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Chapter 3

Being Human

Being is … not only a belonging but a becoming.

—Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling

MY EXPERIENCES IN Peru have convinced me that the work of postconflict social repair involves reconstructing the human. Although it may sound clichéd to speak about “dehumanizing violence,” listening to how campesinos describe the sasachakuy tiempo confirms that dehumanizing is precisely the word that best captures how people experienced the war. People tearfully recall that “we lived and died like dogs” and “we had to leave our dead loved ones wherever they were. They ended up as animals”—referring to having seen dogs and pigs gorging themselves on the cadavers. In the aftermath of fratricidal violence—in contexts in which people are fully aware of what they and their neighbors are capable of—people ask what it means to be a human being now.¹

In Andean communities, the status of “human being” is acquired.² One accumulates the characteristics that transform criaturas (babies and small children) into runakuna. Most people concurred that babies are not born with souls. With the exception of the “very Evangelicals”—as opposed to the chawa (halfway) Evangelicals—villagers explained that babies acquire their souls when they are about two years old. It is because their souls are not “well stuck” to their bodies that babies are very susceptible to susto (soul loss due to fright). In this stage, babies and toddlers are considered sonsos (senseless).³

Another characteristic criaturas acquire is the uso de razón—the use of reason, a supremely important faculty. In addition to making us more fully human, this concept is fundamental to the assessment of accountability. The term cuts across social fields: in the religious sense, it is the age at which a child can commit sin; in the political sense, it is related to accountability as a member of the community; in a legal sense, it refers to the capacity to discern right from wrong. Children are said to acquire the uso de razón around the age of six or seven; this is also the age at which children are said to remember things.

Just as the uso de razón makes criaturas more fully human, so does the accumulation of memory. When parents spoke about their children, they differentiated between the younger and older children by using yuyaniyuq for the older ones. Yuyay is Quechua for “remember,” and the older children are described as the remembering ones, in contrast to little children who are sonsos. People with mucha memoria are considered better people, more intelligent, and they have more conciencia.

The question of conscience and culpability figures into legal standards as well. In the Diccionario para Juristas, uso de razón is defined as “possession of natural discernment that is acquired passing through early childhood; the time during which discernment is discovered or begins to be recognized in the acts of the child or individual.”⁴ Discernimiento refers to the capacity to judge, to choose, to distinguish. Thus uso de razón implies volition, memory, and the capacity to judge right from wrong. This is a central phase in becoming a moral person and entering communal life as an accountable member of the collective.

Just as one acquires humanizing qualities, so may they be lost. The mutability of identity is a central psychocultural theme. In Quechua, uriway refers to the transference of the essence of one life form to another. For instance, El Piki runs a cuy (guinea pig) over his patients as a diagnostic tool. After several passes, he cuts open the cuy and can read the illness there; the signs have transferred from the internal organs of his patient to the animal. Many Andean stories concern human beings who can transform themselves into animals, springs, trees—and convert themselves back into human form.⁵ Recall the people who explained why it had taken the security forces so long to capture Abimael Guzmán: “He could change himself into a rock, a bird, a river—and the police only thought to look for a man.” Thus the capacity to transform oneself is imbued with ambivalence: it can be dehumanizing or a form of power. This transference can also occur through no volition of one’s own, with devastating results. It is how villagers explained what had happened to wawa Gloria.

* * *

Wawa Gloria (baby Gloria) was a round toddler who had caught my eye many times, her ponytail bobbing on top of her head as she half-walked, half-crawled around Carhuahurán. Yolanda, Edith, and Gloria’s sister Marina would sometimes carry her over with them, bouncing her on their backs in a shawl. At other times she came on her own, pulling herself fully to her feet and peeking around the door.

One day I told the girls “I’m next in line” to give wawa Gloria some hugs. They passed her over, and I took her in my arms, resting my head lightly on hers. We sat in the sun, visitors coming and going as I felt the warmth of her baby breath against my chest. The women who came by began joking that I looked like I wanted to keep her. They weren’t too far off.

