woman responded on behalf of the group: “What we need most are pills to make us forget.”
Forgetting is more than a strategy of the powerful over the weak. There are desired forgettings and, as Elizabeth Jelin has argued, “There are forms of forgetting that are ‘necessary’ for the survival and functioning of the individual subject as well as for groups and communities.”44 There is a need to open space for “positive forgetfulness” that liberates a person from an unbearable past. Forgetting and remembering to forget were leitmotifs throughout these communities.
These memory afflictions are different from les maladies de la mémoire that concerned the founders of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.45 The work of these analysts was situated within concerns about the reality of intrapsychic phenomenon, unclaimed traumatic experience and its recovery, and broader debates regarding the normal and the abnormal. In contrast, llakis and “martirizing” one’s body are not experienced within a framework of individual normality or abnormality; there is no stigma conferred upon those suffering from llakis; nor do llakis isolate the sufferer. These memory afflictions do not index an internal world of private suffering but a social world that causes distress, and they invoke a chain of mutual aid and response.46 The memory of unaddressed wrongs, of economic dispossession, of loved ones brutally killed—these memory afflictions indict a social world that is capable of making people very ill indeed.
The Frightened Breast
My daughter was born the day after the massacre at Lloqllepampa. We were hidden in a hut. I told my husband to leave because if the soldiers came they would have killed him. I gave birth all alone. During that time we were escaping, I didn’t even have milk to breastfeed my baby. How was I going to have milk when there was nothing to eat? One day the other women told me, “If you leave your baby in the mountain, alcanzo [also known as daño] will grab her and she’ll die.” Remembering this, I left her in the mountain so she would die. How was she going to live like that? I’d passed all of my suffering in my blood, in my milk. I watched her from a distance, but she began to cry so much I had to go back and get her so that the soldiers wouldn’t hear her. If they had, they would’ve killed me. That’s why I say my daughter is damaged because of everything that happened, and because of my milk, my blood, my pensamientos. Now she can’t study. She’s seventeen and she’s still in fifth grade. She says her head hurts, it burns. What could it be? Susto? Ever since she was a baby she’s been like this. I took her to a curandero and he tried to change her luck. But it’s no better—it just stays the same. I took her to the health post and they gave her pills [Dioxycillin] to take everyday. What could it be? Nothing helps her.
—Salomé Baldeón, Accomarca
There is another reason people, particularly women, attempt to forget and spare their bodies further martyrdom.47 Not only do toxic memories torment them; they also pose a danger to their children. Quechua speakers have elaborated a sophisticated theory regarding the transmission of suffering and susto from mother to child, either in utero or via the mother’s breast-milk. The term used in Quechua is mancharisqa ñuñu. Ñuñu can mean both breast and milk depending on the context and the suffix, and mancharisqa refers to susto or fear. In my Spanish publications, I have translated the term as la teta asustada (the frightened breast) to capture this double meaning. La teta asustada conveys how strong negative emotions and memories can alter the body and how a mother can transmit these harmful emotions to her baby.48 Quechua speakers insist the frightened breast can damage a baby, leaving the child slow-witted or predisposed to epilepsy.
In addition to Salomé’s daughter, there are six other young people in Accomarca with various congenital problems: they are deaf, mute, or suffering from epileptiform attacks. These young people are collectively referred to as “children of the massacre.” All of their mothers were pregnant when the soldiers entered Accomarca, rounded people up in Lloqllepampa, and killed them. The mothers of these seven young people escaped and watched the killing from their hiding places in the surrounding mountains. All seven women gave birth in the days and weeks following the atrocities.
Rather than disregard this as anecdotal evidence, it echoes the findings of a study conducted in Chile, where a team of researchers studied the impact of political violence on pregnant women. For the study, the researchers determined which barrios of Santiago had suffered the most political violence and disappearances. They selected a sample of barrios, ranging from low to high levels of political violence. They followed the pregnancies and deliveries of a group of women from each barrio and, when they controlled for confounding variables, the researchers determined that the women who had lived in the most violent barrios suffered a fivefold increase in pregnancy and delivery complications.49 Both the epidemiological study and the pervasive theory that villagers have with respect to the damaging effects of violence, terror, and llakis on both a mother and her baby are suggestive and warrant further study. These women and their children provide a painful example of the violence of memory.
Rural Afflictions
When I began working with rural communities in Ayacucho, I asked people which illnesses were most common. There was an answer that has stayed with me: “Well … coughs, colds, colic. But more than illnesses, it’s the males de campo50 that grab us.” On several occasions I was told los males de campo (rural afflictions) would not grab me because I was from the city and “did not believe in them,” which illustrates the ethnicized geography discussed earlier. In addition to marking territory and status, this phrasing distinguishes between the ailments that send one to the health post versus those that prompt a visit to the curandero.
Throughout Ayacucho, biomedically oriented health posts coexist with curanderos, healers whose innovative bricolage defies the term “traditional.” Villagers go to the health post for the bags of fortified powdered milk the government distributes, as well as for the treatment of bronchitis and malaria and for birth control. These are considered strictly “health problems”—medical issues for which the health post may be useful. It is with the curanderos, however, that villagers address what is wrong with the world: ancestors who are angry, the envious neighbor who has placed a curse, the llakis that riddle the body with pain, ex-enemies whose presence in the village irritates the heart, and the earth itself that reaches up and grabs those who carelessly tread where they should not.
Curanderos can serve as lay psychologists by treating the relational aspects of life; they diagnose “social ills.” While one may visit the health post for an acute but short-term problem, with curanderos there is follow-up and frequently a series of visits. Importantly, with curanderos there is respectful interaction. Within a population that resists the idea of spending two soles (roughly sixty-five cents) for a trip to the health post, patients may well pay the curandero with a sheep in exchange for his services.51
Males de campo refer to disordered social relations and to the spiritual and moral confusion that characterizes a postwar society. Indeed, these males de campo frequently arise from strong negative emotions. Michel Tousignant has noted that emotions are generally conceived throughout Latin America as important etiological factors of illnesses.52 In addition to causing individual illness, certain emotions are considered socially disruptive and dangerous. Managing strong negative or retributive emotions is one part of managing conflict.
Carlos Alberto Seguín has suggested many illnesses in these communities have an “ethnoreligious” aspect.53 In contrast with PTSD, which marginalizes the spiritual plane, these males de campo have a strong religious component. The separation of spheres of experience into nonporous categories (for example, natural/supernatural, secular/religious) is an obstacle to understanding the semantic world in which these villagers become ill, recover—in which they live.
“The males de campo grab us.” The verb in Quechua is qapiy and deserves a few additional words. A woman in Accomarca described her pain and how difficult it is to be alone because “When I’m alone, the sadness follows and wants to grab me.” Similarly, alcanzo can grab a person when they