Alabanza is a celebration of the lives of 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, a union that included staff who worked at the Windows on the World restaurant. All 43 employees were killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“Alabanza” is the Spanish word for praise. In his poem, Martin Espada memorializes different members of the kitchen and waitstaff, describing at different times their physical appearances, home cultures (see example 1), and their labor, as well as the fragile beauty of the human experience (see example 2).
Example 1:
“Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.”
The picture that Espada paints of this “blue-eyed Puerto Rican” with his “shaven head and a tattoo…that said Oye,” just one such description in the poem (see the waitress, busboy, dishwasher), is wonderfully vivid, and successfully brings the reader into the lives of these doomed people. It renders them real to us, and makes us feel both their fragility as well as our own.
Example 2:
“Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.”
The primary theme of the poem is praise. Espada repeats the word, in both Spanish and English throughout the poem, detailing the lives of the dead workers, and what makes his celebration of them particularly beautiful are the tiny details he highlights, allowing readers to grasp the commonalities that all humans share.
Example 3:
“Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.”
The poem’s final two stanzas concern the terror of the attack itself (see example 4), as well as the transcendence of the human soul (see example 5). The final stanzas also address the human cost of the attacks and the military response to them.
Example 4:
“…thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook’s soul.”
“Thunder wilder than thunder” refers to the cataclysmic boom of the airliners hitting the towers; “shudder deep in the glass of the great windows” refers to the actual shaking of the building after the impact and as the building began to collapse.
Example 5:
“Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.”
In the final stanza, Espada also imagines the smoke that emanated from the sites of the terrorist attacks (Manhattan) and military response (Kabul) intermingling with one another after the destruction and suffering. The image is beautiful and poignant, with the Afghan smoke asking the Spanish smoke (note that the American smoke “speaks” Spanish, the language of the deceased restaurant employees) to teach it to dance. The Spanish smoke agrees, “I will teach you, Music is all we have.”
