STICK FIGHTING

Perhaps you think that what I am going to tell you is a lie, but it is truth as big as the sun. Fighting with sticks has a secret music that can only be heard by those who have the art of stick-fighting in their blood. For that reason when you see two men fighting with all their strength, stay as quiet as if you were in a church. Those men are transported to another world; each time that the sticks clash, when they buzz cutting the air, swishing so close to their flesh that it scares you, finally, when one begins to imagine that the sticks themselves have life and they move alone so that instead of being two men fighting with sticks, it looks like two sticks playing men or as if those men are breathing through the sticks, those are holy moments... All of this makes the fighter feel as if he is under a magic spell, that is like an ancient mixture of war cries, waving banners, clanking of chains, and silence of dead bodies. It is an echo that resounds from the purest elements of our blood: conquest, colonies, slaveries, liberties, dictatorships, jails, guerrillas, deaths, survive, survive, survive...

It is an ancestral reminiscence of the violence that has forged the nations.

And that is holy.

Eduardo Sanoja, 1986

Translation made by Miguel Angel Cordero Chavier