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CHRONICLES OF THE BANISHED: DISPLACEMENT AND POPULAR IDENTITY IN COLOMBIA
By María Helena Rueda
Strolling through bookstores these days in Colombia, one readily finds a significant number of books focused on forced displacement: novels chronicling the lives of people outside of their usual places and spaces, narratives and testimonies of men and women forced to flee because of brutal armed conflict. More and more frequently, books in Colombia tell the stories of farmers driven to the cities because of violence, of victims of kidnappings, of Colombians who have had to learn to live in another country, or of people whose lives within Colombia are marked by a sense of not belonging anymore. A common thread tying together these narrations of experiences of displacement is that none is enjoyable, planned or desired. These are more than simple stories of movement, of travel - they chronicle a plunder of life itself, a rupture not only with the roots of sustenance, but also with everything that gives meaning to existence. The majority of the lives of displaced people are permeated with a tragic certainty that returning to their places of origin is an impossibility; this is why their experience borders on the extreme of a breaking point, a banishment.
The texts narrating the stories of displacement compose a long list of diverse experiences. I will only examine a few in this essay. There are two testimonials with the same name - Desterrados, (literally, those from under whom the earth has been moved). One is written by Marisol Gómez Giraldo and the second by Alfredo Molano. They tell stories of farmers threatened by left-wing guerrillas or right-wing paramilitaries who, after witnessing the slaughter of friends or family members, have had to leave their rural homes to seek refuge in the city. These texts are based on fieldwork conducted by the authors, and they create the effect of making readers feel as if they were directly experiencing these peoples' reality. Among the novels that exist, Laura Restrepo's La multitud errante (The Wandering Multitude) uses a tone of allegory to tell the story of a man who meanders from one refugee center for displaced persons to another, searching for a woman who cared for him after his parents involuntarily abandoned him as a child, they themselves threatened by another epoch of violence. Paraíso travel (Paradise Travel) by Jorge Franco narrates stories of Colombians who have had to learn to live in New York. Both La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) and El desbarrancadero (literally, a place where one runs the risk of falling into an abyss), by Fernando Vallejo, have as main characters individuals who arrive in Medellín after several years of exile, only to find the city converted in a no man's land. In these accounts, it is the city, which has been "displaced" and converted into a territory of non-belonging. With the exception of Our Lady of the Assassins, which was published in 1994, all of the aforementioned books were published in 2001. Why have so many books dealing with the theme of displacement and displaced persons appeared in such a short time?
Statistics help to answer this question. During 2001, throughout Colombia, 341,925 people had to abandon their homes due to violence. Most of these people arrived in the cities, to join the ranks of an already 1.5 million people displaced by armed conflict in Colombia over the past decade. Since 1998, Colombia has witnessed 13,878 kidnappings. Between 1997 and 2000, approximately 988,000 Colombians left the country with no intentions of returning.(1) Forced displacement is a crushing representation of the reality people face every day in Colombia. While diverse groups of armed actors intensify the evacuation of rural areas, city dwellers read about displacement in the newspapers, they watch on television images of dispossessed people fleeing their homes, and they commonly encounter groups of internal refugees, mostly women and children, in the city streets, begging or selling what they can to try and subsist in urban surroundings. They also listen to stories of friends and family members who have been kidnapped, or who have left the country, fleeing from terror or unemployment. The main question on the minds of most Colombians these days, those who still have a choice, is "Should I leave, or should I stay?" Those who have no option, on the other hand, try to find ways to co-exist within this reality of displacement that permeates life, a reality that in itself is out of place because war has turned vast regions of the country into unrecognizable spaces. Does this explain why such a demand exists for books about displacement and the displaced? Is this why editors are rushing to publish books on this topic?
Before answering these questions, it is important to clarify that only a small percentage of Colombians read these texts. Those people more directly and radically affected by armed conflict will never read these accounts, in which they themselves are the central characters. Urban readers seek this literature and push the demand for publication. The people of Colombia's cities, who for a long while were able to exist on the margins of the war, are beginning to feel its presence. The war approaches them not only in newspaper headlines, but in the very streets themselves, which are filling up with displaced people; in the constant threat that exists of being kidnapped or extorted; in rampant unemployment; in the feeling that, as city dwellers, they are trapped within a bubble and they can no longer venture into "the countryside," - the territory which has played a pivotal role as a place of rest and entertainment for Colombia's middle and upper classes. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that most of the inhabitants of the cities depend in large part for survival on what the rural areas produce. This production has decreased radically in recent years because of the war. All of these elements converge to explain why violence has begun to profoundly permeate the urban world, which houses the consumers of books published in Colombia.
There is, however, another aspect of the image of displacement that occupies a place of particular resonance in the collective imagination of the Colombian people. Yes, displacement is a palpable and tragic reality. But it is also a metaphor for life today in Colombia. Colombia is a country that, for the people who live there, has been transformed into a foreign land. It is unrecognizable, not only because of violence, but because of other processes that have been strengthened in recent years. The state has weakened; there is an absence of ideological discourse to link people to a struggle for democracy; unemployment looms like a ghost; socio-economic imbalances resulting from drug trafficking and corruption are profoundly unsettling; the bankruptcy of industries that could not survive free market reforms which liberated imports and the crashing of coffee prices - all of these phantoms are the life companions with whom the Colombian people have had to learn to co-exist in recent years. Add to this a bombardment of images of a destroyed country that appear every day in the media, in a strange response to consumer surveys and confusing the need to inform clearly about the war with the desire to feed the morbid appetite of the television viewers by saturating them with an inexhaustible parade of catastrophes and bloodshed. These elements characterize life in other Latin American countries and even other regions of this globalized world in which we live, but the situation in Colombia is an extreme one, given the intensity of the violence and the imbalances it has provoked at different levels.
In this context, it is not unusual that Colombian authors write with increasing frequency about displacement. Nor is it surprising that readers have a growing appetite for books that focus on this theme. As the books mentioned in this essay reveal, perhaps the image of displacement offers a kind of antidote to this country razed by a war which fills up headlines in Colombian and international media. The books on this theme give displaced people a face and a past, removing them from the status of an ephemeral and threatening phantom that no one knows how to understand. By narrating their stories, these authors want to make this reality known, perhaps in an attempt to find a solution, or perhaps because a primordial need exists to paint a picture of this national tragedy. Readers seeking these books want to become familiar with this portrait because it has become an inextricable part of our identity as Colombians - a painful and tragic aspect of ourselves that we need to understand and rationalize in order to continue living our lives. The image of displacement is important, too, for another reason - it evokes the idea of a pre-existing order to which it is desirable to return, even if that order has been suspended or exists only in the terrain of nostalgia. All of the narratives on this topic constantly refer to a prior harmony that existed before the violence causing displacement began, a world composed of familiar spaces, where harmony and productivity reigned. Are these authors emphasizing that it is essential to work to recuperate that world, that order? Or are their texts merely a collective lament for the irremediable loss of that world? I prefer to believe the former.
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1. The statistics regardig displaced farmers are from CODHES, the Advisory Office for Human Rights and Displacement (Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento). The kidnapping statistics come from the Free Country Foundation (Fundación Pais Libre), and data concerning migration are from the World Organization for Migration (IOM).
María Helena Rueda was born in Bogota, Colombia. She has been studying Latin American literature and cinema for several years and has published several articles on these subjects. She is currently completing a Ph.D. at Stanford University, with a dissertation on the treatment of violence in Colombian literature.
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