Parade of blackness, of the pure, that comes from down there, the sonero mayor sang in my head while I saw the images that were arriving on the electoral journey on July 19 in Colombia. Nothing like this had ever been seen: people in boats, boats and colts navigating between rivers and estuaries, people on mules opening trails, in caravans of goats or on a long walk to a polling station to leave there, with those calloused hands, as Francia Márquez would say, his vote for the Historical Pact.
I’m lying when I say I’ve never seen anything like it. These images, in other circumstances, have revealed the barbarity of exile and terror. Families and communities leaving their territories. A flight to nowhere in a republic that has denied every right to millions of people. What is new, now, is that these caravans, that parade of singing and crying, this time were just the opposite: the way to exercise their right to vote, their citizen right, which is not a minor thing given the context. A vote that was crucial to define the second round.
This double meaning of the image invites us to reflect on two issues that I consider to be fundamental on what underlies the triumph of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez. On the one hand, what I mentioned before as a novel image, and allow me to contradict myself, leads us to remember something that has been a constitutive part of the construction of the nation: the struggle for citizenship and, above all, for the reaffirmation of humanity. systematically denied to Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples, since the redefinition of the colonial order and throughout the republic, beyond what the 1991 constitution may say today. On the other hand, the recurrent image, that of terror and political violence, It makes it possible to highlight the role that the victims have played in these elections and in the search for peace. Since the final result, there has been a constant tribute to the victims, the victory dedication to so many people murdered in the country of the “most stable democracy in Latin America” according to the Creole elite.
In both cases, memory and awareness of the nation’s history played a crucial role in the election of Colombia’s first popular government. And I’m not saying that there has been a historiographical exercise to define a vote, obviously. What I think about is how, even in a deeply unequal country, with high dropout rates, there is a collective memory that has survived the production of History by white literate elites. That History, as recalled by Alfonso Múnera1, was built from the center of the country throughout the 19th century and fabricated the idea of border regions: where inferior, uncivilized people live and who had contributed little or nothing to the construction of the Nation. From their literate wall, they wanted to erase the participation of black and mulatto people in the independence processes of Cartagena, or the fight in the liberal armies of the mid-nineteenth century and the fight for the abolition of slavery in Cauca; not to mention that the base of the economy was the workforce of black people.
Despite the persistence of this history of denial, when I speak of collective memory I think of the joy that the election of Francia Márquez as the first black woman vice president produced. I mean, when people in the Pacific celebrated the event of her election, it was not only because of what she represented in terms of multicultural liberalism, in that kind of summation of subalternized identities that they have wanted to frame in the neoliberal discourse of just do it multicolored: despite who he is, look where he got to, certain press headlines seem to say. He said that happiness was not only due to a representative individual triumph, but also due to the collective achievement, due to the feeling of being part of a history so often denied. The joy for the realization of a battle that has taken place many times and many times has been erased, turned into a non-event, to put it in the words of the Haitian intellectual Michel-Rolph Trouillot.
Of course, what Francia Márquez has done, the tenacity of her struggle, her commitment, her ethics and the wisdom of those who know what “living tasty” means, arouse deep admiration. But that admiration takes on another value if you see the revolutionary reservoir, the accumulated history that is in each of her gestures and her deeds. There lies the power of a memory that is not governed by the monument.
And there is also the power of memory for the dead, for whom not a minute of silence has been observed despite the silencing. Political violence, the history of dozens of civil wars, the annihilation of entire political movements throughout the republican life turned Colombia into a vast necropolis. Dispossessed land and human remains seemed to be the fate of the country. His fate and his face. But a dispossession is precisely the disfigured face, a shattered body, a face without a face: just a trace. Hence, the victims, who persist in the truth, keep in their memories, stamp on their shirts or upload the face of someone who was alive in their photo frames. That persistence is not due to a denial of death but to contest the lie, unearth the truth and be able to mourn, which is a way of closing the circle, of restoring life.
The triumph of Gustavo Petro is the triumph of thousands and thousands of victims of political violence, of extermination as a state doctrine. His face is the answer to dispossession, to which he could not be taken away, because he could have added even more to the list of murdered leftist political leaders. Although the big media wanted to disfigure it until a few hours before the polls opened, the country, little by little, has stopped looking at itself in the mirror of terror and fear, and has begun to look at itself in another mirror, which is the face of the other, of the I am because we are. And we owe that to those who have pushed so hard for peace.
They say that a person who forgets the past also loses the ability to imagine the future. Without an awareness of the past and an imagination of the future, the present is oppressive and barren. Undoubtedly, great difficulties await the new government in a country looted and broken by one of the most abject oligarchies on the continent. Dismantling the mafias of the state, reducing the deep inequalities, rethinking the fight against drug trafficking and seeking peace in the territories seized by terror, are some of the more than peremptory tasks. However, they will not be easy. Hence the importance of memory. Know where we come from and imagine how to build tasty futures. Otherwise, it will be anchoring ourselves to the bleeding present, it will be pulling off the scab without having healed, it will be denying time to time.
Until dignity becomes a habit!
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Note:
1 Munera, Alfonso. Imagined borders. Planet (2005)
