/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE-COLOMBIA: Traditions Emerge Among the Uprooted

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

María Isabel García

BOGOTA, Sep 17 2002 (IPS) - Colombians displaced from their homes by the ongoing civil war are dispersed throughout the country, taking their music, customs and traditions with them as they create new lives and neighbourhoods, new languages and modes of expression.

It is a culture of exodus that “serves as a profound revelation of who we are as a nation,” says cultural researcher and artist Arturo Alape.

“The displaced flee, carrying their lives on their backs. Their dreams and realities, their homes, the future all turn into one big question: what to do?” Alape said in an IPS interview.

For the communities of peasants, Afro-Colombians and indigenous peoples who have escaped the violence of their home territories, “each step along a river, every ravine in the mountain is a precursor to what the site of reunion will be like,” said Alape, author of several books about social history.

In their flight from danger, the uprooted ones become brothers and sisters, learning to listen to each other in silence while the enemy passes. They continue to speak, sometimes using hand signals or through symbols left on trees or rocks, or in the sand, he said.

It is the language of survival, emerging during the long trek in which one’s view of oneself changes, with the shifts in landscape. What is individual becomes part of everyone. What belongs to one now belongs to all, according to the artist.

Although the phenomenon of forced displacement has been a constant in Colombia over the last half-century, in the past decade it has turned into a human tragedy of immense proportions.

From 1999 to June of this year, 885,000 people were forced from their land and homes, while for the last 10 years, the total reaches two million in a country of 41 million people, according to figures announced at an international meeting about the displacement phenomenon, held here earlier this month.

In parallel to the “International Seminar on Displacement: Implications for Governance, Democracy and Peace”, a retrospective exhibition of Alape’s art was organised by the Colombia-based non-governmental Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES).

His works in collage, “El llanto colectivo” (Collective Weep), “Los gritos” (The Shouts) and “La madre” (The Mother), show the pain and sorrow of the peasant families displaced from their land in the late 1950s, and mirror his more recent efforts, like “El rezo de despedida” (Farewell Prayer) and “La fosa común” (The Common Grave), from 2000.

CODHES also organised the “Second Expedition through the Exodus”, a circuit of the art produced by uprooted communities that gathered in Bogotá.

Dance, song, oral narrative, theatre, video and music by the displaced from Colombia’s diverse regions, alternated with the work of professional artists.

For some it was a transitory encounter in which they discovered that the drama of displacement and the miracle of survival have similarities in many parts of the country.

The director of the Colombian Theatre Corporation, Patricia Ariza, stressed the need for “an emergency cultural policy for the displaced population, because theirs is a culture that can easily be lost.”

The recent arrivals have lost everything, and bring only their culture as baggage, Ariza told IPS. If it is not expressed, it might be forgotten, she said.

The displaced person should not be seen merely as a victim, said the director, who is spearheading an initiative of cultural work with marginalized groups.

“Without shifting the responsibility away from the government and the armed groups that pushed them from their homes, one must see each individual as a person with strength and great potential for social transformation,” she said.

In the mixtures of music from different regions, in the speech of communities from divergent backgrounds “is the force of resistance and the transformational wealth of culture,” according to Ariza.

Ariza stressed the need to get beyond “the initial testimony phase of suffering and bitterness,” to the next phase in which “art plays a transformational role.”

The displaced population, and particularly the children and young people, must have the opportunity to see their experience from the perspective of art, says Humberto Londoño, leader of the social movement of displaced families in Antioquia.

“There are many kids with artistic aptitudes but we don’t have musical instruments or other materials,” nor support for training in theatre or other disciplines, Londoño told IPS.

“The international community is carrying out assistance that always goes towards the bare essentials: humanitarian aid, health, and education. Culture is left out because it is not a priority,” he said.

The ability to express one’s own culture is a key support to build community cohesion among the displaced and to foment self-esteem.

“It is not about showing some peasants singing and dancing. Culture and art are basic elements of resistance,” commented Gilma Benítez, activist for a national peasant rights organisation.

“People must realise that in spite of the difficulties, we continue being what we are,” says Marcela, girl who left the northern Colombian department of César after right-wing paramilitaries massacred local residents.

However, she played a role in a theatre piece during the conference and asked that “someone show us how to do theatre, because what we are doing is our own way.”