All I Did This Week Was Play Bad Bunny's New Album and Think About Cultural Bereavement

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

Image: Rimas Music

 
 

In my memory, my grandma’s house in Trinidad is a crisp white against blue, blue skies. I’m pretty sure there are maroon accents, though I can’t remember exactly what parts of the house were painted that colour. I do remember the faux terrazzo tile on the floor of the gallery, which is what we call the second-floor balconies that so many homes in Trinidad have, and the wrought iron railing with its black banister and white curlicue spires, and the heavy wooden door off to the right that leads to her bedroom. I can picture the layout of the house, too—three bedrooms in a row, each one with louver windows and standalone wardrobes and the hardest mattresses and pillows I have ever slept on in my entire life. The living room and dining room feel straight out of 1972, all ornate wood furniture and lace curtains. The bathroom and the kitchen are at the back of the house, where more louvered windows look out at the backyard, really a second lot of land that was probably once meant for another house, but instead remains mostly empty and a bit overgrown, with coconut and mango trees and the remnants of a duck pond built out of brick. There are two sets of stairs, one leading downstairs from the gallery at the front of the house, the other from the back door in the kitchen, both guarded with a wrought iron railing on one side and open on the other. Downstairs, a decades-old washing machine always reminds me of I Dream of Jeannie or some other 1960s TV show, because it’s compact and—I think—cream and light blue. Since this is my memory, there is a tiny poodle-Pekingese mix named Tuffy reclining in the gallery, because she’s the only one allowed upstairs, and two other dogs, long-haired Blackie and short-haired Brownie, lying on the cool concrete under the house. (There’s no one left who remembers this argument, but Brownie was really more orange than brown.)

The house doesn’t look like this anymore, of course. My grandma passed away in 2009, and a few years after that, we began renting it out. The family that lives there takes really good care of the property, including repainting the exterior walls. Now, the top half of the house is a demure taupe, and the lower half a sky blue. I always feel simultaneously closer and further away from her when I’m in Trinidad. I guess that makes sense—I’m there, surrounded by places we went together, or things she used to cook for me, or people who used to know her, and she’s not. But the last time I was in Trinidad, in 2023, it was even more emotional. We stayed on our old street, the first time we’d done that since she died. So every day, I could look over at her house, and every day I felt a little bit disoriented, like my brain couldn’t quite reconcile the way it looked with the way I still believed it should look. 

Which I guess is a long way of saying that I’ve been thinking about what it means to have roots in one place but live in another, and the feeling of missing somewhere that really only exists in your memory, for months now. Well before Bad Bunny released DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, or influencer Tefi Pessoa’s viral TikTok sound absolutely took over my FYP, for the record. (If you haven’t watched approximately 100 videos using it like I have, it’s a nine-second snippet of her saying “Because if people go to heaven, I think homes go to heaven too. Because where else would they know where to meet us? And how else would we know that we’re home?” over the chorus of “DtMF” and yes, I want to cry every time.)

@theeeari I am truly grateful to still have my witos. And blessed that they have created a home and family full of unconditional love. I know the day that it’s my time to go I’ll be walking into their arms in our casita 🤍 #medina13 #CapCut @hellotefi ♬ Tefi x Dtmf - Dina

I’ve been reading some great criticism about the album, and especially the political underpinning of Bad Bunny’s sonic and lyrical choices. (Harper’s Bazaar culture editor Bianca Betancourt’s review was really helpful in understanding Puerto Rico’s musical and revolutionary history, as was Craig Jenkins’ review for Vulture. Also: pour one out for the TikTokers who are translating Benito’s Puerto Rican slang and the often political double meaning of so many of his lyrics.) But the thing that made me want to write about DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS this week was actually a very personal feeling of connection to every immigrant and diasporic kid who used “DtMF” to talk about their longing for home and the grief of knowing it may not actually exist anymore. The reasons for that longing and grief differ—for some of us, our idea of home froze when we left, even though the physical place kept changing without us. For others, who weren’t born in their homelands and maybe haven’t even visited, a sense of home had to be assembled out of snippets of family stories and faded, white-framed snapshots and WhatsApp forwards of other people’s videos and photos. And for still others, their homeland does not exist, or has been so devastated by colonization and war that it is functionally inaccessible. But there’s some solace in knowing so many of us feel this way.

