In January of this year, Bad Bunny released one of his most critically-acclaimed albums to date, Debí Tirar Más Fotos. The album, whose title translates to ‘I should’ve taken more photos’ has been heralded as a passionate tribute to Puerto Rican identity and culture, with many of the lyrics throughout the album alluding to the streets and people amongst which the singer grew up.
The significance of the Puerto Rican pride woven throughout this project is compounded by the context of Bad Bunny’s career progression and previous high-profile relationship with the human epitome of consumerism herself, Kendall Jenner. This body of work is seen as a profound statement and the overall message is clear as the dense web of references to Puerto Rican history, expressed via the lyrics, samples and diverse range of rhythms all point to an unapologetic celebration of the singer’s homeland.
Shortly after the album's release, the title track, DtMF, became an instant hit and a top-trending song on TikTok. With an infectious instrumental and a heartfelt chorus that’s easy to sing-along to (even if you don’t speak Spanish) the song easily elicits feelings of nostalgia regardless of whether you’ve been to Puerto Rico or not. However, the song’s impact quickly exceeded mere likes and shares. As quickly as Latin Americans started posting videos of family and friends to DtMF, so too did another group of people start using this song as a means of reflecting on their own lost homeland.
Although the song generally speaks of a lost love, the lyrics of ‘I should've taken more pictures when I had you/I should've given you more kisses and hugs whenever I could/I hope my people never move away’ quickly became the soundtrack for a number of Palestinians who compiled videos of Gaza as it once stood in an act of remembrance that amassed millions of views online. Hundreds of videos depicting the beauty of Palestinian life before Israel’s cruel and unforgiving bombardment went viral, all of them accompanied by the tune of DtMF.
For myself, the song pulls at the heartstrings. I am the proud granddaughter of a Nakba survivor who has had to navigate an intense array of emotions concerning my cultural identity since October 2023. For most of my life, critical discussion of Palestine was something that rarely left my family home as warnings of being labelled as anti-semetic shrouded my confidence to speak on the topic. Interestingly enough, a Jewish friend recently shared that she too was instructed to selectively discuss her ethnicity for fear of different but related repercussions, illustrating the conflict’s effectiveness in silencing any opportunity for knowledge sharing and solidarity.
However, in one day, on October 7th, everyone suddenly became an expert on something that I had always considered to exist within the most personal parts of my being. A quiet rage, a paralysed confusion and a hopeless despair waged a war inside me as my passion and pride felt constantly undermined by an overwhelming sense of fraudulence.
I grew up in Australia, I don’t speak Arabic and my grandmother’s family represent a religious minority within the Palestinian diaspora. Without any memories, language or faith that can tether me to my family's home in Jerusalem I have struggled immensely to feel worthy of my Palestinian heritage.
In the past few years I’ve felt lost in an isolating limbo, lying somewhere in the chasm between missing and longing. I cannot long for Palestine, for it's something I’ve never had the privilege of knowing. I can’t miss it for I’ve never been. So what do I do with the fistful of attachments to which I clutch forcefully with all my strength until my wrist grows tired and my hands weak and sweaty? How do I possibly define the feeling of frustration in being robbed of my chance to connect to my ancestors’ culture?
Any grandchild of war and displacement will resonate with the conflicted confusion that arises when we see photos of all the greats; great-uncles, great-aunts, great-grandparents. In the garden of the old family home, at historic sites around the city from whence they came. A concoction of pride and wonder quickly followed by a squeeze of guilt and muddled with grief. A swarm of mixed emotions that pine for a sense of belonging only to be quickly subsumed by doubts in legitimacy.
Despite the proof of our shared blood made clear by the photographs that are routinely splayed on the plastic cover of my grandmother’s kitchen table somewhere in between dinner and dessert, I struggle to consider myself deserving of my heritage, as if my privilege acts as an insult to my advocacy. The iPhone in my pocket, the European surname that I hold, the Caucasian features I possess, the markers of my modern life seem to contradict any claim to the title of kin. What is there, other than a handful of photos and stories that entitles me to the despair I feel for my grandmother’s home country?
Unlike other cultures, Palestinians are not awarded the same privilege of cultural remembrance and celebration. We don’t have museums or holidays or even a place to which we can return. All we have are photos scattered on kitchen tables and stories perforated with inconsistencies that grow and reshape with each retelling. These are our archives. This is what is left.
And so, when the world denies you of your history and strips you of the chance to connect to your culture, where and how can you channel those feelings of frustration and grief? In this specific case, music and solidarity emerge as our primary vehicles for validation.
A Puerto Rican singer celebrating and remembering his country in the face of its own colonial past demonstrates the facility with which music can overcome geographical and linguistic boundaries. The impact of DtMF acts as a testament to the power of music to bring you closer to the very things to which you’ve always felt a stranger - it elicits feelings that you may not have even realised you had.
It can be hard to put feelings of grief and disillusionment into words. When it’s a loss of place, how can one articulate the layers of identity that juxtapose and contradict each other? For myself, how can I come to terms with my past and my future when an overwhelming sense of imposter-syndrome inhibits me from reaching what they call a ‘breakthrough’?
This is why we have music.
It exists for the lost souls who desperately search for evidence of others sharing the same feelings. When we can’t put things into words, we find them in song. Importantly, music reminds us that there once was a time and that there will be again.
However, music, the ever obliging sponge with which we mop up all of our emotions, is also somewhat resigned in its powers. For it is us, the listener who does the job of wetting, soaking and wiping - the sponge is merely something we use to stop our hands from getting dirty.
When was the last time you were in love? And how quickly did every song you heard become an exact reflection of your own state of infatuation? The last time you were grieving and suddenly every record had a deep sense of longing to which you felt connected? Or when the euphoria of a closing track made you prematurely nostalgic for the moment still unfolding?
Music does a good job at giving us something to mould our feelings around, but only so much as we want, we need it to. Music doesn’t heal but it places, it identifies. It provides refuge for the things that we struggle to come to terms with on our own.
The sentiment of ‘I wish I’d taken more photos’ is one that transcends translation, for grief is unforgiving and universal. Whether it’s a homeland, a family member, a partner or a pet, everyone has lost something and everyone is desperately looking for answers.
Even now, I feel like I shouldn’t talk about my experience because I’m only ‘a quarter’ Palestinian. But my grandmother has siblings and I have great aunties and uncles and I have the food that she cooked me and the stories she told me and I have treasured memories of playing hide and seek in the backyard counting to 10 in Arabic with my face pressed against our hills hoist and I will not apologise for feelings of closeness to my heritage just because there is an impenetrable system that tells me I should not identify with something it has already decreed as dead.
The greats, with whom I share but a handful of commonalities and whose names I only hear in stories, are tethered to me in a way that I should not and cannot allow to be overcome with settler-colonial subterfuge. It is not until I remember that doubt in the legitimacy of Palestinian identity is the exact outcome that the occupying powers hope to achieve, that I realise that if I do not claim this voice, then I am letting them win.
I should’ve taken more photos. Even those of us who never got the chance to take photos in the first place can see our struggle reflected in the sentiment. Us descendants of the displaced, we sing ‘debí tirar más fotos’ not for ourselves, but for our defiant, toothless greats. We sing as we grip onto recipes, artefacts and pictures as tightly as they gripped onto keys that opened doors to homes they never saw again.
A line so simple that it transcends cultural differences and speaks to all those with a longing for answers to their history, an ache for recollection and of course the thing that everyone craves, more time with those we love.