Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Medellin: A journal excerpt
Medellín – so badly desiring to capture this place between these pages and also know the impossibility of it. It is noisy and dangerous, polluted, and crowded with throngs of people mostly going in circles – the dispossessed caught in the bowl that is the base of this city. Where Pablo Escobar once ruled is the legacy of paramilitaries and the divide between the people like a dirty river that washes nothing away.
In Botero’s painting of the assassination of Escobar, he is shown as a giant, his feet straddled across three tiled rooftops assaulted by a dozen bullets. Even the leftists who hate him and his mercenary forces can’t help but remind us continually of where he lived and what he owned – a figure of some awe despite his ruthlessness – but then again, Colombia’s history is full of figures as cruel and as ostentatious – perhaps this is absorbed as the way things are. Sometimes the Colombians want us to be impressed by the country’s badass history, and sometimes they want us to be sad for it. In either case, it is simultaneously wounded and mythical – the same well from which Gabriel Garcia Marquez drank.
A quick illustration of security: On the night we returned to the hotel from a party at Nora’s house, I took a cab with two other women from the delegation. Before we left the house, I noticed that Gerardo reached into the car and took something from the driver’s glovebox. Of course it only dawned on me later that what he was taking was a card carried by the driver to identify him and his cab should anything happen to us between his place and our temporary home.
The morbid in me wonders how many of the people we meet will be killed, how many of the women have been tortured, how often the children are afflicted by hunger and ringworm. It seems too cheap to look for hope in these desolate landscapes – and by that I mean the cheap platitudes with which North Americans comfort themselves when by with dark corners. There is no life for the girls of the barrios except to grow into a youthful maternity, or a sex trade hungry for the fresh. And the boys would only be too lucky to get work as labourers – but will more likely end up begging or hawking oranges or cold drinks on the crowded roadways. Everything for sale here in the desperation and madness of extreme privation.
The faces of the street children are black, as are their limbs – their clothes. These human figures move like the blackened imps of nightmares – wily and without a moral other than to get fed – one can only imagine an early death at the hands of violence that reach out from every crack in the pavement. We are the white wealth continually reminded of this with every stare from the doorways. A sex trade worker grabs the arm of my friend James and simply says – you are lucky to be white – by which is means to be rich and to be free from the daily torture of this existence.
Looking at the green mountains that ring Medellín, the condors which fly high above the city , one can see before the buildings and roadways – the lushness of this place unfettered by the tentacles of the shanty towns which crawl upwards forever into the hillsides. This land is beautiful and dramatic – an obvious provider to those who originally lived in the crooks of the mountains and the river’s elbows…. But like all of civilization’s chained lands, she has become a prison to most of her inhabitants. We are both the jailor and the jailed in this context – the Taoist paradox – for which we are raised in illusion so that we cannot see it.
Sunday reading.
(an excerpt from Derrick Jensen’s new book – Endgame – which can be found here. Really – if you haven’t picked it up yet – you should….)
CIVILIZATION
Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.
Stanley Diamond
If I’m going to contemplate the collapse of civilization, I need to define what it is. I looked in some dictionaries. Webster’s calls civilization “a high stage of social and cultural development.” The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “a developed or advanced state of human society.” All the other dictionaries I checked were similarly laudatory. These definitions, no matter how broadly shared, helped me not in the slightest. They seemed to me hopelessly sloppy. After reading them, I still had no idea what the hell a civilization is: define high, developed, or advanced, please. The definitions, it struck me, are also extremely self-serving: can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of “a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society”?
Life continues.
While I would like to be posting Colombia journal entries, I am instead at work today. Pheh! Just because you go away, life at home doesn’t stop!
Besides the usual work stupidity (that I hoped would die down while I was away but hasn’t) – Darren was transferred unexpectedly to Lane County where he can’t phone me from and now has a hearing scheduled for next week – problem being that I wanted to attend the hearing but can’t find a plane ticket for under $700, and I’m not sure my employer would be overjoyed about another absence from the office right now. I spent this morning being pretty tense about the situation, but have now mostly accepted the fact that I can’t talk to Darren, can’t attend his hearing, and will have to wait until some future date to actually see him. I just don’t see any other way – though I feel pretty bad about not being able to be in court for him at least one of these times.
Update: I just figured out the Lane County prison phone system which is serviced by one of the other Texas-based private phone companies and managed to set up an account with them. Once Darren’s lawyer gives him the info he can at least phone me again.
Besides that, I got my nomination forms in for the union position I decided to run for last month this afternoon – after some fretting about whether or not I should actually go for it given my bad odds. We’ll see what happens, but I would be very surprised if I win (even with the fancy bio I laid out today).
It’s Friday, and even though I have only been in the office one day this week, I feel like I need a weekend! I’m sortof proud that despite my edgy state I worked my way through the prison bureaucracy to get the phone calls sorted out – dealing with the system always feels like this overwhelming hurdle, and getting over it a small victory.
Pictures and imprints.
I returned home this morning with a full head and an opened heart – the struggles and landscapes of Colombia imprinted into my view of the world. I intend to post some excerpts from my journals here as soon as I can manage them but for now I have managed to post my photographs to the red cedar photo gallery. Go look – they are just simple snapshots – but you can get a sense of where I have been for the past two weeks.
From Medellin.
This will be my one and only dispatch from Colombia via the blog… This trip has turned out to be far more packed than I had realized it would be with meetings and travel taking up 14 hours or more per day.
Needless to say, I got through the US and into the country fine – and the past nine days have been spent in various parts of the country meeting with trade unions, indigenous groups, human rights organizations and barrios of displaced peoples. I have taken pages of notes, written copious amounts in my journal and taken dozens of photographs which I will try to synthesize into some coherent postings when I return home (I will be uploading my photos to my red cedar photo gallery as a first priority after returning).
We have been lucky to have access to places that most outsiders would never be invited to, the expectation being that somehow we can do something to help people once we return to Canada. I am afraid at times that the expectations might be too high… but at least in one case myself and two other people on this tour have agreed to personally fund the operation of a women´s center in the town of Neiva in the Huila province for the next year. It´s a small start – but when you are facing global injustice, it feels like almost nothing at all.
I have lots to say about Uribe, the paramilitaries, the FARC, the countryside, the resistance and the people – but am running out of time and couldn´t do it justice on this little sleep in any case. I am returning home on the 11th/12th which seems far too soon to me… so stay in touch and my travel reports will be posted here.
Red Cedar 