[00:50] (ALR) If you’ve had the chance to listen to the podcast ‘Nuestra Orilla’ (Our shore) you can decipher my name. I am Ana Luisa Ramírez Flórez, a community leader in Chocó (Department along the Pacific Ocean and north-west of Colombia). I am mother of three and working towards the wellbeing of our communities and relatives since a very young age in this territory that has seen so much violence (…)
[02:15] (JS) My name is Jenry Serna Cordoba, from Riosucio, Chocó. I was born in 1984 in the basin of the Truandó River. Together with Ana we are speaking from Riosucio, in the northern part of the Chocó department, and part of the lower Atrato river region. It is commonly known as ‘lower Atrato’ as it is the last stretch of the river before it flows into the sea. This is a very humid region, and the Atrato river usually floods. Our livelihoods and our ancestors' have relied on fishing, wood and agriculture tied to the river.
I am a father of four (…) and passionate about transmedia communications since I was 16, when I also became a community leader in this territory.
[04:37] Riosucio, a territory we call home, is also a territory both Ana and Jenry had to forcefully leave and a territory to which we later returned to. A distinct form of violence – paramilitaries - arrived in Riosucio on 20 December 1996; different to the presence of guerrillas, the FARC, the ELN, and other illegal armed groups and actors that preceded. In Riosucio we are agents of change; it is a territory where there is no presence of the state. We are not ‘formally’ educated people, nor have access to health system. We love our territory and everything we do is out of love.
[07:15] (DRS) I am Daniel Ruiz Serna. I have been lucky to have worked and keep working in the lower Atrato region with Anita and Jenry, in a time when forcefully displaced communities were making enormous efforts of returning to their territories. Territories, understood etymologically, means solid ground. But working in the lower Atrato, a region that has so much water – water in the sky, in the air, in the rivers, everywhere – I realised how notions of territory are traversed by an aquatic element and by its amphibious peoples, therefore offering distinct ways of relating to the territories and amongst themselves. To return home, after forced displacement entailed a reconnection of livelihoods inextricably tied with all watery beings, presences and more than human entities (…)
[11:20] (ALR) Our struggle for land and territory dates from the time our ancestors started to fight for a territory of their own, which triggered a community led process demanding action from the local and national government. With the new National Constitution of Colombia (1991), Black populations’ right to land was recognised (though it is important to mention that it was a fight that our Black community, together with indigenous communities) (...)
What I am talking about here, is the ley 70 (law 70) which recognises our rights as Afro descendant peoples and established the legal tools and frameworks for the recognition and legitimation of our collective lands and territories (…) This recognition in the early 90’s also prompted us to ‘speak louder’; stronger, as a way of honouring the struggle led and initiated by our ancestors.
[13:00] We have always approached and owned our territory collectively, from generation to generation. But this ancestral inheritance wasn’t legally recognised. For us our territory is not for sale. It is for conservation and stewardship. To speak about our territory is to speak about ourselves. We live in a territory wounded by endless violence. But regardless, we honour its memory, its ancestral memory as Afro descendants living in this beautiful land, and the way we do so is by sustaining, nurturing, and safeguarding our territory. This is how we see our leaderships.
[15:33] Nuestra Orilla is a referent of how to engage and ‘do’ memory differently (…) through story-making and storytelling and narrated by multiple voices that relate to each other. We foreground what memory wants to be for those voices; we recognise each other in the multiple stories shared; in those lives and livelihoods that characterise our territory. It is a question of collective memory for younger generations to continue these processes.
[16:37] (JS) It is very meaningful for us to talk about the territory in this podcast. I’d like to refer to episode 7, where we expand on this as it relates to legal frameworks mentioned: the law 1745 and the Law 70, 1993. To be able to own, to obtain our territory, many things happened: kidnappings, killings, forced disappearances (…)
In episode 3 or 4 you can hear how we were ligados (tied) to our territory, or how our ancestors nos ligaban (tied us) through la ombligada: most of the people born up to the 90’s or 2000’s would have their ombligo (umbilical cord) seeded our in our territory. We belonged to it, we learnt from it, and we would always be tied to it. As we worked on the podcast and talked to our people, we realised this is one of the things that are getting lost due to the ongoing violence our territory has been affected by; this is important when thinking about memory.
[20:50] (CM): I would like to add something about time, and the role it plays in the podcast series. How to craft repairing histories. In different parts of the world, the uses of the term 'past' for reparations has assumed that the ‘past’ is gone and that the present is different from it; as for instance the way it is used within truth and reconciliation commissions. The hegemonic way of thinking about time as progressive, in the case of Colombia and probably many other places, leaves Afro diasporic communities like Ana Luisa's and Jenry's, ‘outside’ of that history – represented as ahistorical beings, pre-political. In the podcast we are interested in breaking this dichotomy (…) the ‘past’ is not in the past (…)
Reparation therefore implies rethinking temporalities: past, present, and future. Rethinking time but also space – the space where in this case this history takes place. In Colombia we live with spatial suppositions of here, as modern, and ‘there’, far away, the territories are ‘savage’ and violent. For the podcast we intentionally foregrounded and disrupted these temporal and spatial assumptions. Our challenge was then how to capture the territory sonically, and to take bring our listening audience up close to the lower Atrato and its people – as a spatial and social entity that is not distant. But also, to foreground narrative strategies that navigate time not through conceptions of past and present (or chronological time) but, as mentioned, encompasses different understandings of time and space.
[26:00] (JS) We decided for Anita to be the protagonist of the story, as someone who could tell but also narrate her story. For all the other voices we didn’t decide beforehand who would we be talking to. We shared ideas, wrote scripts, went to the street, and started talking to people and including voices that were in synchronicity with Anita’s story. It wasn’t easy – we have 180 interviews recorded, all done in agreement with those collaborating; for us selfcare practices have always been at the core. Due to the violence we have endured, many of us were not willing to share, not even to speak. Many were sceptical of interviews, as so many interviewers have come here to extract our testimonies alone. Also, many interviews done in the past have focused on the harm done and mobilising our pain for their purposes or judging us– we have always stood against that. We took this into consideration – we unsettled those practices.
[30:46] (DRZ) The reasons for voice multiplicity are many. The first one is methodological (…) The idea was to be able to engage in multigenerational conversations as we noticed that there is a disconnect between the generations that fought for their land, and the new generations that are born and bred here who take for granted that the land where they live has been theirs and will be theirs for perpetuity. The second one, a gender component (…) there are many Anitas in the lower Atrato. Everyone is affected by violence, but there is a differential aspect to it – not everyone is affected in the same way.
We worked on multiplying voices inhabiting these lower Atrato territories as it is a collective history. For children and younger generations that have not faced forced displacement in the same way Anita did, this kind of violence is ‘historic.’ However, the effects of these wars on the territory do not end once there is a peace accord or because an armed group disarms. The memory of this violence stays; it inhabits these lands; it is perpetuated through people’s bodies and spirits.
