美国国家公共电台 NPR Long Before Burning Man, Zozobra Brought Fire And Redemption To The Desert

Long Before Burning Man, Zozobra Brought Fire And Redemption To The Desert

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Speaking of getting rid of the annoyances 2 of life, ever wish you could just, I don't know, toss your worries into a bonfire and start fresh? Well, for the past 92 years, thousands of people in and near Santa Fe, N.M. have gotten together to do just that - symbolically 3, anyway - by burning up a giant marionette 4. It's called Zozobra. NPR's Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi reports.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Three days of fun and fiesta are ushered 5 in by the burning of Zozobra, or Old Man Gloom, on a hill overlooking the city.

ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE 7: For those of us who grew up in Santa Fe, there are few figures that loom 6 larger than Zozobra. That's literal as much as figurative. The 50-foot-tall, ghostly white, scowling 8 old marionette with flailing 9 arms and a flowing robe is as familiar as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Only on his holiday, Zozobra is ritualistically burned to death on a hill above a baseball field filled with tens of thousands of screaming people.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Burn it.

UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting) Burn it, burn it, burn it.

KENNETH GARLEY: Zozobra is a Spanish word for pain, gloom, anguish 10, despair. He represents all of the gloom of Santa Fe, so the burning of Zozobra's the burning of all the gloom.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Kenneth Garley is a self-diagnosed Zozobra fanatic 11 and the secretary of the Santa Fe Kiwanis Club, which builds the puppet and puts on the burn. He was less than a year old when his parents first brought him, and he's attended 52 since then. Garley says that over the years, he's seen a lot of gloom go up in smoke.

GARLEY: I've seen wedding dresses. I've seen mortgage papers.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: In the weeks leading up to the burn, thousands of people anonymously 12 drop slips of paper containing their handwritten woes 13 into Gloom Deposit Boxes around town. Elizabeth Harris says her annual contributions are usually minor 14 complaints.

ELIZABETH HARRIS: But about 25 years ago, I was diagnosed with a stage 4 cancer. So I took a copy of the pathology reports to the location where Zozobra was being built and I stapled 15 10 pages of paper right onto the two-by-fours.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Even the city police department donates thousands of shredded 16 police reports. All of it goes to stuff Zozobra's body with flammable misery 17. But the ritual isn't just about the gloom. It's also a way for parents to scare their children into obedience 18, a rite 19 of passage for young teenagers finally allowed to attend without adult supervision 20, and the biggest party of the year for everyone else.

The event began in the early 1920s when a young Philadelphia painter named Will Shuster moved to the Southwest seeking relief from his tuberculosis 21. What he found in Santa Fe was a budding arts community and a city steeped in Catholic tradition. Shuster created Zozobra as a satirical, vaguely 22 pagan counterpoint to the then-200-year-old Fiestas de Santa Fe, an annual Catholic-Hispanic festival celebrating the re-conquest of New Mexico from the Pueblo 23 Indians. Today, Zozobra has become so popular that in this city of just over 80,000, almost 56,000 people have come out to see him.

I arrive a few hours before the burning, and the entrance to the field is already packed. Across the street, a trio of born-again preachers are pacing the sidewalk with homemade signs and megaphones, calling out to celebrants to abandon their wicked ways.

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: Shame on you parents who would bring your kids and get them involved in the sin of idolatry, to worship a 50-foot piece of trash.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Rolando Iglesias drove up from Roswell, N.M. to dissuade 24 potential sinners.

ROLANDO IGLESIAS: It's called idolatry when you replace Jesus with something else. Even though it's tradition or whatever that the town does, well, it angers God.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Zozobra's angered some locals, too, who associate the event with the drunken brawls 25 and gang violence of decades past. Event chairman Raymond Sandoval acknowledges that there is a dark side to Zozobra.

RAYMOND SANDOVAL: Zozobra is our scapegoat 26. There is a violence to burning this 50-foot effigy 27.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But he points to the scholarships and charity projects that the Kiwanis Club funds every year from ticket sales. And, he says...

SANDOVAL: The overall idea of this, which is to stop for a moment and to really think about things that you regret and how you can be a better person and how you do things differently, allows us to actually reflect and, I think, become a better community.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But before they reflect, they burn. A few minutes after dusk, the lights go out and the crowd comes alive.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Burn it.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: A fire dancer taunts 28 Zozobra to a chorus of fireworks and mariachi music. And as the tension builds, the screams of Old Man Gloom himself get louder until the crowd's excitement reaches a crescendo 29. And all of a sudden, Zozobra's arms go up in flames. He waves his arms and screams in anguish until he gives out a final whimper and crumples 30 to the ground.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: We're all going to be gloom-free all the rest of the year.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Fiesta de Sante Fe.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Viva Zozobra.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Kenneth Garley of the Kiwanis Club says that what Zozobra really offers the crowd is an escape.

GARLEY: Their gloom is gone. It's been lifted, right? Then we have to face the realities of the world the next day. But, you know, for at least that night, it's a celebration that things can get better and will get better for all of us.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: After the burn, the field empties out, strewn with discarded turkey legs and crushed cans. And the dozens of volunteers who've spent the better part of the year building Zozobra gather around the embers of their fallen enemy to roast marshmallows over his smoldering 31 remains 32 and to bask 33 for a few sweet hours in the absence of their worries. Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, NPR News.

ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: I'm Asma Khalid. I cover politics. To me, NPR is truly the old-school public square. It brings together voices from all across the country, coal miners to hedge fund managers. And it allows us to hear from one another even if we might not have the chance to walk down the same streets and meet in real life. And so in some small way, it helps me feel like we're all more connected. Thanks for listening to this NPR station.