It is the end of another day of research in Colombia and I am visiting one of the many entities with a mandate to serve victims of the armed conflict.
By now, I have mastered the choreography of entry. I show a security guard my identity document and inform him whom I am there to visit. An assistant takes a blurry, black-and-white photo of me and prints it onto a sticky badge.
“Sixth floor, Víctimas.”
Victims, in this case, is a place, a topography. It is also shorthand by which to refer to the bureaucrats who inhabit it. The subjects of their attention–individuals whom the state recognizes as registered victims of the armed conflict–shape how the subjects of my attention–state officials who tend to them–are known, grouped, and described.
I pass through a full body scanner, as though at an airport. Whether it beeps or not, I am waved through. My white, female body is not coded as a threat in these spaces. I wear a lanyard around my neck to signal I am a visitor. The tag at the bottom of it suggests I should not be left unaccompanied. Beware the unaccompanied researcher.
I take a seat in the waiting room as a video of smiling women harvesting coffee plays in the background. When it concludes, a tagline announces a new Colombia. The video plays three times on loop as I wait. Colombia is born anew each time.
My interviewee arrives and warmly apologizes for the delay as he escorts me to a windowless conference room. I pull a voice recorder, notebook, and business card out of my bag and explain that I am researching the production of victimhood as a status during transitions from violence — not only through acts of violence, but also through acts of bureaucratic affirmation.
He smiles. “So, you want to talk to bureaucrats.”
The university ethics board that must review all research of this type has approved two research protocols for me: One for victims of the conflict, and one for officials interacting with them as part of the Colombian bureaucracy. This classification system is based on the same limited premise as trigger warnings: You can know what hurts. You can sort pain and identities into buckets: the victims, the bureaucrats.
Acknowledging that lives touched by violence are less tidy than the interview sorting system suggests, I begin each interview broadly: “How did you start doing this work?”
Responses vary: Many of my interlocutors vividly remember media coverage of massacres during their youth. Others name a relative who was displaced in a different part of Colombia. Yet others recall a particularly enthusiastic professor in university. For a minority, bureaucratic idealism brought them here, to the seat across mine.
“How did you start doing this work?,” I ask on this day too.
“On the eve of my 13th birthday, my father, who was a life-long human rights defender, was assassinated.”
I swallow. This has happened before, this mixing of protocols. For the purposes of the ethics board, am I talking to a victim or a bureaucrat? Months earlier, I resolved not to attempt to settle these dilemmas alone, shuffling labels around quietly in my head, assigning categories.
“Do you identify as a victim?”
Over the next two hours, the conversation stretches my Spanish reflexive pronouns to their frontier: “I see myself as . . . ” “They see me as . . .” We meander through an I, a we, and a they that are constantly changing, through institutional acronyms and Wittgenstein, liberation theology, and hierarchies of pain.
Months later, at an academic conference, a colleague remarks that my interlocutors seem unusually articulate. This exposes less about ‘them’ and more about ‘us.’ We expect subject-verb-object victimhood. Poetry is not how we imagine suffering or impunity to speak.
As we wrap up our conversation, my interviewee’s colleagues pop in to the conference room to say goodnight. I behave as though I am at a restaurant in which the servers are starting to stack chairs and turn the lights down. I am still learning to take up space in my own research, still learning the difference between acknowledging research as an intervention and treating myself as an imposition.
“Do you have any questions for me?”
“Yes, actually.”
This, too, is common: the words that come as I make my way to the door, recorder off, notebook safely in my bag.
“Whom did you lose?”
I am taken aback. I deflect and ask my interviewee if it’s been his experience that people who research these topics have experienced loss.
“No, not always. But you have.”
Much training in interviewing is an exercise in distance. I join many feminist colleagues in rejecting this unidirectional gaze of research. I am not a neutral, objective observer, clinically parachuting into the lives of others to examine them as though under a microscope. My own vocabularies of grief have informed the questions I ask and methods I use to answer them in ways that are not quite suitable for the Qualifications and Prior Experience section of scholarly grant applications: “I speak fluent Spanish and loss.”
In this moment, though, I mumble through my Spanish. I cannot discipline both language and grief in the same breath.
“So?” My interviewee, too, knows how to hold the silences. A woman is mopping the floor outside the office.
I research hierarchies of loss and now I tiptoe in a minefield of them. I struggle to acknowledge my own history of sudden loss without suggesting that it is the same as or comparable to the losses inflicted by violence.
“My father,” I say. “When I was younger.” I am embarrassed at my own vagueness.
“I am very sorry,” he says. “I could tell.” We stand at the edge of the conference room, waiting for the recently mopped hallway to dry. The scent of lemon Chlorox follows me out.
Later, I send my standard thank you note. He replies with a single photo.
Across the image, a neon caption from a museum exhibit: “Every search contains a loss.”
