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 only have a lifetime of tears [waqay vida]. We should die with white hearts. We must forgive, ask for forgiveness, so that never again will these same things come to pass. If our heart is a rock, we must change. We are passing one another with our hearts of rock, with our pensamientos that cause us such pain. Let’s change. We must open our hearts because our pueblo is waiting for us so that we can all live well with our families. We must speak with one another with our white hearts. From this day forth, let’s change our hearts so that we don’t have llaki vida, waqay vida [a life of pain, a life of tears]. We must soften our hearts so that we can change.
The emphasis on softening the heart, and on change, is striking. One must learn to live with the memories, many of which are personified in the faces of family members or neighbors, without each memory overwhelming the heart’s capacity to contain it.
“Changing one’s life” is a central psychocultural theme. Campesinos visit curanderos to change their suerte (luck or destiny); congregations in the Evangelical churches pray to God so that He will change their hearts and their lives. Importantly, when the context changes, so does the person. Many people described the process of arrepentimiento (repentance): “After repenting, we go forth with a clean heart. We are no longer the people we were before. We are musaq runakuna—new people.”
This was powerfully conveyed by El Piki in Carhuahurán. In the midst of a long conversation about the violence, I asked him what he thought about reconciliation. He replied by telling me about a friend whom he had known since primary school and how he had participated in Sendero. “It was difficult, but we can accept the arrepentidos [the ex-Senderistas, literally, ‘the repentant ones’]. As long as they act like runakuna [people] they can come back. We have
