not located within the individual: rather, the “badness” or “evil” enters and grabs the person. This exteriority is important when we consider the rehabilitation of perpetrators and the processes used to cleanse them of their evil or wrongdoing. This is one component of a complex understanding of agency, accountability, and the force of things: objects, words, and violence itself are imbued with their own agency.54
The healing processes used by campesinos emphasize cleansing and purgation. The idea of cleansing one’s interior and purging the “badness” is common and is invoked at the communal level as well. Villagers often exteriorize the violence (“the violence arrived here”) and the Senderistas (“they arrived here—where could they have come from?”). People attempt to locate the cause of sociopolitical problems outside the community, depicting the violence and its perpetrators as invading the collective. One long-standing sanction in communal justice is the banishment of the perpetrator, a form of “purging” the community.55 These ideas influence the processes of rehabilitation and reconciliation. The emphasis on exteriorizing harmful agents serves psychological and social needs: it opens space for one to regain his or her humanity via cleansing and confession, and permits people to assimilate more slowly just whom they are living with. These illnesses and their alleviation figure strongly in the violence, both its making and its unmaking.
Weakness
I’m already so old. I don’t even know how old I am! Maybe eighty. Before I was happy—now, there’s so much suffering. With so many pensamientos, with iquyasqa I’m so old. Those years were penitence, sacrifice. We had to hide in the hills, without eating, without sleeping. The soldiers killed my two little children when we were hiding in Lloqllepampa. We were escaping, hiding in the hills. So my little boy said, “Mami, I need to pee.” “Ya, go ahead,” I told him. When he was peeing, that damned soldier shot him in his penis. The bullet passed through him from behind. The same thing with my little girl—the bullet passed right through her stomach. That night I cried, holding them at my side—my little boy under one arm, my little girl under the other. I cried all night, I mourned all night. The following day I kept escaping, hiding myself in fear. Oh, some people say all of that is coming back again. If that happens, I’d rather take some poison and die. I could never live through that again! I’d rather throw myself in the river—I’d rather jump off a cliff! I can’t forget. Oh, I’m so old now.
—Señora Edelina Chuchón, fifty-six years old, Accomarca, 2003
In English we could translate iquyasqa as “weakness.” It is the sensation of profound physical exhaustion, as if one did not have the energy to carry out even minimal daily activities. Women lamented, “We’ve cried so much we’ve lost our vision because of weakness.” They associate this weakness with the political violence and the suffering of the sasachakuy tiempo. As Señora Edelina graphically described, iquyasqa ages the body.56 Adult women of all ages complained of iquyasqa, underscoring the toll the sasachakuy tiempo had taken upon them. Women of reproductive age routinely stated they were so weak they “died” while giving birth and had to be resuscitated afterward. Villagers and medical personnel in the health posts both use the term “weakness” but assign a different etiology to this affliction. While the majority of “lay interviewees” locate the cause of iquyasqa in the upheaval of the political violence and its legacies, the medical personnel I interviewed reduced the problem to poor nutrition, erasing the psychological suffering indexed in the common usage of the term.
Here is an opportunity to analyze how the same word may have different connotations for the villagers and for the medical personnel stationed in the health posts. Malnutrition is chronic in the countryside and was exacerbated by the violence because people could not engage in normal agricultural production. However, I insist that we follow the complex meaning of the term as the women use it. Campesinas juxtapose their weakness now with the energy they had “during the time of meat” when “we wanted for nothing.” This is not just nostalgia, and they are not referring exclusively to the material sphere: more is being remembered than simply “the time of meat.” Ayacucho has always been among the poorest departments in Peru. However, that is not how people remember their lives. Villagers had homes with thick straw roofs that kept out the rain and the wind; now they have corrugated aluminum roofs that inevitably channel frigid raindrops down the back of the neck and onto a shivering back. They had livestock and fields that were continuously planted; during the war, 65 percent of land remained fallow and most villagers saw their livestock almost completely lost or killed.57 Virtually everyone lost a family member or someone dear to them, often in brutally violent ways. Local biologies have been altered by the sasachakuy tiempo.
Iquyasqa—profound, bone-penetrating exhaustion. Words do not just express our experiences of loss, pain, or suffering; they orient us in the world and in our bodies. To be war-weary—iquyasqa—is a phenomenological reality. It also serves as powerful motivation to avoid repeating a bloody past and to engage in individual and collective practices designed to keep further conflict at bay.
Hardening the Heart
To remember: from the Latin word re-cordis, to pass again through the heart.
—Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces
The heart is the most important organ in terms of memory, health, and affliction and plays a central role in repentance and reconciliation. We recall that llakis refer to painful memories that keep passing through the heart, lacerating its soft tissue. Various curanderos described how they treated their patients in order to “harden their hearts.” With the use of herbs and by sharing examples of suffering they themselves have overcome, curanderos help their patients who must endure great suffering. During the internal armed conflict, hardening the heart was a means of tolerating pain and loss. As Dionisia lamented, better to have been a rock all those years, better never to have felt anything. Beyond tolerating pain, however, hardening the heart also implied the restriction of love and compassion (caridad) for one’s fellow creatures. In a time of extremely reduced resources—and the intimate violence that distorted social relations—compassion was also diminished, reminding us there is a political economy of the emotions.58 When people spoke about the origins of the sasachakuy tiempo, they emphasized that hatred (odio) and envy (envidia) played a key role in fomenting lethal violence. Additionally, as with the envious gentiles that God punished with the rain of fire, the violence was widely described as a punishment from Dios Tayta for the unbridled expression of odio and envidia.59 Qocha—a polysemic Quechua word meaning “sin,” “crime,” or “error”—captures the porous realms of human and divine affairs and transgressions.
However, as don Jesús Romero explained, times change and so do norms. One part of recuperation is recovering the capacity to access a range of emotions and not only those associated with political violence such as fear, hatred, or rancor. This was the key theme of a communal event in Sacsamarca, located in the central-southern region of Ayacucho.
In May 2003, villagers organized a day of reconciliation in their community. The chapel in the cemetery was filled with people as one activity included a visit to the cemetery to honor “all of our war heroes.” This illustrates a central theme of the day’s agenda: all who died during the violence, regardless of their allegiances, were human beings. In an attempt to overcome the victim-perpetrator dichotomy, villagers imparted the message that everyone gathered in the chapel was a survivor.
In the church a member of the community addressed the crowd, flickering candles grasped between their hands. Orlando is a young man, and there was a striking contrast between his smooth complexion and the deeply wrinkled faces of the elderly women gathered in the chapel. Orlando reminded the crowd that during the violence they had all hardened their hearts. Now, in the process of reconciling, he spoke to them of the need to once again have “softened hearts”—hearts capable of feeling, loving, remembering.
We offer this homage to our heroes, thinking of how our pueblo will be different. We are born with white [pure] hearts, and it is with a white heart that we should die, for the good of our pueblo. No one should be allowed to stain our hearts. If we stain our hearts, we will