AN INDIAN WANTS TO CRY OR THE PREMATURE NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

He asked me for something that I had never considered important until that moment: “Listen to the lyrics of the song”. For some reason that I do not know, my sister and teenager had been struck by the “Black Gate” of the North Tigers (I suppose something had to do with the obvious erotic connotations of the story), so I played In the stereo of the house, asking for my full attention.
Then she began to make some interpretations that she considered important. That was almost a premature and very basic narrative-symbolic analysis of the piece (which the meanings of the door, which the intensity of the plot, I chose). For me it was like a little epiphany. In something as daily as a song there was a narrative network that at that time, and at my age, I thought quite complex. From that day, I would listen to the narrative world of the songs I had never heard.

At that time we lived in apartments near the bridge of the 5th and 10th. The parking lot on the ground floor was like the playground of all the children in the building. He spent hours a day there. Just in front of the bars was a commercial drinking water store. Almost all day, the local employees played music at full volume. One day they put “An Indian wants to cry”, of the Band Machos (yes, it was a very northern context in which I lived), and I listened from beginning to end recalling the lesson of that day.

Remember that the song begins by telling the story of an Indian who can not forget his past partner. But that was not the least for me. A very burned subject. The moment that struck me was the last stanza I still remember from memory: “He can not forget it / and his sadness kills me / because that Indian is me”. It was like those movies where everything changes in the end. My first experience with the “experimental” (let me the term) use of the narrative voice. The abrupt move from the third to the first person was what left me amazed for several days. I was so impressed with the song that a few days later they asked everyone in the car that with what song they wanted to be buried I chose without thinking that that one, that of “An Indian wants to mourn.”

My brothers had chosen the typical pop-romantic songs of the moment, besides I was “too small” to choose songs so “deep and serious”, so my decision brought so much laughter and carrilla in all that still now remind me of that moment.

Now that I remember all this gives me much laughter, but during those days, unknowingly, I was training to analyze stories, to study their narrative form. It was from those moments that something in your way of perceiving things changes. My sister, Los Tigres del Norte and Banda Machos were, why not ?, my first teachers of narrative analysis.