This conversation with Dionisia still unsettles me, and I have returned to it many times as I struggle to understand memory, the body, and affliction. Memory is achingly bittersweet. Of course she wants to remember her son but has tried so hard to forget the horrible way Teodoro was killed and the impossibility of mourning his death and burying him as would befit a beloved son. So she ties the sack tightly, only to open it and touch his clothes an innumerable one-last-time.
During my research in Ayacucho, various women asked, “Oh, why should we remember everything that happened? To martirize our bodies, and nothing else?” Others insisted their martirio (martyrdom) had already begun, starting with an audible rasping in the marrow of their bones. The term “martyr” shares a root with the Latin word memor. The martyr is one who voluntarily suffers as punishment for having been a witness. The corporality of memory is central, and the link between the body and memory is evident in the Latin root “testes,” from which the words “testicle” and testigo (witness) are drawn. The root privileged men as the bearers and reproducers of memory, eclipsing women and their “martyred bodies.” In contrast, Veena Das has suggested, “the representation of suffering is such that it is experienced metonymically as bodily pain and it is the female body that shelters this pain in its insides forever.”39 These women were lamenting the bodily toll of remembering and bearing witness.
Dionisia was plagued by llakis, one of the most prevalent afflictions throughout the region.40 Llaki, in the singular, can be translated as “sadness” or “pain,” but that scarcely does justice to this complex term. Llakis are painful thoughts or memories that fill the heart where they are charged with affect. These “emotional thoughts” blur the distinction between intellectual and affective faculties, just as the heart is the seat of emotion as well as memory. Llakis can be the product of either political violence or the poverty that serves as a trigger for remembering all that one has lost. This suffering is not merely a state of mind: it is an embodied state of being.
The thoughts begin in your head, but they drop down to your heart. When they reach your heart, they become llakis because of the pain.
—Hilario Pulido, promotor de salud, Accomarca
When you have pain/sadness, thoughts arrive in your heart. Your heart opens up like a pot with no lid. Your heart cannot contain all of this, all of the llakis, and you become pure pain/sadness.
—Benedicta Mendoza, Accomarca
Llakiwan kachkani can be translated as “I am in pain,” consumed by sadness. Llakis surge from the heart, overflowing its capacity to contain so many hurtful memories. As they fill the body, “you become pure pain or sadness.” This is a “hydraulic model” of the emotions; emotions rise, fall, bear down upon, and travel through the body. There was another powerful expression several women used: Yuyaynipas tapawan (“My memories suffocate me”). Beneath the weight of reminiscence, the person cannot breathe and their heart aches. Llakis can rob the person of their use of reason, leaving them sonso (senseless or mad). And as llakis mature in the body, they can be fatal.
Many people described their search for a way to cleanse their bodies of llakis. Among methods of cleansing are the use of guinea pigs to “scan” the body, drinking agua de olvido (water of forgetfulness, caught as river water runs downstream and forms whirlpools), and the faith healing that occurs in the Evangelical churches. When the women took mama Dionisia to the river and had her drink water caught in the whirlpool, they hoped to cleanse her body and relieve her suffering.41 Another important point: to claim one is in pain is to place a demand upon others to respond.42
The word llakis frequently appears together with pensamientos (thoughts or worries). Señora Victoria Pariona in Cayara described the effect of pensamientos:
I always have pensamientos. I’m worried. Sometimes I’m so enraged that I cry, and I have to calm myself down. That’s how I am. This pensamiento is very heavy, and because of this I ask myself, “What sort of life is it that God allows our destiny to be like this?” The pensamientos grab you, really suddenly. A pensamiento arrives when you’re doing just anything. In that exact moment it grabs you. When you’re headed to the path, walking, or sometimes at night, too, when you’re tired and sleeping—you’re calm and then suddenly a pensamiento arrives and you ask yourself again, “What sort of life is this?”
There is a temporal aspect associated with llakis that allows us to distinguish between llakis and another term that was prevalent in testimonies during the war years: ñakariy (to agonize).43 One agonizes in the moment of horror, but it is with the memories and their unchecked accumulation over time that llakis grab the person. The person suffering from llakis is suffering from a memory affliction. Just as a person can possess memory, so can memory possess the person, grabbing them, filling their body, maturing to the point that their body itself becomes unbearable. So villagers emphasize their desire to forget.
I had a long conversation in 1997 with a group of women in Umaru, a community that had been virtually destroyed during the war. I was seated with the women amid the burned-out remains of someone’s home, conducting a health care needs assessment for an NGO. At one point during our conversation, I asked the women which health care services were a priority in their community. Past experience indicated that a question about services needed could solicit responses that ranged from livestock to food to materials to build an Evangelical church. The women murmured briefly among themselves, and finally one 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
