Published
Alabaos
Voces de Resistencia is an audiovisual project by the Centre for Afro-Diasporic Studies (CEAF) at Icesi University in Cali, funded by the Ford Foundation and produced in partnership with the Centre for Ethics and Democracy (CED). It seeks to make visible and strengthen the organising processes of Afro-descendant women.
Voces de Resistencia is a journey along the Atrato River charged with magic and contradiction—far more than an album of twelve songs. It is a return to our roots in a time of alabao.
Alabaos are ancestral songs known as the art of singing to the dead: bidding them farewell and accompanying them on their passage to other worlds, where the spirits of their ancestors reside. 2 May 2002 profoundly marked the lives of the people of Bojayá. That day, fighters from the FARC’s 58th Front, during clashes with the AUC’s Élmer Cárdenas Bloc, fired a cylinder bomb that struck the church in Bellavista, killing more than one hundred local people. The alabao, a song of intercession before God and the saints for the souls of the dead, has been transformed by this group of women and men singers into one of the most powerful ways available to them to care for their own—both those here and those in the world beyond.
In the face of so much pain, the voices of the communities living along the rivers that cross the municipality of Bojayá joined together to sing more forcefully, to resist and never again remain silent. Their strength has led them not only to sing the traditional alabaos learned from their parents and grandparents, but also to compose new ones: songs that honour their dead while denouncing long-standing abandonment and demanding that repeatedly broken promises be fulfilled.
Alabaos are mortuary chants that accompany souls and bid them farewell at the time of death. They are one of the ancestral traditions of Afro-Colombian inhabitants of Colombia’s Pacific region.
María del Rosario Acosta López in “Making Memory”: Historical Memory in Colombia and Its Legacies