There’s a term for—and a growing field of study about—this feeling 

When I write about Trinidad, it’s usually as an acknowledgement of my social location. Being Trini, and a member of a Caribbean diaspora, informs my opinions about colonization, the British monarchy, tourism, climate change, Lilly Singh and Nicki Minaj, so it feels like important context to include when I’m writing about those topics. But honestly, this also just feels more comfortable than writing about the things I’m less sure of, like where I belong as a multi-ethnic person. (Though I do that sometimes.) But, I learned this week there’s actually a term for that seemingly universal feeling of grief, and you know I love a study, so here we are.

The concept of “cultural bereavement” was first described in 1991 by Australian psychiatrist Maurice Eisenbruch, based on his work with Cambodian refugees. As Eisenbruch defined it at the time, cultural bereavement is “the experience of the uprooted person—or group—resulting from loss of social structures, cultural values and self-identity: the person—or group—continues to live in the past, is visited by supernatural forces from the past while asleep or awake, suffers feelings of guilt over abandoning culture and homeland, feels pain if memories of the past begin to fade, but finds constant images of the past (including traumatic images) intruding into daily life, yearns to complete obligations to the dead, and feels stricken by anxieties, morbid thoughts, and anger that mar the ability to get on with daily life.” What he was seeing among those refugees was a constellation of symptoms that resembled PTSD, depression and/or anxiety, but didn’t fall neatly under any one of those umbrellas. (In 2005, researchers Dinesh Bhugra and Matthew Becker expanded Eisenbruch’s term to encompass not just refugees but all migrants, and even their children.)

But the definition that resonates a bit more with me is Jelena Markovic’s. A postdoctoral researcher at Université Grenoble Alpes who came to Canada in the ‘90s as a Serbian refugee, she tackled the topic of cultural bereavement in a November 2024 article for Aeon, characterizing it first as an ambiguous loss, and later as almost a loss of social location. “As a migrant, you might grapple with whether to maintain the kind of family and community roles and relationships you had in your home country, or whether to uphold the religion and political outlook characteristic of where you were born,” she wrote. “In the process, you don’t simply acquire new insights or reflections, but must rework the fundamentals of who you are—what you care about, what you see as important or valuable, and the basis on which you make decisions…

The values and commitments associated with my cultural identity were taught and emphasised to me, but I was never quite sure what to do with them. What was ‘ours’ was frequently used to guide behaviour, but what ‘we’ do and don’t do seemed to stretch in arbitrary directions – from not wearing certain kinds of jewellery to not celebrating Thanksgiving (I’m pretty sure my parents thought this was a religious holiday). It was never something I could encompass in my mind as a clear, predictable set of norms. Rather than adjusting my behaviour to fit them, then, I increasingly questioned whether I was in fact part of the ‘we.’ If we are defined by our participation in certain religious, social and aesthetic practices, I said to myself, at what point do I fail to fit in the category? As I grew into the person I was becoming, I wasn’t sure whether I had lost something along the way, or whether I had turned into some ‘other’ who couldn’t even claim the loss.”

Um. Yes. I’ve talked about this before in a more joke-y way, but when I was a kid, I used to get so annoyed when my dad would respond to something I had said or done by calling me ‘so Canadianized.’ He could never hide his disappointment when I didn’t like a food that he thought was quintessentially Caribbean or, in retrospect, just delicious (a short list: soursop, mauby, chicken feet, any sort of organ meat, eddoes). He didn’t mean it like this, but for me, this conversation always felt like a tiny referendum on whether I was ‘really’ Trini. Because even though I was born there, and go back all the time, and participate in so many of our social, aesthetic and culinary practices, I grew up in a mostly white suburb disconnected from diasporic Caribbean communities and I’m pretty ethnically ambiguous, so I’m often not perceived as Trini. This has been, as you might guess, a lifelong sore point for me, and it was an ever bigger one when I was a kid.

The TiKToks I’m seeing using “DtMF” aren’t necessarily going that deep on their creators’ immigrant-kid trauma. But they are tapping into what seems like a universal diasporic experience of simultaneously loving and being proud of and yearning for and grieving over and in some cases, feeling resentment toward your homeland/heritage/people, even as you’re trying to preserve a connection to all of those things. (An example of that last one: I really appreciated London-based TikTok user Shelen’s honest and emotional reflections on the song, and by extension her complicated feelings around claiming her Latin heritage, because she’s Black and had been subjected to racist microaggressions from her community throughout her life.)

