Those of you who follow me on social media know I’ve spent the last month in Oaxaca, Mexico at an artist residency. It’s been an incredibly fruitful period of creating and comfort zone stretching. And it only feels right as I write a personal essay each day that I start sharing some with you all. This essay tells the story of the origins of Fado, a song customary to Portugal. More relevantly, it shares the origins of my first album, First Bloom, which will be released this week on Spotify, Apple Music and more!
Turning Ache into Art
I come from islands. Islands sun-drenched and surrounded by deep blue, endless Pacific and Northern Atlantic - ancestors who made their way from Madiera, Portugal to Hawaii. I come from count the crops that have flourished and fallen. My great, great-grandfather, a grape farmer of Portugal until a drought decimated life and there he heard a call across the sea from Hawaii. Sugarcane farmers wanted, word spread. So, he and his wife sailed. Crossed the oceans to find brighter days. I come from grandfather’s cut hands in sugarcane fields. I come from ‘my sons won’t hurt in this crop like I did.’
I come from take the speed boat over the deep waters never mind the dark down there. Don’t get lost in all the beginnings. It’s hard to see your reflection in that cavernous gap, and not know what to do with it. Generation after generation, we try their best to go further than those who came before us.
I come from ‘Look up ahead. See that mound, that barely visible hill between you and the stretching sea? Slow for it. Study the way the light hits, how the ocean laps against its edges. There will be plenty of these mounds turned islands along your journey. But if you study them, you can see them coming. You can leave behind what you don’t wish to carry. But sometimes it gets hard to leave the islands, or stray from your solitary life, after you’ve studied it for so long. If there’s one thing I’ve learned along the journey, it’s that an island can spot another island before she even speaks.
I hear an island in the voice of the Fado singer as I’m sitting in a restaurant alone in Lagos, Portugal. I’m the only one in a room full of 100 who is sitting alone and the portions they serve reflect that. I came because this place is known for its nightly Fado - the song of my ancestors. I ask for a sangria, still craving the Spanish nights I just came from and they bring me a pitcher the size of my head.
“Only one size,” she says. I laugh and look around. It’s so telling to only have a pitcher size of a drink as though this town is for couples, for community, for it’s not good to eat alone, as they saying goes. Every time I sit in a restaurant like this by myself, I write. The page is my company until company comes along. Sometimes it does. Other times it doesn’t. Sometimes I like it that way. Other times I sigh a deep exhale and imagine tomorrow. Tomorrow when I’ll be back one day with love in the other seat. I have a whole map of places we’ll go. The crystal blue lakes of Alberta, Canada. The flamenco-bursting town of Sevilla. The quiet, bathwater beach of Mazunte, Oaxaca. The waterfalls of lush Laos. We’ll stand in the plazas of Florence, Italy. We’ll hike mountains at the southern tip of Chile. We’ll go to so many places I’ve already been and they’ll all be new because they’ll be this you. And while I trust my life path, everyone who has been on an island, metaphorically or literally, knows it can get a little quiet sometimes. Knows most things in life are better shared.
So, that’s why I came for the Fado. To feel the company of her voice, the ache in her song, the depth of her lament. It’s said Fado originated as a transgression of the lower class. According to the Museu de Fado, this trademark song of Portugal was born in Lisbon in the 1800’s. It started spontaneously in gardens, bullfights, retreats, streets, alleys, taverns, cafés de camareiras, and casas de meia-porta. Inspired by social contexts ruled by marginality and transgression, Fado took place in locations visited by prostitutes, faias, sailors, coachmen, and marialvas.
Later in the early 19th century, Fado grew in popularity, making its way into theaters and radio. Although the first Fado lyrics were mostly anonymous, successively transmitted by oral tradition, by the mid-1920s popular poets wrote the lyrics. It slipped its way into society as poetry often does. Today, it remains a musical treasure of the country.
The moment you hear the strumming of the Coimbra Portuguese guitar, plucking the base note, low to high, low to high, space spreads across the room. In the gaps between the strings comes room for the dark-haired, middle-aged sequined woman. She walks like the rows between the table are her catwalk. Her shoulders back, chin high, hand draping her black shawl across her shoulders. The guitar continues and the other pot-bellied man brings in the classical guitar to accompany. When she begins, her voice feels like someone’s holding it back Strained by the monotony of her life, constricted by the doors of heartache and possibility, and as the verse builds so does the deep bellow. In comes the longer ooo’s, the pause of the guitar, the laddering of her voice ascending from deep to high, expanding from tame to bold, a trail that connects this room, this life to the next.
Within seconds, you hear the mourning. The standing at the top of the mountain lament, singing her old love, her future life, the silence spreading around her island. You hear the raw. You settle in the ache. And in there, after you’ve shaken off the resistance of all the darkness you prefer not to feel, you find a light ray of beauty, the catharsis of Fado.
I don’t understand Portuguese and despite my hope for its crossover to Spanish, I hear none. It sounds like a mixture of a Slavic tongue meets French with a dash of Spanish tucked in the corners of garbled lips. But even without the clear translation, I can see her letting go of decades of ache. I can feel her finding her power in each stanza of the song. I can hear how this cold moan turns into a fluttering release as though her body has waited all week for this moment to come alive. I sip my sangria, slightly cringing at the overdose of cinnamon, and see the mote deepening around my island but feel the bridge forming from my world to hers.