I finally felt her stirring, her top-knot rubbing against my chin. Marina told me she would take her home since it was time to begin late afternoon water-fetching and fire-starting chores. As I passed her to Marina, I realized there were a few spots of toddler poop on my sleeve. Although babies were usually wrapped in cloth, toddlers didn’t wear diapers. The moms would just lift their clothes, let them relieve themselves on the spot, and then wipe them down with a cloth.

Before going to bed that night, I threw the clothes I’d been wearing that day into a bag: sun permitting, I would wash clothes the next day. Sun did not permit, so the bag sat in the humid corner for a few days until the clouds cleared and the thought of frigid water was bearable.

I gathered up my Bolivar soap, scrub brush, and bag of clothes and walked down the hill to the river. I found my favorite small pool and rock, and went to pull my clothes out of the bag. When I opened the bag, something seemed to be moving. I recoiled: mice in my room were a constant, but I never grew accustomed to them. I kicked the bag upside down with my foot, but no furry creature emerged. Keeping my distance was part of the plan, so a stick replaced my foot. I turned the clothes over, trying to figure out what was moving. I finally narrowed the movement down to my long-sleeved green shirt, the one I had worn when cuddling wawa Gloria. It was moving. A few more pokes revealed why: the left sleeve—the one that I’d cradled under Gloria’s little bottom—was alive with worms. They rolled over one another, squirming in the sun. That round baby belly was full of parasites.

After I washed my clothes, I headed to the health post to let them know wawa Gloria had a bad case of parasites. Manlio, the nurse, nodded: “Almost all of the children have them. They drink unboiled water, they eat dirt—there isn’t much we can do.”

“But wawa Gloria is so chubby. She’s so big for her age,” I commented, a bit perplexed.

“Kimberly, how old do you think she is?”

“A little over a year, no?”

Manlio went behind his desk and pulled out his files. Searching a bit, he found Gloria’s. “Gloria is three-and-a-half years old. She’s had malnutrition her whole life. She seems to have some kidney problem, which is why she is chubby. But she’s terribly delayed.” I was stunned. She could barely walk, didn’t speak a word. Manlio winced as he saw the look on my face. “Don’t waste your time on that one. It’s too late to do anything.”

The next day I watched her and felt awful. I was writing about it in my journal when Víctor came by. He was about eleven, shy and skinny. He frequently visited, and just as frequently sat quietly in my room, watching the endless activity of the other children.

“Víctor, what’s the matter with wawa Gloria? What do you think she has?”

He knew. “It’s uriwasqa [uriway]. Gloria must have been playing with a frog when she was littler. The frog grabbed hold of her and took her body.”

“But Víctor, how do we know it was a frog?”

“It had to be a frog. Look how small she is, and she doesn’t speak. It was a frog. If it had been a parrot, she would talk a lot. If it had been a cow, she’d have a huge tongue that reached up to her nose. No, it was definitely a frog that grabbed her,” Víctor patiently explained. Evidently that frog never let her go.

Uriway was common and influenced how people think of life forms and human status. There were many transformations during the violence, and identities were in flux. There were the massive conversions to Evangelical Christianity that characterized the highlands of Huanta. The guerrillas could assume a variety of shapes. There were villagers who transformed into anticristos (the antichrists) and malafekuna (the people of bad faith/bad conscience), ceasing to be people. Mutability is a resource: enemies who at one time had “fallen out of humanity” can convert into people again, seeking reentry into the community of humankind.

An Emotional Education

In the alturas of Huanta, many people experienced the sasachakuy tiempo as a cultural revolution—an assault on a way of life, shared meaning, symbols, and moral codes. Tumultuous upheavals may provoke explicit discussions regarding the content of culture as individuals engage in the everyday work of social reconstruction. There was tremendous talk about who people had been—individually and collectively—before and during the violence, as well as what sort of people they would be now. This talk was part of remoralizing the world: redefining cultural norms and managing affect was one component of these discussions.

Richard Shweder and E. J. Bourne suggested the term “sociocentric” to refer to cultures that value interconnectedness among people.⁶ From this perspective, we are who we are because of the social relations that define us, that give us our identity—an identity that changes according to the social context. Psychological theories predicated upon the bounded, sovereign individual have limited applicability when working with groups whose life is more oriented toward the collective. The atomized individual is neither the developmental goal nor the norm within Quechua-speaking communities, and individual members of the community will be reminded in many ways that the collective good takes precedence over individual interests.

