“Now I look at myself in the mirror, I do not blame myself anymore, now I want to be other me”: Memory, Bodies and Violence in the Meta Province, Colombia

Abstract

This article presents the result from a research project entitled “The voice as persuasion: body, memory and displacement in narrative productions” sponsored under an institutional call by the Universidad de los Llanos in 2016. The project sets out an analysis on the ways of storing the records of violence in the body from people who were victims of violence in the Meta Province. In this context, when the bodies impacted by successive violence(s) both at a national and regional extent, the Meta Province becomes one of the Colombian territorial areas with highest numbers of forced displacement getting in and out. Even though the Government is more focused on relocation efforts or how to make these persons adapted to spheres of consumption and employment, there is a lack of work on the memory of the violence chiseled in their skin, a violence that will hardly expire as it has become embodied in the people. Therefore, the challenge is to give a voice to those who never had one, those who find a refuge or dwelling in subaltern or intimate spaces; to give a voice to those who are unseen in the studies as they are only deemed either as objects for examination or qualified informants to the expert’s ear and analysis.