THE CARIBBEAN SEA HIDES ITS OWN SHAME

by DANIELA HENAO OSORIO (Colombia)

I didn't expect to find Colombia

All I want to do in this moment, is to write about my own country and my favourite place in the whole world: Cartagena de Indias. Everytime I travel there, I sit in front of the sea and I talk to it because I feel it listens, and then I feel a kind of peace coming into my heart. But in this sea, also lies a hiden story, a truth I had not heard before my last travel there. In any research you make about Cartagena de Indias, you will find a reference to The Walled City, but what most people ignore, or some of them just want to ignore, is how those walls were built, and the most relevant, who built them, and it were the slaves. I don´t blame tourists to ignore the details, I mean, the charms of Cartagena don´t need to be explained; but I think it is more like a ‘colombian thing’, to try to hide the truth. I already knew that, as I knew the fact that Cartagena de Indias, is a city built, the most, for slaves in the colonial period. But the last december, the University of Cartagena organized a conference about an important colombian doctor, antropologist and writer of Bolívar, Manuel Zapata Olivella, in the meetings of Recum (Renacer Cultural de los Montes de María / Cultural Rebirth of Montes de María), and I discovered that not just Manuel Zapata Olivella, but many of our important people in Colombia, have been and are still being ignored in our country, for an only reason: racism. Most of the participants in the conference, had not heard a word about Manuel Zapata Olivella, and at that point, came a new story, a nowadays story about racism in Cartagena de Indias: a lyric soprano woman was rejected from her own show at the doors of the Adolfo Mejía Theater, just for the colour of her skin, even when she explained she was invited to sing in there. In that moment I felt a deeply indignation and shame for Cartagena de Indias and for my country. I don´t want to believe that in a city and a country, that fought hand to hand for its Independence, can hold these feelings of discrimination inside. I just want to believe in what I see and keep those other feelings right where they belong: In the bottom of the sea. Because what I see, is a country full of hope and a city with the only sea that listens; and when I walk into the little streets of the Old Town in Cartagena de Indias, with their coloured houses and their flowered balconies, I feel that freedom appears in front of me, I can feel how freedom travels in the air and touches my nude feet in the warm sand, like I am a part of that landscape and its inspirational history. I feel I am in my favourite place in the world, because Cartagena de Indias is the whole world contained in a little dot of a little country.