An important part of one’s emotional education includes kuyachicuyta yachana (learning how to make others love you). Love is something one must inspire or generate in another person rather than being a “natural” or latent emotion just looking for an object upon which to focus. For example, women were candid: some children knew how to make their mothers love them, and others did not.⁷ A mother’s love was not unconditional but rested in great measure upon a child learning how to be lovable and to act in such a way as to elicit that emotion.⁸

With kuyachicuyta yachana, boys and girls (and adults in rituals such as weddings) learn and are reminded of the centrality of exchange in social relations, as well as the importance of conflict-avoidance mechanisms. The capacity to produce positive emotions in another person is a sign of maturity in a face-to-face context in which retributive emotions are disruptive and potentially dangerous.⁹ Rather than a concept of the self that places value on the degree of separation achieved from others, solidarity and interconnectedness are valued. And this solidarity and coexistence require a continual effort to maintain them. As Catherine Allen has noted, there are few channels in daily life for the direct expression of negative emotions; even brief interactions among runakuna are marked by elaborate expressions of mutual esteem.¹⁰ “Harmony ideology” functions on the interpersonal and communal levels, cloaking perpetual conflict in a florid idiom of courtesy.¹¹

One component of this relational model is a high level of permeability between the interior and the exterior. Rather than a model of the human being with a clearly defined internal world, there is tremendous fluidity between the social environment and the person. For instance, several curanderos explained how they cure susto. One effective treatment is qayapa, which consists of repeatedly calling the patient’s soul, requesting that it return. Calling the soul is complemented by identifying the place in which the person suffered susto and taking an article of the patient’s clothing to that spot. The soul, upon recognizing the clothing, “sticks” to it and can thus be reunited with the person. The clothing beckons to the soul. The theory that clothing carries something of the person’s essence also plays a role in mourning and rituals of death. For Dionisia, the bits and pieces of her son’s clothing strewn throughout the house made it impossible to forget the horror of his death and his distant burial. Gathering the clothing into a sealed sack was to alleviate her lacerating memories. More generally, after someone dies the soul of the deceased remains present, revisiting the sites frequented during the person’s life. On the fifth day following the death, family members of the deceased wash his or her clothing so the soul can begin its journey to heaven. If the clothing is not washed, the soul cannot free itself and will continue wandering this earth without finding peace; during this transitional phase, the wandering soul is potentially dangerous to the human beings it encounters. For a year following someone’s death, his or her clothing is stored in a folded shawl (manta). Once the year of mourning is finished, family members open the shawl and distribute the clothing the soul has left behind.

Clothing is also important for practicing the witch’s craft. Because an article of clothing carries the person’s essence, having it helps the witches more effectively cast their spells. The power of this was made clear when people in the highlands of Huanta described how they burned the clothing of the Senderistas they had killed: those flames finished off the terrucos. The essence of the person extends beyond their skin; the surface of the skin does not mark the person’s bodily boundaries. That which is inside and outside are connected, and a human being is primordially defined by his or her mutable social environment. This is a thoroughly “social body.” Madness is social as well.

Madness

We were like crazy people [loca qina karaniku]. We went around like crazy people then. There was so much death! It was like another life [huk vida].

—Juliana Morales, Hualla, April 2003

If indeed llakis constitute the most common category of suffering, they find their complement in two expressions that dominated conversations about the sasachakuy tiempo: “We were like crazy people” (loca qina karaniku) and “as though we were in a dream” (muspaypi qina karaniku).¹² We begin with two conversations about madness, attuned to how figures of madness emerged within the context of the internal armed conflict and its aftermath. The discourse of madness is a domain of knowledge that can tell us a great deal about intimate violence, cosmic upheaval, and moral transgression.

Dulia and I were talking with mama Zenaida one morning when someone registered in my peripheral vision.¹³ It was a tall woman whose hat was adorned with flowers of various colors, and she was heading toward us. Her determined stride sent the layers of her blue skirts swaying back and forth. She stopped in front of me: “Are you the people who are gathering testimonies about the violence?”

Dulia nodded. “Yes, we are.”

