Unfading Voices

Grief, Resistance and Living Memories in Medellín

On June 28, 2022, the Commission for the Clarification of the Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition held a public ceremony in which they shared the various reports it worked on, the result of four years of listening to the stories of victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. To name just one fact, this research determined that twenty percent of the Colombian population is a direct victim of the conflict in its six decades of existence;^[1] eighty percent of these victims are civilians.

In his speech, the chairman of the commission said:

We aim to heal the physical and symbolic pluricultural and pluriethnic body that we form as citizens of this nation, a body that cannot survive with a fractured heart in Chocó . . . our head cut off in El Salado, our vagina violated in Tierralta . . . our stomach burst in Tumaco . . . our face burned in Machuca, our lungs punctured in the mountains of Antioquia, and our Indigenous soul devastated in Vaupés . . . We call to free our symbolic and cultural body from the traps of fear, anger, stigmatization, and distrust, to remove weapons from the venerable public space, to distance ourselves from those who place guns in politics . . . we aim to take back confidence in our way of seeing the world and relating to each other, which is trapped in a mode of war in which we cannot conceive that others think differently, to the point of making them enemies and making it possible for some to be turned into smoke.^[2]

These words have been insistently haunting me the last few days. Although they refer to the recent history of Colombia, they also speak of the use of force, violence, and weapons in one word: war. War as a means to justify the extermination of everything that does not fit into the Western and Westernized world’s ideal of the social body^[3] from colonial times to the present in all the territories of ouramerica. Understanding the conflict through differential approaches exposes the specificity of violence on the bodies associated with the feminine, Black, and Indigenous who have been dehumanized deepens the historical and structural burdens of coloniality.

The contemporary armed conflict is a sophisticated and complex expression of neocoloniality.

My grandmother married an older man when she was fifteen, coerced by the possibility of security for her and her mother after suffering forced displacement. The only problem she saw with this man was that he was too Black. Octavio left her after several years of marriage with five children, when the youngest was two years old. None of her granddaughters knew him and he died alone and completely impoverished in a coastal area of the country. My family history is close to that of thousands of Antioquian families. Over time I have understood that my colonial wound has to do with the impossibility of belonging to any identity with a history, due to assimilation and whitening. I come from a lineage of impoverished and abandoned women taking care of girls, bastards, and outcasts in a city where the ideal of family, whiteness, and property are the spinal cord of the paisa.^[4]

“How did we dare to let it happen and how can we dare to allow it to continue?” This was the closing question of the Truth Commission chairman’s speech when he delivered the report. Through five centuries we have been forced to move forward, in a straight line and as a function of progress, leaving behind all those condemned to be expendable, giving a body and substance to necropolitics by disconnecting us by coercion or conviction from those ancient and collective pains, to go on alone and stumbling. The constant erasure of the Afro in families is a symptom of a city and a nation founded on racism. It is not by chance that the Afrodescendant and Indigenous communities have been among the ones hit the hardest, repeatedly and head-on, by the recent armed conflict, in continuity with structural and atavistic violence.

The lives of entire peoples have been systematically placed at the lowest level of the order of priorities of the state, armed groups, and international policies. Afrodescendant communities in Medellín, as well as in many other places in the world, have resisted and re-existed through memories that exceed rational and linear time, which are housed in their bodies and transmitted orally. These mobile and living memories have little to do with the rigorousness of academic historical narratives; instead they operate as artisanal strategies to weave resistance.

In addition to receiving the report of the Truth Commission, 2022 saw the commemoration of twenty years of multiple victimizing events that took place under the state policy of democratic security^[5] that militarized the national territory, including urban centers, with the justification of fighting against guerrilla insurgencies, drug trafficking, terrorism, and a long list of internal enemies. It is within this framework of the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the military operations carried out in the city of Medellin (2002-2003)^[6] and the Bojayá massacre (2002)^[7] that, through the Museo Casa de la Memoria (an institution to which I belong as assistant curator), we built the temporary exhibitions Bocas de ceniza [Ash Mouths]^[8] and Alzar la voz [Raise Our Voice]^[9] with the intention of enabling spaces and devices for conversation and encounter.

The work Bocas de ceniza^[10]   Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarría, which in a way detonated the entire project and its universe of connections, shares the singing of victims of the Bojayá massacre and other massacres in the region. This video installation presents the power of song to say that which cannot be told. At the core of this project are alabaos, a cultural tradition of funeral and praise songs with which the Afrodescendant communities of the Colombian Pacific, among them those that inhabit the banks of the Bojayá River in the department of Chocó, bid farewell to their dead and accompany the mourners to collectively process the mourning. With their voices and authentic expressions, the people who sing in Bocas de ceniza express a grief that goes beyond the reasons of the current conflict and manage to transmit an unspeakable mourning that needs to become collective.

