The moment I arrived home to Guate I felt strange energy. It's that feeling you get after leaving the creepy first world where everything is rigged to look good, but really isn't. Here, everything looks bad, and most of it is bad. The whole country seemed wet, drenched, like a wet dog staring at me before a bath. My father welcomed me with the story of driving by a bullet-holed police truck after three coordinated shootings against vehicles of the penitentiary system, orchestrated by drug lords from
in jail, killing three. There's no wonder why Guate is 3rd worldwide in homicides. Then followed a discussion with my brother during the windy highland drive towards Lake Atitlan, about Guatemalan problems and solutions. His view is simple: centralize power, alter the constitution to do so, come down hard on gangs and drug lords with brute force including torture and the use of the army, and elect a strong, charismatic leader who will amass political power to eradicate this amount of violence. My view: not so simple, structural explanations, international influences, anti-militarism, anti-torture, anti-constitution alteration, anti-centralized power. Who's view is more realistic? That's the problem, I have no idea. Realistic ceases to make any sense here. My brother wishes to stop violence and chaos with more violence. I wish to stop violence with 'politically correct' principles and theories. He has had my position in the past, and now he's tired of it, because his nails are worn to the nerve from scratching at the frustrating metal box that is violence. That once you're country is in it, and you want out, everything appears what it's not. And the walls seem to get thicker.
So with that, I listened to some Bob Dylan and we made it home safely. It was raining outside from the moment I flew in, to the moment I arrived home. Damp, everything was damp outside. Without my phone with numbers, and having not told anybody in the community I was coming, I was alone, at home, but not really home. And that's how I spent my first two days home, alienated from home and thinking about how fucked up this country is and how strange it is that my family exists as if in a bubble of illusory protection, and how it is that life just goes on here, despite the rain, despite the deaths, the terrorism, despite the metal box.
And life did go on. A volcano exploded in Antigua, closing the airport and cutting off tourism for the next few days. I was thankful I had made it in. It rained water, mostly, and a little sand and ashes, and rained... and rained. After having taken my dad to have ankle surgery, he was destined to bed-ridden-ness for the next few days. Saturday May 31st rolled around, and by mid, day I could tell that something was up with the amount of rain, and judging by our experience with Hurricane Stan's rains in 2005, something bad was going to happen. Even the rain sounded different, quieter, welcomed into the ground by heavy mud. Somehow, after about three days of rain, the birds were still singing. On Saturday, it rained a total of 3 feet, (1m) of water, superseding records, and river beds.
As I sat in the car staring out at the pouring rain, I filled the tank, anticipating being stranded from the outside world of essential resources, and Bob Dylan's a Hard Rain's Gonna Fall came on. "I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin."
It was disgusting to me, in a tragi-comic way, how the best word I could find to describe the situation on Facebook that evening was, "apocalypse?"
I saw how we welcomed this tragedy, in a nearly masochistic way. We stood by the rivers, waiting, documenting, nearly hoping to see something bad happen: a bridge fall in, the river rise, a house fall in. I saw language conjure a "disaster" out of nothingness. Everyone wanted to be the first to make others know of the severity of the situation, as well as the impending disaster. I saw how lots of rain turned into "Agatha," the tropical storm. I saw how "a landslide" turned into "landslides" that "wiped out X, Y and Z' s houses" that were "gone." I saw how landslides on roads turned into "roads completely destroyed." The exaggerations, although completely false, only served as a means with which to 'make something of' the scary situation. In talking about it in such terms, one's opinion and assessment was validated, and taken more seriously, one became the hero, who told the world the truth. The impact of the exaggerated language, unfortunately, didn't rival the severity of the material reality. Those signifiers and signifieds can only be experienced in person. The exaggerated language merely served as a way of coming to terms with, or coping with, the material reality that seems completely out of our control.
That night, "bajo el rio" (the river came down), an expression used here on Atitlan, where parts of towns are built on mainly river deltas due to growth, and after rains, it's expected that a sudden rush of water make it to the village slightly afterword, usually small enough for the bed to contain. Last Saturday at around 6:30pm the boulders in the rivers thundered through mud, trees, garbage in huge overflowing rivers, shaking the near-by ground, powerful enough to smash through entirely submerged homes, fill nearby houses with thick mud and create new riverbeds that didn't exist the day before. This happened to El Jaibalito, the Mayan town I grew up next door to. Luckily, people were evacuated that evening, or took to higher ground.
Sunday, the rain's slowed down, leaving behind region-wide, thousands evacuated, hundreds left homeless, 150 dead, and lots of money to be spent on roads and 32 unusable bridges. The inflammatory language was viral, and seemed to serve a soothing function.