Debí Tirar Más Fotos is becoming a tool for cross-cultural empathy—and solidarity

Also? It feels particularly poignant to be having this conversation this week. 

One of the things I have loved about seeing “DtMF” and the rest of the album gain traction with listeners is how many different cultures see their own experiences reflected in Bad Bunny’s music—even those who don’t speak a word of Spanish and need social media users and/or Genius’ English translations to understand the depth of emotion he’s conveying. I have seen TikToks using the song from English-speaking Caribbean people, Nigerians, South Asians, East Asians, Sudanese people—and Palestinian people.

Since October 2023, photographic evidence of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing have helped keep global attention on Gaza, even as Western politicians, media and random social media users have worked to obfuscate or downplay what is happening there, and throughout Palestine. Mostly, these have been photos of Palestinian people mourning their loved ones, or photos of those loved ones’ dead bodies, or of grey, dusty rubble and makeshift tents. There has been another genre of video that has played an important role, though: compilations of what Gaza looked like before Israel’s 15-month bombing campaign. These videos serve as poignant reminders that Gaza did not always look like a post-apocalyptic war zone, that it was once a place where kids went fishing and played on the beach, friends hung out at cafés and shoppers haggled with vendors in bustling markets—so naturally, it didn’t take long for Palestinians to start using “DtMF,” too. That was moving enough, but each video took on even more emotional resonance when news broke that a ceasefire might be imminent, when the deal was announced on Wednesday, and when an Israeli airstrike killed 73 Palestinians in Gaza City that evening. The longing that these TikTok users were trying to convey felt even more complicated in the context of that news, the hope that people could finally start to heal and rebuild—and the inextricable fact that it took more than a year of Palestinian death, torment, suffering and degradation to get here. (Sidenote, a study published in The Lancet last week found the death toll for Palestinians between October 2023 and June 2024 was an estimated 64,260 people, which is about 40% higher than the Palestinian Health Ministry’s estimates.)

Which is why I’m glad Bad Bunny is not just giving voice to our complex emotions around home, belonging and identity, but explicitly calling for a political reaction, too. I hope the next song from the album to go viral is “Lo Que le Pasó a Hawaii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”), which Pitchfork characterizes as the “ideological centerpiece” of the album. According to the outlet, “over a stripped-back instrumental full of sounds you would hear walking down cobblestone streets in San Juan—güiros and guitars—Bad Bunny speaks slowly and with a measured intimacy. ‘Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái’ (‘I don’t want them to do to you what they did to Hawaii’), he cautions, drawing connections between the current plight of the Puerto Rican people and the way Hawaiian statehood has threatened local culture. At times his vocals cut off mid-phrase for dramatic effect, simulating the electrical blackouts the island frequently experiences.”

If there is an inherent heartbreak to migration, which I think there is, it is inextricable from colonialism, both historic and contemporary. So, maybe this is trite, but to Bad Bunny’s point, there is meaning and value in documenting where we’re from, what it looks like, the quality of the light, the exact colour of the sky, and yes, even those cheapie plastic armchairs that we all sit on. But not just as a memory; also as a way to spur action toward to goal of wresting back political and cultural control of our homes and ourselves.

One more thing about my grandma’s house: It was never white. This week, I realized just how few photos I have of the house itself. There are many, many shots of my family in and around it, from posed group shots with distant relatives and long-time friends to quick snaps of things we want to send to people in Canada, like the price tag on the single-serving size container of yogurt I bought at the grocery store on the main road ($20?!) or a tiny lizard just hanging out in the sink. There are also shots of my view from the house, of the sky at sunset or empty lot across the street or the familiar architecture of our neighbour’s houses. But could I find a single clear photo of the entire building? Of course not. However, there is a photo on my fridge of myself at nine, sitting on that gallery with my grandpa—my dad’s dad—who had come to see us when we went back to Trinidad for the first time since moving to Canada. A sliver of the wall is visible in the background, just enough to see that actually, the house was a buttery cream colour. It was only while writing this newsletter that I realized my memory was wrong.

I should’ve taken more photos, for real.

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Culture, IdentityStacy Lee KongBad Bunny, Tefi Pessoa, Lilly Singh, Nicki Minaj, Palestine, Gaza Strip, Israel, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Trinidad