The power of song in Bocas de ceniza was the starting point for thinking about, through music, the implications of being caught in the crossfire of armed state actors, guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers on the central and northwestern slopes of Medellín. Alzar la voz is a selection of twenty songs, which between 2003 and 2022 narrate a journey through part of the processes of mourning and resistance developed in this area of the city.

The selection articulates audiovisual productions in relation to three moments associated with mourning and one more transversal in time associated with intergenerational processes of resistance. The music videos grouped in the first moment respond to the question, “What happened to us?” In these, the lyrics starkly talk about the consequences and impacts of the military operations, mainly for young people. In a context of precariousness and violence close, temporally and physically, to the victimizing events, the sonorities and audiovisual production reiterative in these videos are rudimentary, simple beats, raw voices, and archival images of violent events. An example of this section is the song Lágrimas de sangre [Tears of Blood]   J el capital, Nene, and Sprintz, three teenage MCs and rappers who later, in 2004, created the first projects that today make up the Corporación Afrocolombiana Son Batá,^[11] where through art and live culture (music, dance) they have worked for eighteen years to provide life alternatives to children and young people of African descent in the departments of Antioquia, Chocó, Córdoba, and Bolívar.

In a second moment, we explore the question, “Why did this happen to us?” In this section with more temporal distance, the musical productions propose more reflective lyrics regarding the consequences and perpetrators of the victimizing events. Coordination with other victims’ organizations created in the territory from 2002 and 2003 appears repeatedly and the audiovisual productions begin to have another level of technical specialization, as well as to include other sounds and to build video clips that tell stories through figures from the territory. The song INSURgentes Poesía de tierra^[12] [Insurgent Land Poetry]   a tribute to Mujeres Caminando por la Verdad, an organization of family members of victims of forced disappearance from Comuna 13. This collaboration was made between El Aka Hip Hop Agrario and Medina the Barrio.^[13] The former is one of the leaders of the collective Agroarte,^[14] an organization created in 2002 that through art and gardening has provided spaces for mourning and resignification of the waste dump.^[15] The second latter a music producer and researcher who has accompanied different processes of training and resistance through hip-hop.

The third section of the selection answers the question, “How to continue?” From a music scene that has become professionalized, the processes of resistance and construction of visualities have begun to articulate or follow struggles such as feminism, sexual and gender dissidence, and anti-racist struggles. An example of this is that organizations such as Casa Kolacho, a hip-hop cultural center, have implemented lines of work with girls and dissidents in their pedagogical processes. A sample of this collective work is ¿Quien elegiría?^[16][Who would chose]   trans singer Big Emma in collaboration with Alliizon Mc and Vero Bouquet. This is an audiovisual project that explores the violence exercised on the bodies associated with the feminine and particularly the experience of trans women. In addition to feminist lyrics, the video subverts national symbols from which trans women have been violated and systematically excluded: the police and the national anthem.

Finally, through the museum we produced videos of traditional music such as the alabaos of Socorro Mosquera, leader of the organization Asociación Mujeres de las Independencias AMI (Comuna 13), the group Alegrías del Atrato, and the Banda Paniagua. These works include experiences of several generations of Afrodescendants who largely came from areas such as Chocó to Comuna 13 of Medellín due to the armed conflict and in their daily work continue weaving ancestral cultural traditions through their organizational  .

In the midst of radical exclusion, state abandonment, and imminent risk, Afro communities have historically given life to cultural practices such as hip-hop and the alabaos, which, with their voices and bodies, have made individual and collective resistance possible across time and borders. Singing has been a tool of resistance that makes it possible to exhibit pain in a sensitive sphere involving the collective. It makes it possible to denounce, remember, reflect, and resignify the memories of all those people who have been condemned to be erased, denied, and violated. The collectivity generated by singing allows the encounter to create catharsis, to weave strategies for the protection of life, and to create a counterweight to the fact of being in the midst of violence and the rhetoric of war.

These reverberations of the modes of resistance of Afro communities are everywhere, even in a territory that has historically aspired to whiteness and all that it implies.

Healing the wounds of the armed conflict, as well as the wounds of neocoloniality, those old and entrenched pains through generations, implies collective exercises, made of real and not symbolic bodies, of lives that throb, hurt, and are moved by the cadence of the voice and the sound of a beat.