—the time-spatial configuration that is accurately expressed in art and literature—to assert the relevance of the song in the ruined Venezuela of our days. The Soviet intellectual tells us that: 

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal relations are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.¹

Not all the works, of course, are chronotopic: Bakhtin's favorite when talking about the early Renaissance, François Rabelais, was an author among many others back then. But he was an author who deserves to be constantly reread to delve into the tensions of his time.

It may well be that Bakhtin's approach throughout his texts is literary, he always insists on that. But I don't think it's necessary to distinguish between literature and reggaeton to adapt their ideas in order to think about them. Wasn't literature something oral in its beginnings, isn't it still so when we think about the cultural production of certain marginalized groups? What serious distinction can we make between poetry and music when the literary devices—metaphor, anaphora, hyperbaton, etc.—are the same? Establishing a dichotomy between popular culture and the dusty books on our shelves isn’t worth it when the implications of what the aforementioned authors examine are so similar—even when they are much more relevant, understanding that the scope of Latin music goes far beyond the reach of novels and pamphlets in the past.

Let's move past the parenthetical. If, as Marx deftly implies in his relationship between the base and the superstructure, we must delve into the socioeconomic order of a people to understand the reason for its cultural artifacts, the ideal starting point when focusing our subsequent analyses should be chronotopic. Not all artistic expressions that occur in a specific time and space have the same hierarchy, some are more celebrated and speak to us more directly than others. When we become interested in the social contradictions that become particular ways to communicate with one another, to remove the anxiety we feel inside from being a political animal, certain voices are the magnifying glass whose glass better magnifies the microbes. And I sense those voices are the ones that are replicated in all sectors of a city with the same intensity.

In his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx also writes that “​​with the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”² That is, the path to better our society is to alter the relationships between the State, its subjects and the generation of wealth, not the messages hidden in texts, paintings and symphonies. But Marx also wrote in a letter to Jenny von Westphalen that “love—not of Feuerbach's human being, not of Moleschott's metabolism, not of the proletariat, but the love of the beloved, namely of you, makes the man once again into a man.”³ If we concede that that conclusion is revolutionary—I mean, that recovering our humanity is the radical change that we need—, maybe we should move away from the dogma we can  infer from his texts. In “Me rehúso”, Danny insists that the future could be better—“Mami, give time time”—that other worlds are possible by having faith in the heart. If the artist’s consciousness is useful to complicate our own, if we rescue—for real this time—the concerns of cultural studies, could we describe the young reggaeton singer as a revolutionary?

LOUD, a podcast about the history of reggaeton hosted by Ivy Queen, insists that reggaeton and resistance are practically synonymous and that radical change comes from resistance from the oppressed, and “Me rehúso” represents the resistance of millions to losing their homeland.

National anthems are chronotopic. Their lyrics, although very often mythologized, allow us to approach the strong feelings produced by relationships to a certain time and space. For this reason, I do not necessarily find it funny that so many Venezuelans in their daily interactions speak of “Me rehúso” as an alternative national anthem. Venezuela stopped being a country with a group of people who live abroad, like any other, to become a country whose identity is deeply linked to its diaspora. Those of us who have left are the product of a country fragmented by authoritarianism and corruption, but we have not abandoned our citizenship for that; rather, our desire to return and the impossibility of forgetting those people who made us feel great have filled Venezuelan identity with meanings that go beyond the physical borders of our birthplace. Danny Ocean's song faithfully represents us, and the digressions of the aforementioned authors allow us to understand the reason for its importance, beyond the fact that it makes everyone dance in the clubs even as the years go by. Baby, we are not going to stand by with regard to the hardships that are experienced in Venezuela: if songs like this serve to put the complexity of our suffering into simple words, surely they will be played more on the radio and Spotify.

Footnotes

¹ M. M. Bakhtin, Teoría y estética de la novela (Madrid: Taurus, 1989), 237.

² Marx, “Contribución a la crítica de la política económica.”

³ Cited in Alberto Barrera Tyszka, La inquietud. Poesía reunida (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2012), 138. 

References

Carlos Egaña (Caracas, 1995) is an MFA student in creative writing at New York University. He was a professor of contemporary North American gender and narrative studies at the Andrés Bello Catholic University. He has written three collections of poetry: antología de la pintura venezolana (LP5, 2021), hacer daño (Oscar Todtmann Editores, 2020) y Los Palos Grandes (dcir ediciones, 2017). He also writes about art, politics, and pop culture in various Venezuelan outlets. In his final year as an undergraduate student, he was one of the faces of the student movement during the presidential crisis in Venezuela.

Carlos Egaña
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