I came to singing the same way I imagine Fado came into the world - as a means to process pain. Bound to my 400 square foot studio in the peak of the pandemic after a debilitating knee surgery, I knew it’d be hard having done this same surgery over a decade ago, but I didn’t know it’d be this hard. Tissues 15 years older, not so swift to regenerate, it was five months post-surgery and I couldn’t walk more than five blocks without a cane and piercing pain. I filled most waking hours with physical therapy, determined to get out of this hole I felt sure would soon swallow me. I woke up, did two hours of physical therapy in my home not yet comfortable returning to gyms amidst the surging COVID cases. Then, I’d work from the same room, distracting myself with tedious tasks. During lunch I’d go for a walk which I dreaded because each step felt like tendons screaming, stretching in ways they hadn’t before. Walking felt foreign; with each step I tried to remember how to do it which only made iet more awkward. I felt the eyes of people staring at me, a young woman just a touch past 30, leaning on a cheetah print cane. I didn’t recognize myself. I missed who I used to be.
Before this you could find me hiking peaks three days a week, running the cemetery every other morning in absence of Oakland’s parks. You’d see me kayaking lakes or trying to surf waves on weekends and winding down with yoga in the evenings. I defined who I was by the activities my body could do. And without them, I had gaps. I had lament. I had the crevasse between the escapes my body was used to and the cage of this apartment. I struggled with the bridge. Nearing month six, I started to believe I’d never get better. It was nearly Christmas and I sat in my bed, crying a sob so deep it felt like it penetrated the floor, sunk into the earth where I hoped something ancient could transmute the unknown.
“If this is my new life, I don’t want to live it,” I whispered between sobs. And as I hurt those words, I unraveled even more. I’d never thought about suicide. Maybe in a passing flash when I was 15 and destroyed by a toxic relationship but I’d never do anything to hurt myself just thought about how I wanted the pain to end. But here, feeling isolated with only one friend nearby, a pseudo-boyfriend I just broke up with, and a body that felt half-usable, I started to say goodbye to days where I felt alive, the things I used to live for.
I needed something else, something new. Something I could do while sitting. And that’s when I saw my guitar. This dusty thing I hadn’t touched in a year. I bought it after the breakup with my decade-long love. In the ache of the separation, I sat in my bedroom and asked myself who I wanted to be after this. What did I want my future self to know how to do? Play music was the crystal clear thing I heard. And so I took lessons for six months, learning a bit but struggling to practice and sit with myself amidst the constant sounds of clashing.
But on that day the guitar looked like my only way out. I picked it up, and plucked a strings. I played a C chord, then a G chord and it didn’t sound so bad. No Beatles or anything, but it was something. It was music. Each day I practiced the same song over and over, recording it and cringing at how Wonderwall didn’t actually sound like Wonderwall but a distant, disgruntled cousin. But in time, I’d hear moments. The smallest moment where the chords, the timing, the lyrics everything came together like it was supposed to. And I’d sit there on my chair, eyes closed, a smile stretching across my lyrics.
“Hey, that sounded like music. I made that. I made music.”
Riddled with perfectionism, learning other’s songs never suited me. It felt like I was constantly comparing myself to a professional and feeling less than. So I stopped learning covers. I wanted to enjoy this process. I wanted lightness. I wanted novelty. So, I chose two chords and started reading one of my poems over them. I’d study the line, figured out how I could chop it to be less poem, more song. Make the ending word rhyme in ways I usually avoided in poetry.
And then I started writing new lyrics, new songs where my pain could slip out. I’d sit on my hardwood floor, surgical leg awkwardly outstretched. My pen and notebook wedged in between my legs on the floor. Here, my sadness could get an ear. My voice could build and build and build and release into something that felt like new life breaking past windows and into clouds. Once the first song formed, they started rushing out. Like a stampede of bulls finally set free. They rushed through my hand afraid to stop. I wrote a song each day for a month. Never needing them to be perfect, just needing them to come out of me.
Like the Fado singer and the people listening in bars or at the docks of ships, music became a mirror. The ache was no longer tucked in the shadows. The pain grew wings and found its way to the tops of peaks I couldn’t yet climb. But in song I could feel the levity of one day. Maybe I would move in ways I wanted to again. Millions of people rehabbed their bodies back each year in far worse conditions than the one I sat with. So, why would I be any different?
As the songs came, so did movement. On Christmas Eve desperate for change, I fired my physical therapist and found a new physical therapist through social media who revamped my entire routine and consequently my life. I lived and breathed his regiment, and while the progress was slow, I could feel it. I could feel the pain disappearing. I could walk coastal trails and hit a mile. I could start uphill climbs of sidewalks and make it home. I could meet with friends without my cane. And although I felt fragile, unable to run if needed, I started to look like myself again. Except it wasn’t the same me anymore. I had felt my depths. I had seen the dark caverns the Fado sings of. I had cried to my therapist and learned how to hold myself in the moments that felt unholdable. I knew whatever happened, I could find my guitar. I could find my music. I could find my way out.
With the waves crashing not so far from this restaurant in Portugal, there’s a moment where it all comes together. A moment at the end of the Fado performance where I look around and as the singer’s hand raises to the sky, she’s smiling. The musicians are smiling. The people in the crowd are transfixed, adoration bursting each to ear. The applause roars out the front doors. The woman is still standing in the spotlight, hand still outstretched to the sky, eyes twinkling like her sequined dress. She’s staring at something we can’t see. She’s feeling something we may never know. And as her hand descends, it’s almost as if the unknowable has left the room and she’s watching it fly away like a flower caught in a the wind. She’s coming back down. She’s looking at the crowd. She’s here with us now. We’re all here in the ocean of her grief, in the levity of our life, in a soaring that can only be known after knowing what’s it like to unshackle from darkness and fly. Fly. Fly.