She expressed her interest in talking with us, and mama Zenaida quickly excused herself and left. Her reaction was perplexing. Normally she was very friendly. I asked the woman standing before me, “What happened? Why did she act that way with you?”

Victoria looked up and down the street to see if anyone was watching us. Then she replied, “There are people here who’re afraid of me because of my husband. But we can’t talk here—I’m afraid. Come to my house and there we can talk woman to woman.” She insisted we visit her that same afternoon.

We went to her house later that day, and one of her children let us in. At the back of the room Victoria was seated with her children and grandchildren, who continued playing boisterously while we talked. She offered us sheepskins so we could sit beside her and began to talk while we threshed corn. She seemed quite anxious, her words tumbling out as quickly as possible. Over and over again she insisted, “I suffer so much. The violence left us poor. We were going to have work, the schools were going to improve—but when this problem began everyone left, even SINAMOS [a government agency]. Where did they go? That’s how it was.”

“And now—are these things still lacking, mama Victoria?” I asked.

“Yes, but hopefully they’ll come back.” She shrugged before adding, “If Dios Tayta wants them to return, then they will. In Matthew [chapter] 24, Dios Tayta says, ‘The mother will kill her children, and the children will kill their mother.’ That’s how it will be when it’s the end of time [tukupay tiempupi]. That’s how it will be when time runs out. That’s what God wanted.”

“So it was a time of killing among families, neighbors?” prompted Dulia.

“Yes,” she replied, emphatically nodding her head. “That’s what it said in the words of God. In Matthew, those words made me understand because I was so frightened by these things. Then a woman warned me, ‘Don’t be afraid even when they kill in front of you because we are in the last days. We should kneel down to save our souls. We need to ask God to save us. He will save us. If He wants, not even a bullet can kill us.’ She made me understand these words. It made my heart stronger. Since she warned me, I was no longer afraid. That’s how I began to know the evangelio [Evangelical church].”

“So the evangelio arrived during that time?”

“Yes, since that time the evangelio appeared. With this violence we all went mad. There was so much death! With the violence, we were like crazy people. My head aches when I remember these things. During those years, I was like a crazy person.” Her face changed and she stopped threshing the corn. She raised her hands and touched her chest forcefully, thanking God for the healing she had found in the evangelio. “The word of God reached my heart like water, refreshing me. And the word calmed my thirst.”

She waited a moment before she began speaking again. “Señora Margarita, she also went crazy.” Victoria’s face grew sad as she remembered. “Ya, with her head gone mad [uman locayarusqa] from having seen people dying in front of her. She went crazy. She wandered from one place to another. She reached Huancapi and threw herself in front of cars. ‘Let these cars kill me,’ she said, and threw herself in front of them. She grabbed a knife, giving it to people so they could stab her in her chest. ‘Stab me with this, I can’t do it alone,’ she pleaded. To the hermanos [members of the church] she gave them sticks and asked them to strike her in the head. ‘I can’t stand anymore of this!’ Oh, she pleaded so desperately.”

“What happens when a person goes crazy?”

“When a person goes crazy, day is no longer day, night is no longer night. It’s night all of the time. That’s why they like to be in the darkness, a darkness that would scare any one of us. ‘I’ve seen hell,’ she said. ‘Hell reeks horribly,’ she said. ‘Everyone has horns there—goats with horns, cows with horns, everyone has horns in hell.’ But a healthy person, healthy with God, can’t see those things. That’s how it is. ‘Papá Dios made me see these things,’ she said. That’s why she also sought the word of God. ‘I’m going to leave here, leave the darkness,’ she said. That poor woman—morning and night she sang songs of the souls [for the dead]. She said her head burned and she kept putting mud on her head. She would wrap her head in mud because it burned, and walking in circles she’d sing the songs of the souls.”

“Mama Victoria, what happened to her?” asked Dulia.

“She went crazy. She was weak in her thoughts. I also wrapped my head in a chumbi all of the time. At what hour will we die? That thought was in my head, and my head was wrapped day and night.”

“And how was that—to feel mad? How did you feel then?”

“You don’t recognize day and night. You cry, singing songs of the dead.”

