The Day of the Dead

                                         -          Octavio Paz

 (The essay talks about the deep psychological needs met by fiestas in Mexican culture. Paz’s language is graceful and erudite.)

Mexicans like fiestas and public gatherings more than anybody else in the world. They celebrate their fiestas with different costumes, dances, fireworks, fruits, candy, toys, and many other things in great amount.

The Mexican calendar is full of fiestas. They are celebrated all over the country to show the honour for various gods. The fiestas are often violent. People forget their past and future; and get involved with their present.

Besides the national celebrations, every village or city in Mexico has its own annual fiesta. It is impossible to calculate how many fiestas the Mexicans have and how much time and money they spend on them. Despite their poverty, both the public and the government spend more than their annual income in fiestas.

In the rich countries, people have many other options to entertain themselves. They have only a few public celebrations. They celebrate in small groups or individually. But the Mexicans take fiestas as only luxury against their ‘poverty and misery’. It is because the otherwise silent Mexicans get chance to reveal themselves and ‘to converse with God, country, friends or relations’ only in these celebrations. In a feat to ‘discharge’ their souls and to escape from their loneliness, they get violent and even kill each other. The fiestas often end badly.

The French sociologists think the fiestas are for squandering money. The people try to bribe the gods with sacrifices and offerings. They try to show what they do not have. They try to prove their health, abundance and power through the expense. So, the fiesta is one of the most ancient form of economy. But the writer thinks this interpretation is incomplete.

The fiesta is sacred, literally and figuratively. They are special with their own rules, logic and ethic which are generally not found on other days. They give new experience to the people so that they can forget the burden of time and reason. The fiestas help people to come out of their everyday formality or order. They become equal and assimilate with each other forgetting their caste, social status, sex and trade. Therefore, the fiesta is not only an excess but also a revolt. By means of the fiesta, the Mexican society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws.

Everything merges, loses shape and individuality and returns to the primordial mass in the confusing or chaotic atmosphere of the fiesta. The fiesta helps people return in an ancient state when there was no society and no differences among the people. They forget everything else, and participated in the fiesta.

The Mexicans would explode if there were no fiestas for celebration. They need the fiestas to escape from themselves. There is nothing so much joyous as a Mexican fiesta, but there is also nothing so sorrowful. Fiesta night is also a night of mourning.

The fiesta is the only opportunity for a Mexican to open up with himself. Otherwise, he never gets chance to express his true self. The frenzy of the fiesta shows the extremity of his everyday solitude. Because of this, he doesn’t know how to dialogue with other people in the society. Therefore, the fiestas are often tumultuous and violent. The explosive, dramatic and suicidal manner of celebration shows the suffocation and frustration of the people.