Alabaos: Cantarle a la vida en presencia de la muerte

En La Azotea de la Abuela, las tradiciones ancestrales del duelo nos recuerdan lo que significa sostener el dolor colectivamente.

In the days following the earthquake in Colombia, I have been thinking deeply about what it means for a community to mourn together and about the ancestral practices that teach us how to do so.

At La Azotea de la Abuela, in the east of Cali, we had the extraordinary privilege of sitting with mayoras and cantadoras of the Colombian Pacific. La Azotea itself is a space built around the preservation of Afro-Colombian ancestral knowledge: food, medicinal plants, oral tradition, music, memory and the wisdom carried by Black women across generations.

But on this particular evening of August 15th, in the aftermath of the earthquake, these traditions became vessels for a grief that was still raw, holding our collective mourning and giving voice to losses that felt almost too heavy to name.

We listened as the women and young people sang alabaos, ancestral songs of mourning, spirituality, memory and accompaniment of the dead. In the Black communities of Colombia’s Pacific, death has never belonged only to an individual family; mourning is communal. This practice carries particular weight in a country marked by decades of armed conflict, massacres, forced displacement and the disproportionate violence inflicted upon Black and Indigenous communities. In places where death became a constant presence, where families mourned those murdered, disappeared or displaced, the alabaos created spaces where grief could be held collectively and where the dead could continue to be accompanied. And yet, these were never spaces only about death.

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They were also spaces where life continued to happen alongside death: where people gathered, children listened and learned, food was prepared, stories were exchanged, memory was protected, and communities insisted on remaining connected to one another.

The dead were accompanied by the living, and the living, in turn, accompanied by song.

Research on the alabaoras of Pogue in Bojayá describes this beautifully: through song, Black women have helped their communities process devastating losses, preserve memory and reconstruct relationships between the living and the dead. After the 2002 Bojayá massacre, the alabaos also became something of a language of political testimony, denunciation and collective resistance.

Sitting there listening to the cantadoras, I realized how rarely I have experienced collective mourning quite like this outside of my years working in solidarity with Black communities in Colombia. There was something profoundly different about being in a space where mourning did not need to be explained, or hurried through. Grief belonged to everyone in the room.

You could cry. You could sing. You could remember those you did not even meet. You could sit silently. The community itself became the container.

I have witnessed moments of collective mourning in other places I have lived, the vigils and protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in the United States, or in Panama, the thousands who poured into the streets to mourn Danger Man, singing his music and accompanying his body to its final resting place.

But I have never witnessed, nor been a participant in, collective grief quite like what I experienced at La Azotea de la Abuela. It was not just a gathering to mourn, mourning itself seemed to belong to the community: held through song, carried by generations, and rooted in practices that existed long before this particular tragedy. There was no separation between grief, memory, spirituality and community. The mourning was collective because the loss was understood to belong to everyone.

Perhaps it was the continuity of it, the sense that this was not a ritual created in response to one particular tragedy, but an inherited practice that already knew what to do when death arrived. The songs existed before this earthquake. They existed before Bojayá. They have traveled through generations of Black people who have known both unspeakable loss and an extraordinary insistence on life.

And there, at La Azotea de la Abuela in Cali, I witnessed that ancestral knowledge became present tense called upon once again to hold a community in the immediate aftermath of loss. What made that experience especially profound for me was the way that collective mourning made space for those whose absence felt particularly unbearable: the children who had died in the earthquake.

Throughout Colombia's Pacific, the deaths of children have their own traditions of accompaniment, including the gualí and chigualo. While alabaos have traditionally been associated with the mourning of adults, gualíes and chigualos accompany children through song, rhythm, prayer and collective ritual. These distinctions remind us that death is not generic. The person who has died matters. Their age matters. Their relationship to the community matters. How they are accompanied matters.

And so, as the children lost in the earthquake were remembered at La Azotea, something really softened in me. I had arrived feeling disjointed, even broken open, for many reasons—the weight of what the communities we serve and work alongside in Colombia were experiencing, my own deeply personal relationship to displacement and what it means to have your sense of safety suddenly ruptured, and the responsibility I carry as the leader of an organization trying to respond with care, integrity and political clarity in the midst of a crisis.

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I had been holding so much at once, much of it without having the space to actually feel it. But sitting there, surrounded by the voices of the cantadoras and mayoras, listening as the children were mourned and accompanied through song, I became less guarded. I became a mourner, too. For a moment, I did not have to organize the grief, respond to it, make decisions around it, or figure out what came next. I could simply be held inside of it with everyone else.

In the days after a disaster, particularly when you are responsible for helping an organization respond, it is easy to begin experiencing the crisis through the language of numbers: how many are injured or missing, how many families have been displaced, how many homes have been destroyed, how many people need support, how many people have died. Those numbers matter, they help us understand the scale of what has happened and what a meaningful response requires. But I was also beginning to understand how easily the work of responding can create distance from the very grief those numbers represent.

But numbers can also flatten human life.

The mayoras did the opposite.

They returned humanity to the counting.

The children were not simply part of a death toll. They were children who had been held, fed, teased, protected and dreamed about. They belonged to families and communities. They had futures imagined for them. And in that space, their deaths were worthy of stopping for. Their lives are worthy of songs.

Perhaps this is what moved me most about La Azotea de la Abuela: death was present, but death did not have the final word.

Life was everywhere in that space.

It was in the young people singing beside the mayoras. It was in the bodies swaying and the voices responding. It was in people listening, crying, remembering and embracing one another. It was in ancestral knowledge being passed forward in real time. Even in mourning, the community was doing what Black communities have done for generations: creating life in the presence of death.

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I left La Azotea profoundly grateful to the mayoras, cantadoras and alabaoras who have kept these traditions alive, and just as a thought, a memory, a reference. By teaching them. By offering them to another generation. By bringing them forward when catastrophe arrives and the community needs a way to hold what feels impossible to hold.

These traditions are more than cultural expressions to be admired. These traditions are technologies of survival.

They teach us that grief does not have to be solitary. They create a bridge between the living and the dead. They transform memory into resistance and mourning into an act of community. And they remind us that healing does not require us to move quickly past our pain.

Sometimes healing begins by creating a place large enough to hold it.

On August 15th, La Azotea de la Abuela was that place.

The dead were accompanied so that they would not leave this world alone.

And the living gathered, sang and held one another so that we would not have to remain in it alone either.