ANNA DEENY MORALES

Notes on Oh, How Small to be a Child in this World

Please read the text Oh, How Small to be a Child in this World here.

Last year Timothy Nelson, the Artistic Director of the IN Series, invited me and a group of collaborators—Tina Chancey, Maribeth Diggle, and Marta Pérez García—to create an immersive opera that engaged with the works of Mexican women writers, musicians, composers, and visual artists. What would form the spine of this opera would be a medieval chant called “The Massacre of the Innocents.” It would be my task to interpret the text, the libretto, of that chant which Nelson chose because it represents a story of migration found in Mary, Joseph, and Jesus’s flight to Egypt. 

“The Massacre of the Innocents” is a 28-section, Latin biblical drama chant attributed to the monks of a French, Benedictine monastery, and collected in what’s called the Fleury Playbook. Derived from the Gospel of Mathew, it tells of when Herod the Great, King of Judea, learns that an infant named Jesus has been born, and that this infant will be the King of the Jews. While the historical veracity of the massacre has been debated, the biblical story recounts that, furious and concerned for the threat to his power, Herod commands that all boys in Bethlehem under the age of two be put to death. In the meantime, Jesus flees to Egypt with his parents. Thus, in addition to being about the fear that leads to migration, the chant represents the practice of infanticide, maternal loss, and unchecked political authority.

The story of “The Massacre of the Innocents” has been adapted extensively in dramatic, musical, and visual forms. As recently as 2019, for example, Dr. Mary Ellzey translated the drama, Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents, from Old into contemporary English, for a performance by the Rude Mechanicals that she directed at Shepherd University. Ellzey’s translation and directorial choices centered on Herod’s madness, sinfulness, and contemporary political issues. The 16th-century choral work, “Coventry Carol,” on the other hand, draws attention to the tender intimacy of children and mothers found in lullabies that teeter between sleep and death. Performed originally as part of a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, the gentle carol begins with, “Lully, lulla, thow littell tine child . . . . ” The visual tradition of the “Massacre,” for example, in works like Domenico Ghirlandaio’s late 1480s fresco or Daniele Volterra’s 1557 painting, presents a story that unfolds in public, architecturally magnificent spaces.  Indeed, Herod was known for having contributed greatly to the physical infrastructure of Jerusalem during his reign. In these depictions, women struggle aimlessly to protect their children while muscular soldiers overtake them. However, what this visual tradition illuminates is not the possible historical reality of the “Massacre,” but its symbolic force, which lies in the fact that the battle over future political authority is public as well as gendered. At the center of that scene, that is, what lies at the heart of power, is absolute control over life itself, and a patriarchy must always prove its ability to displace that control from women, and from mothers in particular. That’s why Ghirlandaio and Volterra represent women defending their children as opposed to men, and that’s why the scene is represented amidst the public splendor of Herod’s city.  

The most striking element of the Fleury Playbook rendition of the chant is the fact that one of its most important characters, Rachel, who comes to us from the Old Testament, was anachronistic to the historical moment of the massacre. In other words, the original piece already considers how the themes of fear, migration, political power, infanticide, and maternal loss, exist through time and across geographic regions. The presence of Rachel, her unanswered question—which is “Why?”—opens the chant to a contemporary consideration. 

This pattern, that is, the continual displacement or taking away of the most primal wish of mothers—that their children live—by a patriarchal force, either political or religious, has driven my rewriting of the medieval chant. I wrote against the original work, and centered it, not on Herod, not on God, but, similar to the “Coventry Carol,” on the emotional, physical, and signifying, foundational tenderness of children; the repeated atrocity of infanticide; the contemporary disappearance of young people; and the struggles of mothers, like Rachel, who continue to mourn and search for them. The goal is not to be historically accurate, but, in the tradition of the interpretations of the “Massacre,” I have emphasized symbolic force. 