I would come home and do my best to update my bed-ridden father about the state of his property, town and department. I had been to one of those houses that had been submerged. It's roof was gone, walls half-bashed in, completely emptied of its insides. Next to it was Aurelio Simon, a current construction employee of my father, salvaging the electricity breaker box of his light blue house. He was quiet and serious. He told me, "mucho problema aqui" (many problems here). I think of this as an expression sometimes used by indigenous in Atitlan used to describe anything that's unwanted that has entered life. It's used for social feuds, health problems, money problems, relationships, alcoholism, crime and in this case, disaster. In what was once the interior of his house, was a bright red, blue and yellow painting of the virgin Mary. Something about that touched me, and brought unwanted moisture to my eyes and that radiating tingly feeling through my nose, stomach, and throat. Was Virgin Mary his way of warding off "problemas?" How was he supposed to explain this? How does anyone explain unwanted, unexpected, undeserved, and unforeseeable loss? I want to think that the Virgin Mary protected the family by allowing them time to evacuate, and didn't permit the little piece of wall she's painted upon, nearly leveraged over the riverbed, to be destroyed, in order to leave them a message from God. Actually, that's what happened.
How do you get to the root of what's happening to your country when all you see is what surrounds you, badness? How do you explain what's happening to it without veering off into fantasy explanations, or self-serving intellectual martyrdom or guilt-trips? How do you manage when what you see and don't see leads you to extremism, and reality smacks you in the face every once in a while? How will Don Aurelio Simon manage? How will Guatemala manage?
"Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number...
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."
My friend Anand, who once was TA for an moving class, now doing research in anthropology, responded to my email from Delhi, India:
Far away from the comforts and consumption of Delhi, where I live, a civil war rages in the forests at the heart of my country. You might have read about this. Maoists, committed to violence against the state fighting for (and sometimes against) tribals who are being dispossessed by the state, so that the minerals under their lands and their forests can be easily exploited by big industry. It is a war far removed from me but the casualties are apparent even here, in Delhi. The river that I cross twice every day, the river that was once the life of the city, runs dead and black, killed by industrial effluent, sludge and sewage. Delhi is a massive groaning city of 18 million people, many of them smugly unaware of their relative privilege. Delhi's drinking water comes not from this river that we have killed, but piped from a massive dam built in the faraway mountains, a dam which displaced a few hundred thousand people. Delhi itself is a city built upon ruins and graveyards. A city built upon its own forgetting. A city birthed by violence which has nearly obliterated the memory of what a city could be -- not at war with its own people and everything around it, not a pillager upon the land; but in harmony with itself, and with nature. Perhaps when you are here, I will show you some of those ruins. But you seem to have seen ruins enough in Guatemala.
This is not a poetic exaggeration but a sober statement of fact -- the world we live in has never been so fucked up. This has been true for every generation since the late nineteenth century, (or arguably even further, since the beginning of "modernity"). The world that we've all lived in, generation after generation, has gone catastrophically wrong in a way that could never even have been imagined previously. What can we do? It is important to do what you are doing, to truly witness what is going wrong; to be moved by what we are losing. For not enough people see it at all. People are too cocooned by false comfort, in the belief that life is the best it can be, and going to get better. To bear witness to the truth, to prove this "first world" notion (not just restricted to the first world) false seems to be the best we can do. There were lines you left out of the Dylan song, which kind of answer the how to deal with and what to do questions with which you ended your mail --
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
None of it is easy. The burden of witnessing never is. And it leaves us marked and scarred and forever changed. But I'm glad you're carrying that burden. For your corner of Guate, and for the world.
A cousin from Chicago responded:
this was an incredible email. i was on the train this monring on my way to work, surrounded by all the everyday downtown people, in some ac-cool train shoulded to shoulder with Iphones, blackberry clicking and red-eye newspapers, with the smell of bad cafe in the air. ( my half ass attempt at setting a backdrop)
i had the articles and pictures in my head of the storm and damage mixed in with all the people and almost pretend worried feeling, because im so distant from it and have no real way of connecting to it, honestly i was more worried about your dad and he's surgery.
i see the email come into my phone and decide to give the primo benj first eyes in the morning look at he's email.
withing 2 lines i was transporting myself into your head, i guess it was like a 3'rd person view of your week. i felt like i was in the crazy curves of the mountains and the ups and downs, bumpy roads and talking to tian, i can see exactly where he's points come from and i see myself answering alot like you. i lost track of time and space, missed my stop by 3. at one point i felt hot and humid, but i was really cold and dry. if i had better words or a more extensive vocab i would go on telling you how crazy this was, but im kinda dumb that way so. It was great writing and i truly saw it and felt it.
thanks for making that possible for me, here in rigid 1st world country Chicago.
