A Gunshot,Dying,and Living: Writing Into Activism

Abstract

In this article, I explore the idea of inquiry as activism through remembering the activism made by my aunt and uncle during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1989). I try to understand how their story lives on in me and affects who I am and who I have become. I work with the idea of “the ghost,” as something missing that calls for a change, as something of the past that keeps asking for answers in the present. With the death of my uncle and the gunshot my aunt received, I try to think of how their “ghost” keeps doing activism when I am working on my own trauma.

Introduction

Through this “writing as inquiry” (Wyatt, 2019), I delve into traumatic stories in relation to me, my family, and my country. It is through the practice of writing that my memories, meanings and reflections arise, in an emergent and spontaneous process of discovery.

I wrote this article without a timeline, aiming to express the lack of order that the work of trauma requires. I find one memory-moment linked in traumatic associations to other memory-moments. I write in this way to show the process of getting in contact and thinking through the trauma. It feels messy and needs to be messy. Tamas (2009, 2012) has argued that our writing changes the nature of trauma when we make it properly organized; therefore, it is appropriate to keep this organization as it emerged in my process.

Writing about trauma is not easy. I have written the same story many times, and every time it means I enter a type of trance. I can get closer to some painful moments, but others remain numb and hidden, and I cannot notice how much I am avoiding, how much deeper I could go.

It is hard for me to keep the scholarly distance as I go through my own text, and it is hard to hold all I encounter in my memories and emotions. So please, bear with me. Maybe you will find that there are stories that should be explored in more detail. Maybe you would feel that I am going too fast. Or being superficial.

When I try to explore trauma beyond the surface, I enter a place of intense affect (Massumi, 1995). Things connect in a different way. One moment of the past seems to be affecting so many of my experiences of the present. Time works differently, moments connect through affect instead of chronological time. I can feel in my body a particular arousal, a charge that guides the memories that slowly unfold. It is the affect that guides, the affect that opens up the stories that follow.

In this text, I weave together three main stories. I write from my experience, but also about events that marked my family, specifically my aunt Pachi and uncle Daniel. We lived in Chile, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and these events happened during the 1980s. Here you will read about my aunt being shot in the head by a police officer in a protest; about my uncle dying mysteriously in the south of Chile; and about me having a crisis and needing cognitive rehabilitation after. I weave these stories together as if they are part of just one story, as if trauma can pass through us and keep resonating in its own affective-timeline.

I am working through traumatic stories to think of an inquiry as activism. These personal traumas are a part of collective processes of state terrorism, which my family fought with activism in the 1980s. In this text, I work with the idea of their ghosts, as a way of understanding activist research. I am conjuring their fight, so it can keep rippling as activism for the future, as ghosts that keep haunting by their absence/presence.

The sections in the article are not clearly distinguished between each other, as the stories keep coming back one over the other. In the next section, I narrate some of the circumstances of my upbringing in the dictatorship and the events that my family faced. I also introduce the notion of the ghost as something that remains in its missing. In “Inquiry as Activism,” I arrive at the idea of inquiry as activism, posing the question on how to make a writing work as activism. In the section that follows, I delve into the idea that the personal is political, making a link to the idea of activism and closing with some reflections about the context necessary for doing this research. “Post Scriptum” is a closing paragraph where I acknowledge the moment when I wrote the paper and its connection to the new developments in the politics of Chile.

A Gunshot: Dying and Living

Dying. Dissolving. Losing the thing that makes me myself. This subtle connection between my intention and action. Between wanting something and moving towards it. Losing the subtle thing that makes me someone, the capacity to remember what I have done before, what I want for today, what I desire for tomorrow.

As if a bullet would cross my scalp. Destroying all my neurons, all the connections. As if a bullet would cross through the fibers of my life, those fibers that link the “I am here” with the “I am going there.” The fibers that make my hand move at will, the fibers that make my passion flow and express.

*

Lying in bed. Looking for a place. Practicing as much as I could. Practicing the basics, the simple. Just to feel some life flowing. The vitality that only art gives me.

*

She was writing a graffiti on a wall. Innocent. Maybe not so innocent (why does that word make things more intense?). She was 18, she was protesting for a better future, for a better life. She wanted to have a voice in a place where difference meant torture, disappearance, death.