* * *

Juanjo and I were walking through the streets of Tiquihua, hoping to find someone home.¹⁴ It was early afternoon and most people were either working in their chacras (agricultural land) or pasturing their animals. Only the tiniest children and older women were at home. Peering over a wall, I saw a woman lethargically sweeping her small patio. I greeted her and she answered, but she turned her back again and kept sweeping. We approached her house and asked if we could join her. She nodded and waved us into her house. She looked Juanjo up and down: “Those guerrilleros [Senderistas] came here just like you—young people. Like you,” she repeated, inclining her head toward Juanjo. We explained that we were there to work, and she poured us each a cup of hot barley water (café de cebada).

Señora Julia Rojas was forty-five and had lived in Tiquihua during the violence. At first she had her children with her, but then her husband was brutally killed. After losing him, the political violence and poverty forced her to send her four children away to live with family members on the coast.

“My husband died, my uncles, my cousins—so many members of my family died that there weren’t enough coffins to bury them.” She cried as she remembered. “So my soul—I don’t know where it might have gone. I was alone and the wives of the dead were crying. Their bodies were scattered around. They [the killers] had taken their ponchos and they were nude. They’d also taken their pants. They were innocent! I cried like a crazy person and I had no one. I had no one to tell.” She was silent for a moment, staring at the space in front of her.

“May I ask how they killed them?”

“They shot my husband here,” placing her hand on her shoulder. “When they shot him he began to cry out ‘call my wife’ so that I could carry him. My husband called my name. ‘Julia! Come quickly.’ And they told him, ‘Shut up you motherfucker. Kill him, shit. Kill him,’ and they killed him again in the mouth so he shut up.¹⁵ So he didn’t have a face—it was just a hole. I cried like crazy. We walked like crazy people seeing so many dead people, scattered everywhere. It was another life. We were like crazy people! I saw the dead scattered, without pants. They’d taken their good shirts.”

Her crying was contagious, her tears falling across a face prematurely aged by pain. “I had to bury everyone alone, being careful they didn’t come back to kill me and my children. That’s why I had to send my children to Lima. They sent for me later, but it wasn’t the same. I felt useless with everyone taking care of me. I decided to come back to my chacra because at least here I can take care of myself. When I returned, my house was empty—only the walls were standing. I fixed the roof, and I cleaned the patio. I was like a crazy person. I’m still like that. I feel different. We can’t forget the dead. Seeing so many dead scattered around, full of blood! As if you wouldn’t feel pain for people like you! Having so much sadness, you cry, thinking, ‘That’s how they’ll kill me, tomorrow or the day after.’ What curse could they be, those plagakuna [people of the plague, i.e., Senderistas] who came here? What mother or father could have given birth to them [implying the Senderistas had sprung from the devil himself]?”

* * *

People overwhelmingly invoked collective madness when they referred to the sasachakuy tiempo. Certainly villagers recognize individual pathology, which makes the emphasis on the collective nature of the madness even more striking. This emphasis on a disorder larger than one’s own, larger than a personal or family issue, conveys a great deal about living through catastrophic upheaval.¹⁶ The emergence of collective madness offers social and political commentary about a world in disarray, in which no one seemed capable of responding to villagers’ demands for an end to the killing and for the reestablishment of a humane social order. At the community level many authorities were targeted for killing or co-optation. In certain regions Shining Path established “liberated zones” and appointed their own authorities, who frequently administered arbitrary and brutal forms of control. There were also armed agents of the state who at times failed in their duty to protect civilians and at others committed abuses against them. Magnifying the ambient terror was the fear that even family members and neighbors were capable of treachery. Many villagers lamented that there was no earthly authority one could turn to or trust. This was a world in which the bewildering loss of context resulted in subjects radically unmoored from the moral limits that tethered life to some sense of predictability, to “social sanity.”