* * *
I am on a layover in Cambridge, MA between intervals of research, paying a visit to Porter Square Books.
The view of a mall parking lot is unremarkable in many senses, but in my life, a return to this vista is one of the ways in which I have marked time. I have sat by this window as I did the reading for my PhD exams. I wrote wedding vows here. I signed divorce papers. I have whisper-told the story of my life to a friend at the next stool and overheard the baristas debating their favorite Fiona Apple songs.
One of the bookstore regulars is sitting next to me today. Being a regular requires presence and I forfeited that title by leaving to make a home elsewhere. I long for an identity that acknowledges my commitment to returning without erasing the fact that I no longer keep these seats warm.
He is a man in his 70s who has dedicated himself to learning languages by dictionary. Today he is learning German and Italian. “A noun is a noun in English. End of story. In German, they have cases. You know trouble when you see the dative.”
I smile, recalling my own fraught relationship with the Spanish subjunctive over the years.
The man continues to talk in my direction: at me, but also to me. “You read all these books already, didn’t you? I always knew girls are smarter than boys. My daughter-in-law tells me you can’t call them ‘girls’ these days. What book are you on today? Number three? Four?”
I put my book down. He talks to me about his old friend from high school who used to work on a nuclear submarine. He comments on the hot chocolate. “They don’t make hot chocolate like they used to!”
There is a chatty loneliness to him. I see it when he talks about his dentist, “the happiest dentist. You haven’t met a dentist this happy.” In this type of narrative arc, I recognize my father near the end of his life: the stories getting bigger with each retelling, the world getting a little smaller.
I ask why he is learning Italian and he declares that he needs to order wine properly in Montepulciano before the end of his life. “I like sweet wine, but I told my son, he can’t go telling anybody that. In Italy, if you are a man and you like sweet wine, you are a wimp. I like sweet wine, but never can you tell anyone until I die.”
He goes to his car to retrieve paper. When he returns, a pad declares in motivational all caps that Today Is The Day. Beneath it, a declension of nouns.
As I pack to leave, he asks where my book is. I point to my bag, indicating I have already purchased it. “No, no, your book,” he gestures towards the bookstore. “You’re writing, writing, writing. I see you writing for years. Where’s the book? Now listen to me: I want to hold this book before I die. Put something in the dative case in it so I know you heard me. Maybe in the epilogue.”
I look to the other side of me, where a man is scribbling into a gratitude journal, a daily practice of listing thankfulness. I look away. I swim in narratives of loss all day, but an accidental glance into another’s thankfulness feels like an intrusion.
* * *
The passenger in the middle seat on this flight out of Colombia is stuffing all his belongings in the overhead bin. Before he sits down, he pulls out an orange and pink envelope, sealed by a felt fabric heart, also pink.
He does not open the envelope until we are airborne. I have always wondered about the classification system that sorts lovers into those who rip open these letters before their body has fully cooled from the goodbye hug versus those who follow instructions and wait until the air. An obedience born out of superstition or, perhaps, fidelity.
He pulls out a paper scented so heavily that I can smell it in the next seat. I used to love scented stationery as a child, when my friends and I would gift it to each other at birthday parties. I would stash it into a desk drawer until I found an occasion that felt worthy of its use. When I return to my childhood home now, that drawer smells of all the words that never came.
At the top of the letter in bubbly letters, also in pink (and possibly visible from space): “Four months of the most perfect love. ” I look away, the man reads on. He turns the page. There is a bright red lipstick kiss on the bottom.
When I would go to summer camp, my mother would use the scented paper from my stuffed drawer to send me letters. There is no privacy at camp: every package is scrutinized for potentially shareable candy, every letter for news from beyond tent hill. My camp friends knew my mother by the red lipstick kiss that would close each correspondence.
My mother was never particularly interested in make-up, except when it came to detecting prohibited shimmer on my cheeks as a teenager, even when the blush package swore it was “a natural look.” Her own routine consisted of two big orange blotches on the cheeks, dark eyes, a groan about crow’s feet, bright red lips.
On a road trip a few years ago, I convinced myself I could be the kind of woman who ‘effortlessly’ wears red lipstick. I tried it again at a wedding and again when I read a book about French women and elegant childbirth.
Every time I smacked my lips together to dab the color, I could hear my mother, looking in the mirror on the morning of my father’s funeral, applying a red tint to her lips. “Otherwise, I look like a corpse.”
Every time the plane hits a pocket of turbulence, the passenger in the middle seat looks at the wing. I know that intersection of nervous flyer and budding romance. Everyone munches pretzels around you while all you can think is let this plane not crash so I can live this love.
He spends the rest of the flight sniffle-crying while he looks at photos of a woman on his phone. I spend the rest of mine secularly praying that he can continue to be this moved by love as he ages.
Before landing, he asks me a question about the US immigration forms. I look over at his. We are born on the same day, thirteen years apart.