Curiosity Roving : V. 22 : Tierra Querida

Tierra querida" · handroanthus chrysanthus

                January 13, 2023

            Curiosity Roving : V. 22 : Tierra Querida

Curiosity Roving
The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen

V.22 : Tierra Querida
in which we examine Colombia
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Greetings and Salutations!

Welcome to the twenty-second volume of Curiosity Roving. I hope this letter finds you.

Thank you kindly, as always, for choosing to spend your precious internet minutes with me. This newsletter is my arcane batsignal and it pleases me to know that my people see it. This is a public project, so if you love Curiosity Roving, please do tell your friends! New subscribers, thank you so much for joining me here and I promise it's not a cult. All twenty-one of my past volumes are available in the archive: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive

It's been about four months since I recommitted to publishing one of these letters every month. I've traveled roughly ten thousand kilometres, characterized by four time zones, two languages, and three cosmic appointments. I've already got my ticket to country number five, but first, we're going on the quasi-journalistic edutainment deep dive. I've been in Colombia since the beginning of December and I can't leave without saying a few (hundred) words about it.
handroanthus chrysanthus

When I performed with La Cumbia Del Sol in Taiwan, our set often included a cover of a song, "Colombia Tierra Querida". This is a classic cumbia from the 1970s that carries the status of a second anthem, and it served as my de facto introduction to the Colombian national character. "Tierra querida" translates to "beloved land", and the incredibly hooky feel-good chorus goes "cantando, cantando, yo viviré" : "singing, singing, I will live". Having spent six weeks on the ground here and gained a minimum of context, the line that now stands out for me is the opening of the second verse: "Colombia, tu hiciste grande con el furor de tu gloria" : "Colombia, you became great with the fury of your glory".

It conveys the sense of this country's illustrious and violent history. I'm not usually into geopolitics, but the trauma of this place is so fresh and so visible that I had to go digging, if only to gain enough understanding to appropriately calibrate my empathy for the people around me.

mean streets of Medellín

I spent Christmas at a beach hostel on the north coast. My roommate in the bunk-bedded dorm was a man called Carlos from Medellín. We went to town for a hamburger on my first night. He held my hands across the table and he shook them until my elbows started to bruise as he talked about the murder of his father when he was a child and the suffering of his family. Later, sorely uncaffeinated and walking a dog at 7:30 AM, a man on a bicycle approached me and spent ten minutes telling me about the corruption and microextortion that he experiences as a humble hillside homeowner and lamenting his country's inability to make something of its vast resources while I stood there with a poop bag on my hand, mostly comprehending the content but utterly baffled by the scene.

Everyone starts these conversations with the same question: "So, how do you like Colombia?"
my neighbourhood, my country

When I decided to get curious about the history of this place, I had to learn some new terms. Asymmetric warfare describes conflict in which combatants are fighting with widely differing tactics, power, and resources. Internally displaced persons are those who were forced to leave their homes, but have remained within the same country. There were a number of niche vocabulary words for my Spanish studies that were invented as shorthand for the novel forms of murder, torture, and mutilation that were invented during the long period of La Violencia in the mid-20th century - have you ever heard of a Colombian necktie?
meat street

For many people, Columbia is synonymous with cocaine, and the drug trade is intimately intertwined with all of Colombian politics. It's true that Colombia is the world's leading producer of cocaine, but the USA remains the lead consumer. Maybe you remember Plan Colombia, the foreign aid initiative of the Clinton era? In the early 2000s, the USA performed "aerial eradication" of coca crops with intensive use of devastating herbicides on 8% of Colombia's arable land. The Plan Colombia wiki also contains sixteen entries on US military programs that have been engaged to combat the FARC-EP, a revolutionary people's army that has been active since the 1960s. In 1999, the FARC also worked with a UN development project that aimed to transition coca farmers into sustainable food production. I can tell you that the dollar value of social aid provided under Plan Colombia was a small fraction of that provided for military aid. I can also tell you that as of 2021, Colombian production of coca leaves had increased 43%. Viva la pandemia!
our lady of perpetual succor

These head-spinning facts are a fraction of the tapestry. The online articles for these subjects are so dense and convoluted that I thought it might be better to just talk to people. One afternoon in Medellín, I shared a table with Andrés at a local patio while we waited for the rain to stop. When I made some clumsy second-language allusion to my interest in Colombia's storied history of conflict(s), he summarized it as "everyone against everyone" and then we changed the subject. I took a guided tour of Comuna 13, hoping to get a little more information, and the tour guide also had to bow out, saying that if he tried to explain The Situation, we would need at least eight more days.

Colombia embodies an extreme expression of plurality. Even before the common era, there were at least nine indigenous tribes operating in this territory. In the modern understanding of geography, there are six distinct regions that vary greatly in their climate, topography, music, food, and culture. All of them are rich in natural features and wildlife; nowhere in the world has more birds. As I traced the threads of all the multifaceted social, political, and military conflicts, I often found the use and distribution of this beloved land, this tierra querida, at their starting points. I suppose it stands to reason that anything worth loving is usually worth fighting for. If you'd rather be shown than told, I can highly recommend last year's award-winning Colombian film, Los Reyes Del Mundo, for a gut-wrenching study of that truism.
infinities upon infinities

The joint forces of colonization and immigration, active here since the sixteenth century, have created a human genetic pool that is also extremely diverse. My roommate at the current petsitting job told me in the midst of a kitchen catch-up that people always say he doesn't look Colombian. I blinked and asked him, "What does a Colombian look like?" Walking down the street, there is no clear unifying theme for eye colour, hair type, build, skin tone - people are just people and they look all kinds of ways. I've had numerous comedic encounters with other Anglophone foreigners at the dog park in which we both spoke Spanish, mutually trying to ascertain in that sidelong-semisocial-dogpark kind of way whether or not the other person was a local, and mutually lacking the language skills to be sure if the other person was or was not speaking fluently.
a fine handsome gentleman

Yesterday, at a red light on a busy street, I saw three men form a human tower by standing on each others' shoulders. Then they all started juggling flaming clubs. Someone blew a whistle, and they dismounted to collect tips from the vehicles before the lights changed. Another time, I saw a man wearing a helmet who performed an unceasing headspin on the crosswalk pavement for what seemed like a full minute. Someone walked down our street and sang La Llorona through a karaoke system three times last Sunday; if I hadn't gone to walk the dog, I would never have known that it wasn't a recording. On a bus passing through Santa Marta, a rapper boarded with a strap-on speaker and performed a spontaneous freestyle for every passenger extrapolated from a word that each provided. It is a dissonant experience: to know that all of this colour exists due to rampant poverty, and yet to be delighted nonetheless.

One of my favourite authors, in a work of fiction, repeatedly described South America as "too damned vivid". To that I say: if you don't like it, you can leave. Personally, I don't mind a little fury mixed in with all that is glorious, especially if we get to sing.

Until next time, stay curious. -- Rose

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