The searing proximity of the violence resonates with Begoña Aretxaga’s work on narratives of madness in post-Franco Spain. Her research on radical nationalist youth in the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) movement shares the themes of intimate violence and collective madness that haunted my conversations in Ayacucho. She found the question of madness was linked to forms of intimate violence that defied comprehension and produced profound shock. The familiarity of local youth turned perpetrators transgressed the moral boundaries of local communities, resulting in violence perpetrated by a “familiar turned stranger.” Narratives of collective madness acknowledged that reality was “de-realized” all the more for occurring within the boundaries of the socially familiar. Importantly, in contrast with individual madness, which does not threaten the premises of the social order, collective madness “blurs the very distinction between madness and sanity and thus turns reality upside down.”¹⁷

A world turned upside down can be taken literally when working with Andean communities, in which the concept pachakuti extends back to the time of the Incan empire. Pacha is a Quechua word meaning earth, time, and space, and kuti refers to overturning something or turning it back. Pachakuti is part of a millennial understanding of time and space, in which one world dramatically ends and another begins. For instance, recall the gentiles who were punished with a rain of fire for being corrupt, envious, and sinful. They were punished collectively, as a people, and their time on this earth came to an end. This historical consciousness endures, albeit under a different guise. Villagers lamented that they had become envious and hateful; that family members and neighbors were sinful; and that corruption reigned. Taken together, these signs meant the Apocalypse was at hand, and the fact the plagakuna and devil’s children walked this earth confirmed its imminence.

For Quechua speakers, there are three pachas, interacting yet distinct. Kay pacha is “this world,” the physical world we apprehend and traverse. It also constitutes a middle world lying between the hanan pacha (upper world, traditionally home to various deities) and the uku pacha (the lower or inner world, home to the wicked).¹⁸ For the Spanish colonizers and their missionary legions, these three worlds were glossed as earth, heaven, and hell.

Although these three dimensions of time and space have always intermingled, the sasachakuy tiempo threw these pachas into disorder. The uku pacha is normally invisible to the living and cloaked in darkness, with spirits that may emerge at night and frequent people’s dreams. However, as we see in the two conversations above, people were terrified as day and night blurred to the point of being indistinguishable and the underworld appeared in all its stench. During the sasachakuy tiempo it was this world (kay pacha) that was hellish. Magnifying the hellish aspects were the changes in norms and in moral codes, summed up by the passage from Matthew 24: “The mother will kill her children and the children will kill their mother.” Family members and neighbors were killing each other, and many times people insisted the killing began because the Devil himself had grabbed them—or spawned them. This was a cosmic disorder.

The rituals that gave meaning to life were also interrupted and, confronted with so much death, people were unable to hold wakes or bury their loved ones properly, which had implications for the fate of their souls. They died a “bad death,” which has repercussions in the lives of their loved ones.¹⁹ Their clothes were also taken, so there was no way to tend to their souls and send them on their way to another dimension of time and space. Thus the unburied dead can become a danger to the living, either by beckoning them to follow or by placing demands from beyond. Additionally, qala (the Quechua word for “naked”) has been used to describe mestizos and gringos—beings who are not runakuna, not “people like us.” The emphasis on nakedness invokes bodies made strange, bodies rendered less than fully human.

In Ayacucho, what is termed “popular religion” played a key role both in implementing the violence and in coping with its aftermath. Bible stories have been a key semiotic resource for people confronted with “limit experiences” and have offered a language to express altered life and the rupture with reality. Religious imagery offered damnation and salvation amid a period of violence people commonly explained as a sign of grave spiritual disorder, a result of humankind’s sins and Dios Tayta’s retribution. When the outbreak of war is understood as grave spiritual disorder—as in part a question of sin and punishment—then religious signifiers may become the reiterative images of both collective madness and its superation. The concept of collective madness condenses this spiritual, moral, and political collapse and reminds us that long before madness was defined as a medical or psychological problem, it was understood to be a spiritual phenomenon.

* * *

When I arrived in Ayacucho in 1994, I arrived in a space full of stories, many oddly familiar to me. I was enveloped in The Greatest Story Ever Told, at times thumbing through a copy of the Bible to see what might happen next or to remind myself how a particular story might end. There is much more to be said about the Evangelical Christianities people elaborated in the context of the internal armed conflict and its aftermath. This discussion involves theologies of war and of reconciliation, involves the religious imagination and its creative exercise.²⁰ I agree with Daniel Philpott that “more attention to local and community level faith-based actors who help populations deal with the past would fill an important gap in our knowledge of religion and transitional justice.”²¹ We begin with one of the first Quechua-speaking pastors to travel throughout rural Ayacucho. He recounted the history of Evangelismo during the many hours we spent in his Clinic of the Soul.