Marcos Gonsalez - Pedros Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land

TO A FATHER AND SON

The world will come between you.

But for now, for this photographic moment, you are father and son. Embraced. Two together there in the early nineties. The soft eyes looking forward, what looks to be soft skin, what is difference of skin. Fathers hands clasp the sons, man holding child, loving tenderly. Both are seated on the couch belonging to the sons grandmother. This is not the fathers mother but a woman through time he will come to know well. He, like her, a far-flung soul, a weary body, she from the beaches and waters of the Caribbean and he from the mountains and lakes of Mesoamerica. Hundreds of years of history, conquest, migration, and survival coming together to form a point of convergence in a small town in New Jersey. One photograph can tell so much.

Who takes the photo? No one seems to know, and no one can remember. All there is of a time and place and moment is a photograph. Two bodies in a photograph who I dont even know, strumming my fingers twenty years or so later across an image of my father and my younger self hoping to recall the moment, for memory to activate. But from this still life all I get are fantasies. Imagining moments on that couch, held, napping away summer afternoons. Laughing on his back as he does push-ups on wintry morning days. Contemplative stares into brown eyes during cool spring nights.

I think of all this past that is and is not mine as so ordinary. Just life, just living. Because if I do not, if I do not stretch a photograph beyond its frame, into language, into story, into feelings, then you two are lost to me forever. If I do not push to remember again, remember anew, then I relegate you to the dustbins of history, to the narrative of pain and disconnection perpetrated by the world outside. I know how the world will tell me how to think about the father and son. How the world will tell me how to think about the father, of his skin, his place of origin, his condition of being in these Americas. How the world will tell me how to think about the son, of his body and mind, to hate and despise all that he is, all that he comes from. I know how shame and internalized hatred will define how I think of you two for so long. I know how your story will unfold, which is why looking at this photograph is that much harder to do.

I dont know you two anymore. Maybe I never really knew you to begin with. So this is a letter addressed to two people who reside in an image, which is to say, this is a letter to no one, and a letter to no one is a letter to anyone. To all the anyones we never got to be, all the anyones denied us, to all the anyones who need to live again. What I know I take from the photographs of those early years of the boys life. Each in their context, in their place, bearing their particularities. I look through them, glide fingertips across their surface, hoping to know some concrete story, wanting epiphanies and revelations, but instead I am met with daydreams and musings, mourning and loss. In these photographs I wander in the fulfilling nothingness of the what could have been.

The writing in these pages will take many shapes. Reminiscences, speculations, and reckonings. They will be letters like this one, addressed to you and to others. They will be displacements in the third person of my childhood self. They will be monologues and ruminations from this person who I am today. They will be present tense wanderings. Above all, these are words reaching out to the two in this photograph, to their many selves across time and space, where past becomes present becomes future all at once, reaching out to the many lives they are connected to, known and unknown, words reaching out across the vastness of time and space.

The world will come between you. Father and son. Boy and man. Kin and kind. But for now, for this photographic moment, you are father and son, smiling and embraced, telling a different story from the one you both carry the burden of having to know.