Log: Violence

Today we are in Lofou, a small village located 20 minutes north from Paramytha. It is another dreamy place that has preserved its beautiful stone architecture. In the café-restaurant that we sit at, a calm and cool atmosphere gives peace. We are surrounded by books, ceramics, dried plants, wood, art, the blue sky and a green garden.

I have Javier Darío Restrepo’s Pensamientos: Discursos de ética y periodismo with me, which I read from a beautifully and simply designed armchair. Pensamientos reminds me of home. Life feels joyful.

And yet, whenever I pull up a map, I am reminded that we are now just off the coast of Lebanon. Perhaps an hour-long flight from Gaza. If I zoom out, I notice that we are on the same longitude as Ukraine, we share the same time zone.

I was born surrounded by violence, but in Bogotá, you are always on your guard, even if the city is safer now than what it used to be, and a lot safer than what other parts of Colombia are still like today. Here, in this idyllic village, however, the contrast feels starker, somehow.

During a brief period in my early adulthood, (outright) war between nations went from feeling unthinkable to almost inevitable. I know this isn’t true, violence and injustice have been and continue to be ever-present. The turn of the century was incredibly bloody for Colombia with the "war on drugs." But it does feel that now there has been a broader mental shift: that before war and violence were somehow more unacceptable globally, and so different actors undertook violence in slyer and stealthier ways. Political discourse around military attacks and violent action was not so forthright. Some people may say, as has been said about Trump, “at least they’re being honest now, showing their true colors.”

However, I don’t agree. I think that the fact that a full-scale war was “unthinkable” for many people was a good thing. The fact that we have mental red lines is important, even if humanity does not always live up to these standards. To me, the goal should be to denounce and expose the ways governments, businesses, and individuals get around what is deemed right and the ways in which they have been hypocritical. We should hold them accountable for that lofty discourse on peace and tolerance, make them meet the standard, instead of giving in and making war and violence an “acceptable” and “inevitable” part of our everyday in the name of "honesty".

For a long time, I’ve felt a natural pull towards pacifism. However, I understood well the people who critiqued it, we need to defend ourselves from those who commit harm after all, don’t we? We need to be able to fight back, right? What’s the alternative?

While I don’t have any answers, I have realized I need to listen to that instinct that protests against violence, conflict, and war. It is an instinct that has been coupled with a life-long interest in literature and art that expresses and describes the ravages of violence, systematized: from Primo Levi, Tim O’Brien and Harper Lee to Maryse Condé, Alain Resnais, and Isabel Allende. It was first the memoirs from Holocaust survivors followed by the accounts of the military dictatorships in South America and then the testimony of the brutality of slavery in the Caribbean that have over time constructed my conviction for justice and accountability, but also at the same time, for nunca más.

“Never again” is always associated with World War II, but in Colombia, never again continues to be called for even as Colombians continue to suffer and die every day due to ongoing violence. Our “armed conflict” is unique in the way that the categories of victims and victimizer are not always so neatly separated. As the writer Rodolfo Celis Serrano describes in his autobiographic shorts on life in the Usme neighborhood of Bogotá: the things that he did while living under the threat of violence bring him shame and guilt. Celis was displaced from his home, a victim of the armed groups that took over the territory, and yet he himself complicates the category of “victim” by highlighting his own guilt. In Colombia, we have to reckon with reintegrating combatants and civilians of all types into peaceful communal living, while at the same time trying to balance this with the pursuit of justice and accountability.

And there are so many Colombian thinkers and artists and activists that have been working through the inherent paradoxes of prolonged and systemic violence for years.

One of them was Javier Darío Restrepo, who I am currently reading. For my next log entry, the “September Reads” entry. I want to reflect on Restrepo’s writing along with the work of Jean Giono, another author who I also read and rediscovered this month.

Their writing has given much to think about what peace means, as real action and not just a “utopian” concept. In their writing, I’ve found that same visceral rejection to war and violence—that it is senseless at its core, even with all the justifications that we try to dress it up with. In their writing, I’ve also confirmed that this rejection of war does not entail sacrificing strong convictions about rights and wrongs, it doesn’t equal apathy or “neutrality” in the face of cruelty, injustice, and inhumanity.

“El carácter del conflicto, su prolongación en el tiempo, la complejidad y multitud de los elementos en juego, el constante juego de la desinformación—que no es accidental sino parte de la táctica guerrera—, crean una atmósfera de confusión tal que la gente muere todos los días sin saber por qué muere”. – Javier Darío Restrepo, Pensamientos (p. 221)

« Il faut sinon se moquer, en tout cas se méfier des bâtisseurs d’avenir. Surtout quand pour battre l’avenir des hommes à naître, ils ont besoin de faire mourir des hommes vivants ». – Jean Giono, Refus d’obéissance (p. 14)

- Andrea