My days in Colombia begin by walking to the cafe around the corner from my house. Sinfully for the standards of this country, I am not a coffee drinker. I request for my drink to be as diluted with milk as the barista can handle without judgment. He has asked me every morning, without fail: “Leche normal?” With normal milk?
As a feminist who is accustomed to interrogating what counts as normal and who gets to accord normalcy, I was initially taken aback by this designation of milk.
Thinking I perhaps had not fully appreciated my options, the barista continued: “2%? Soy? Light?”
“Oh. Whole milk, please,” I replied.
In subsequent days, the conversation would repeat itself. “Normal milk?,” he; “Whole milk,” I, in hopeful delusion that coffee shop corrections are their own tiny revolutions.
I have been returning there for most days this year. Now, when I walk in the door, I am greeted with jubilant familiarity. “Roxani! Your drink, yes? Lots of milk! Normal milk.” I nod complicitly and issue no corrections.
* * *
“Today, Greece takes a new step towards normality.”
These were the words of Pierre Moscovici, EU Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs on August 20, 2018.
The occasion that merited this pronouncement was the conclusion of a bailout program that has dictated the terms of the Greek economy for eight years.
I greeted the news from Colombia, coffee with normal milk in hand. Nearly two years earlier, the then President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, stood in front of the United Nations and stated: “I want to announce with all the force of my voice and my heart that the war in Colombia has ended.”
I wonder where normalcy comes from (a tweet in Brussels) and what the authority on it looks like (a white man in a suit). What is ending today in Greece? What has allegedly ended in Colombia? What is this ‘normal’ to which we are all allegedly returning?
* * *
The “Day of the Little Candles” is the unofficial start of the Christmas season in Colombia. From the overnight bus to the Meta region, between scenes of explosions from the Jackie Chan movie blaring overhead, I catch glimpses of candles melting by the front doors of houses. When I emerge on the other side, I am greeted by dawn mosquitoes and a tiny plastic cup of cafe tinto. No milk.
I board a vehicle to the zone of combatants who are transitioning out of an armed group. When I arrive, the ground is dotted with melted candle wax and beer caps formed in the shape of a heart.
The zone is called “transitional zone of normalization.” In its short existence since the peace accord was signed, the program for combatants formally disarming has had many names, and so have the geographies that correspond to it. These spaces have been called, variously, zones of “reinsertion,” “reintegration,” “reincorporation.”
Though the nouns themselves change, the politics hide in the prefix: “re.” What is the “re” available to these former combatants in a life marked by ruptures? They lived through the rupture of joining an armed group, the ruptures of a war, the often ignored ruptures of leaving an armed group that, for some, supplied not only a livelihood, but also a sense of protection, politics, community, and self.
Perhaps normalization is the honest term, after all. It renders effort visible–the effort of making something normal — even as it conveniently sidesteps the question of what normalcy might be.
* * *
Things that have become normal, an incomplete list.
Waking up in the middle of the night to a screaming or sobbing phone call from a family member, telling you that your childhood home was burglarized. Calling the police to report the incident and being able to hear the officer shrug over the phone. “You see, madam, people are desperate here.”
You are a madam now.
Normalization: The imagined straight line from despair to violence.
Things that have become normal: You avoid the postman. He only ever brings bills and bills bring arguments. You avoid the electricity bill in particular because that is what the extra taxes are slapped onto. Normalization: Greeks eating dinner in the dark.
Your money tracking software wants to know if you sent a payment in error. “Roxani, this is your third wire transfer this month,” it says in digitized compassionate concern.
Normalization: Your entire salary flies to Greece before it ever touches the ground in your own life. The only one surprised by this is your digital money tracking software.
* * *
There is something about these occasions that triggers a reaction akin to the day after a birthday, a wedding, a divorce. I look in the mirror and wonder if I look older. More married? Less married? Bureaucracies pronounce people as being on the other side of a milestone. They accord identities and separate time: Before joining an armed group, during the war, after demobilization. Before the financial crisis. During the austerity measures. After the bailout. Before marriage, after marriage, after the end of marriage.
Much of the dissonance of a life in transition emerges in the moments when one’s own notion of self and time does not match the prepositions.
* * *
I am sitting with “Maria” in her prefabricated accommodation in the transition zone for former combatants. The walls do not go all the way up to meet the tin roof. When the wind blows, it rains dust on Maria’s bed.
She tells me that she misses living in the jungle. “Not the war, not the weapon. The jungle.”
I ask whether that is a possibility for her, for her life ‘after.’ “Could you go back to the jungle to live? Once your… process here is complete?” Everyone seems to use the word ‘process’ in Colombia to refer to any bureaucracy related to the war, but there is something uncomfortable about it, like using “journey” as a euphemism for a difficult pregnancy or a recovery from cancer. “Could you go back after your demobilization is complete?,” I try again.
Maria’s face contracts. “I am not demobilized,” she tells me, raising her voice. “Demobilization is a castration. I am disarmed and will stay disarmed. But, in my heart, in my politics, I am still a guerrillera.”
What does it mean to still be a guerrillera in a world that has pronounced the war over, that has done so on a premise of relegating guerrilleras to the past, that requires that side of oneself to be ‘normalized’? For Maria, it means a refusal to live separately from herself.
* * *
“Soldiers get to be veterans. Veterans for life. I am a victim for life.”
I am talking to “Antonio,” after having accompanied him to a capacity building workshop. “Capacity building” is almost an allergen in Colombia during the period after the peace accords were signed. As a different interlocutor told me, “workshops are an epidemic.” The language of pathogens circulates freely during the-time-of-not-war-not-peace.
During the workshop, a state bureaucrat told Antonio and fellow victims of the armed conflict that “the war is over,” that “there will not be any more victims, not even one.” There was a lot of talk of superación, of overcoming — not just the harms of the war, but also “the condition of victim.”
To Antonio, this suggestion is offensive because it disregards — and erases — the violence that lives on in his community, in his home, in his body, in the very bureaucratic agency in which our conversation is taking place.
“I am a victim for life,” in this case, is not a passive surrender. It is an act of agency — a declaration of resistance to the pronouncement of time as having moved on in ways that do not correspond to the truth in people’s bodies.
* * *
In defiance of all I have learned, I checked my bills in Greece today. I looked in the mirror to see if something would feel different now that an institution has pronounced an era of hardship to have ended, now that another white man in a suit has welcomed us to “normality.”
My supplemental tax is still in place. The phone calls from home, cries for help to an imagined “golden immigrant,” have not stopped coming. Even from a world away, it feels like there is still dust raining on a bed.