Day 33 - Easter Sunday

6:00am Easter Sunday morning. I wake in my run down hostal with no electricity. There is a combination of European choral signing blaring through the loud speakers of the church - rejoicing the resurrection of Jesus Christ. About half a kilometer away from the church a very loud and mysterious speaker belts out contemporary Bolivian Lake Titicacan music. Both competing songs are at such a volume that going back to bed after it’s first play is not an option. I guess depending on who you ask, these voices celebrating and ringing in the streets could either seem like a battle between cultures or possibly an attempt to harmonize beauty between two drastically different peoples. I doubt either are the answer. What rings true is that for anyone that has heard any kind of music more then once – these two sounds are definitely clashing. The extreme irony and mood of these two tracks playing together is incredibly beautiful, haunting and appropriate for the film I am trying to write this week. As the churches mass continues and proceeds to blare its word through the loud speakers the Bolivian music, about ten blocks away, does not let down and continues to compete. After the church's second song the priest attempts to talk to his congregation. Where he is standing the message is being heard. In my bed, as I type this, the Lake Titicacan sounds are definitely a slight notch above the priest's banter. As the church switches gernes into folk the only vocals coming from mass are the priest's harmonies, praising the words of God. Accompanied by an acoustic guitar, the musician slowly strums some very familiar major and minor chords. As the priest gets louder in his cries the Bolivian songs now sit in the back of the mix but still present as ever.
The clashing of cultures in the context of its harsh history – this is Bolivia. The many layers of ironies and confusion is exactly what gives this country its national identify. The visual and audible unresolved strief between two things attempting so intently to stay alive. The people of Copacabana walk the streets as if nothing is wrong and maybe there isn’t. From a foreigner's perspective, sonically, it seems that these two elements are unable to reach a peaceful resolution. For hundreds of years at some level these varying cultures have tried to assimilate but quite naturally couldn’t. Creating an almost polarizing stench in the air, even in the town where it is home to one of Latin Americans most popular pilgrimage, there is no home for harmony in these parts - only confusion. In that confusion Boliva secures its home but what only feels and sounds like confusion to one, I quite contently realize this morning during the blaring of this chaos that I will never fully understand Bolivia. Giving in to that confusion that I have struggled for years to try and understand, I now find tranquility in a culture that I feel will always escape me.