Across the Americas, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly young, have been disappeared. In Mexico, the former head of Mexico’s National Search Commission, Karla Quintana, estimated the figure to be upwards of 110,000. It is mostly the mothers of these disappeared children who have formed collectives in response to the government’s either passive, tacit, or explicit complicity in the disappearances. This chant is now dedicated to those mothers, fathers, families, and their children, particularly Aracely Salcedo and her daughter, Fernanda Rubí Salcedo Jiménez, who was disappeared on the 7th of September, 2012. However, beyond Mexico and the Americas, as we all unfortunately know, examples of the strategic, sinful slaughter or disappearance of children and young people by political regimes or drug or human trafficking cartels, are found across many political, cultural, and religious contexts. 

Anna Deeny Morales is a US-based Latina writer who grew up between Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. She works in poetry and music as a librettist, translator, and literary critic. Her operas have been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Georgetown Americas Institute, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Recent works include Las Místicas de México, an immersive performance dedicated to the more than 110,000 disappeared in Mexico. Created in collaboration with Timothy Nelson, Maribeth Diggle, Tina Chancey, Marta Pérez García, and Emily Baltzer, Místicas debuted in March, 2024 with the IN Series and the Children’s Chorus of Washington at the Dupont Circle Underground and the Mexican Cultural Institute. Commissioned by the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, ZAVALA-ZAVALA: an opera in v cuts, with music by composer, Brian Arreola, made its world debut at the Kennedy Center in 2022 with the IN Series and the Georgetown University Orchestra. ZAVALA-ZAVALA was selected by the Latiné Musical Theater Lab for the 4XLatiné Showcase at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, NYC, in 2023, and will be performed at Gala Hispanic Theater, Washington, DC, in June, 2024. Recent adaptations of zarzuelas include Gonzalo Roig’s Cecilia Valdés (2018) and La Paloma at the Wall (2019), a new rendition of Tomás Bretón's La verbena de la Paloma. La Paloma's score was adapted by Mexican composer Ulises Eliseo. Both were commissioned by the IN Series and performed at Gala Hispanic Theater. Original works for contemporary dance and theater include La straniera (1997), an adaptation of Medea by Euripides, and Tela di Ragno (1999–2002), inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses. Both were commissioned by Il Balletto di Spoleto and performed in Italy and Spain.

A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for her translation of Tala by Nobel Laureate, Gabriela Mistral, Deeny Morales's translations of Raúl Zurita’s poetry include Sky Below, Selected Works (Northwestern University Press, 2016), of which she is also the editor; Dreams for Kurosawa (arrow as aarow press, 2011); and Purgatory (University of California Press, 2009). Shearsman Press in London published her translation of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diana’s Tree in 2020, and Mercedes Roffé’s Floating Lanterns in 2015. Composer Theresa Wong set selections of Floating Lanterns to music during her residency at The Stone, The New School, New York City, in 2018, and for a Long Beach Opera commission in 2020. Deeny Morales has guest edited literary journals such as Almost Island, based in Mumbai, India. Her essays and translations of poetry by Rosabetty Muñoz, Malú Urriola, Diana Bellessi, Idea Vilariño, Marosa di Giorgio, Mirta Rosenberg, Isabel de los Ángeles Ruano, and Idea Vilariño, among others, have appeared in anthologies and journals such as the Paris Review, Mandorla, BOMB, and the Harvard Review. Forthcoming works in translation include Ecopoems, Storm, & Some Fringe Benefits, a volume of selected works by Nicanor Parra, which she has edited and translated for New Directions; and Amanda Berenguer's Identity of Certain Fruits, which will be published by Point Zero Press. 

Deeny Morales received a BA in English Literature with a minor in Piano Performance from Shepherd University; an MA in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on Puerto Rican theater, from Dartmouth College; and a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. She also studied theater and directing at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica, Silvio d'Amico, in Rome, Italy. A Fellow in the Humanities at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, her monograph on Latin American and US poetry, Other Solitudes: Essays on Consciousness and Poetry, is forthcoming in 2025.

Deeny Morales was the 2023 Academy of American Poets Judge for the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. She has also served as judge for the National Translation Award in Poetry, and an expert reader for the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship competition. She chaired the Gabriela Mistral Bilingual Poetry Competition and currently sits on the board of directors of the IN Series.