The Ilopango Volcano: a love story.
In 1891 the Ilopango Volcano rained catastrophe on the People of Cuzcatlan and forced one woman I will never meet to set off a series of events that created me.
I originally performed this piece as a spoken word story at Queerstories in Melbourne, October 2019. Reproduced here below for those that couldn’t be there in person.
X DMC
I want to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land, the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation and pay my respects to Elders, past and present. Even though this is a perfect venue and place, this was, is, and always will be Traditional Aboriginal Land that was never, ever ceded.
Yek Tayua, Tajtaysan: that’s good evening, how’s it going, in Nawat Pipil, the language of my people.
One hundred and forty years ago, almost to the day, the Ilopango Volcano caused a catastrophic eruption.
This wasn’t the first time that the Ilopango had unleashed catastrophe - upon the Pipil People of Cuzcatlan, El Salvador.
Sometime between 410 and 535 AD, the Ilopango unleashed her power, with a force so strong it blacked out the sun in Europe.
She's not just deadly, the Salvadoran soil is so rich and fertile because of her explosions. The name Ilopango comes from the Nawat Xilopango, which means the goddess of the corn.
One hundred and forty years ago, almost to the day is where my story begins.
***
It’s hard feeling like you’re from nowhere and belong to no-one.
I left El Salvador - Cuzcatlan - aged five. My family escaped a civil war that was as brutal and devastating as it was inevitable.
It wasn’t long after I came to Australia that I realised that much like David Wojnarowicz, I too desired to place my naked body on the naked body of another boy.
I had barely been here for 12 months when I was already expressing my little gay self.
I remember once I stole my brother’s Walkman with those big headphones, which I turned on their side to look like a “Madonna Microphone” and I would clip it to my undies, which was as close to a Gaultier-designed corset as I was going to get and I would to my VHS copy of Madonna's Blonde Ambition Tour, Live in Barcelona.
I would belt out Like a Prayer in our tiny lounge room. Just like Madonna.
At exactly the same time, the worst of the civil war was playing out in El Salvador.
Our next door neighbours would tell us stories of having to barricade their doors with mattresses so that the death squads couldn't come in. They also hoped that the coils and springs of the mattresses would ensnare any stray bullets.
But that was over there, seventeen time zones away. We were safe from war and its devastation, we didn’t have to worry about air raids or death squads or massacres here.
But, war, like words, gets in to your pores, and on your things and then it infects your mind.
My parents fled their lives because of a war, but because war gets in your pores and on your things and then in your mind, they brought the war with them - to this place.
My sister had caught me dancing around - like Madonna - in our lounge room and immediately told my parents and she told me that what I was doing was Satanic and in no way pleasing to God. It was humiliating.
It was that moment, that my parents *knew*. I was six years old.
I remember someone telling me once that birds can spot when they have a dud egg so they’ll just push it out of the nest because it’s preferable to let it die than to have a dud offspring.
I don’t know how true that is for birds, but it certainly was true for me, particularly when I confirmed my father’s worst fears, that yes, I was, am, extremely gay. I didn't have to fear death squads, but I feared my father.
My father tried to kill me, twice, with a machete.
It was humiliating.
So, all my life I’ve had an awful feeling of being from nowhere, because I was a refugee from a civil war, and a refugee from a domestic war.
Not long after, I was kicked out of home, I was only sixteen. A child. It was humiliating
It’s fine, I’m fine. I mean I’m ok now. It’s fine, but It's no wonder that I've been more likely to call complete strangers in toilet stalls "daddy" than even breathe a single word to my actual father. War gets in to your pores, into your things and then your mind.
Since I effectively raised myself, until recently, I thought this displacement only belonged to me until, four weeks ago when I was lying in bed in El Salvador with my aunty.
Growing up, she was the only adult that was constant, and safe, and unconditionally loving. I'd never, ever felt so safe with a family member like that, so I told her everything my father, her brother, had done to me and how he single-handedly, with a machete, severed any connection I have to who I belong to.
And then she told me a story of a volcano that erupted one hundred and forty years ago, almost to the day.
***
My great, great, great grandmother lived near the Ilopango when it erupted, the eruption lasted three months. Terrified, she bundled whatever she could and ran aimlessly, seeking safety which is hard to do when the earth itself is shaking.
She ended up in a town called Santo Tomas because that’s as far as her will and her strength would take her. It was far enough from the Ilopango's catastrophe, even if she could still feel the earth quake under her feet.
Once there, she had a daughter, my great grandmother Mercedes who had a daughter, Hortensia, my grandmother. Who in turn had my father, Nelson. who would go on to meet my mother in that same town that was a refuge from a volcano, and then they had me, right there, in that town.
Without the violent catastrophe that was the Ilopango’s fury, The series of events that made me would not have happened. If it wasn’t for the catastrophic violence of the civil war, I would not be here, today, with you.
Before I left El Salvador, I went to my volcano, to honour her.
I looked into her crater and I felt, for the first time in my life, complete- like her ash was in my marrow.
And all that humiliation, from being too - frankly- gay, just disappeared, right there when I was faced with something bigger than any pain that I could ever feel.
Being before that volcano, I felt both my Pipil, and my Spanish ancestry acutely.
I’m both colonised and coloniser, and in this country, I’m a settler. And when you add queerness on top of that my world and my world-view becomes round and borderless. I can be in several places at the same time and that's a strength - not a failing.
Being humbled by another human being is humiliating, but being humbled by the power of nature is freedom.
Because at the end of the day, all of your demons, all of your problems and all of your mistakes, your joy, your ecstasy and your grief pales in comparison to the might of the Ilopango, who is so powerful that she can block out the sun without even trying.
She's so mighty that she also made me. I’m of her, I’m made of her, that power that was enough to tremble the heavens with the power of the earth propelled me, to life.
As a Salvadoran man, I can never be a fearful person.
Padiux, yeyek netayua: thank you, good evening.