*

I feel excited about the new classes. Finally, I will be able to learn the things I want to. No more random things to study, I can focus on my passion. I am 18 and just got a place at the best university in the country. The same university my uncle attended so many years ago, the same corridors, some of the same lecturers. My mum says before I leave:

There is a tree there that was planted when Daniel died, you should go to see it. And, maybe you can tell G [one of the lecturers] that you are Daniel’s nephew. He was so nice when Daniel died. He came home and talked with us.

*

The streets were full of people protesting, dancing around. An independent journalist was filming the protest. We can hear the shot; see the camera turning; the police officer with the gun. The police officer is standing still pointing up; people turn around surrounding the scene. A body lays on the floor with a pond of blood around it. As if time stops for a second. The protest stops, shocked.

The journalist needed to escape. Made some copies of the film and gave it to different people. Hopefully, a copy would be taken out of the country. If found, it would be destroyed, and the author killed.

*

I do not have many memories of the dictatorship and never thought it had affected me in a special way. I never thought that my fears, my shyness, my introversion could be based on witnessing the horror of that time.

It is hard to grasp how some things from my childhood marked my whole life. How seeing Daniel when I was a child, as a happy, playful, intelligent person could maybe have made me go and study where he did. How having seen Pachi recover from the gunshot could have marked my own recovery so many years after.

I never realized all these underground storylines. All those intensities that are not evident to sight. How the ghost of the past keeps visiting my life, even if I do not see it. The ghost of things that are missing: lives, projects and dreams.

*

While working in this project, I found the work Ghostly Matters by Avery Gordon very inspiring, as she explores the “missing” in different social situations. Describing the despaired people of Argentina’s dictatorship, she says:

The ghost imports a charged strangeness into the place or sphere it is haunting, thus unsettling the property and property lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge […] a ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken […] the ghost also simultaneously represents a future possibility, a hope. Finally, I have suggested that the ghost is alive, so to speak. (Gordon, 2008, p. 63)

An absence that keeps rippling, keeps affecting my life, with the force of something that could have been different. The ghost as the figure of the “missing-which-keeps-being-there”—as an affect that did not finish its work and keeps pushing, even after death.

*

I am crying while writing. I am crying and I never realized that all these emotions were there. All the shock of those messy times. All the un-named moments like seeing my mom in grief, seeing the chaos, receiving weird explanations: “Now Daniel is in heaven.”

*

In Spanish, heaven and sky are the same word, cielo. I remember asking myself where heaven/sky is, where does it start. I remember being an (innocent) child looking at the ground and the sky and not seeing any differences, not knowing where one starts and the other ends.

Where is heaven then? It was a question I could not answer.

*

I ask if I can touch. Pachi says, “yes, of course.” I pass my hand over the top of her head and I feel a place without bones. A small circle of skin that feels like a soft little hole on the top of her head.

She says, “well, they have made some scans and I still have pieces of the bullet, they actually do not know how I am living a normal life.”

*

I am going to rehab. I know all the people and I say hi to each with a big smile. I go up the stairs and sit in my usual spot. They bring different exercises: puzzles, memory tests, maths, and comprehension. I am doing cognitive rehabilitation. I feel a small improvement every time; it is not much, but I sense I can improve. I keep trying.

I think to myself: if Pachi kept playing the piano and recovered, maybe if I keep doing this with passion, I will recover.

I don’t have a small hole in my head, but maybe in my soul. After a mental health crisis, I lost my cognitive skills. I needed to stop going to university, take some time off.

Some of the people on the rehabilitation start doing simple jobs, like folding letters. Everyone here has a different reason for attending. I feel that doing simple jobs is not for me. I feel I can improve. I want to give it a try.

My mom is with me. We make a small plan to try to do some other cognitively demanding activities, so I sign onto additional courses.

*

At some point, I felt as if I was re-producing the two big traumas of my family. As if I was holding Daniel’s death and Pachi’s shot. How impactful was this for me as a child? How impactful was it to live those moments when I did not understand where heaven is and what was going on?

I had to stop university, same as Daniel, the same year, the same lecturers. I lost my cognitive capacities, I needed to stop, I needed to go to rehabilitation.

I felt as if I was/am holding part of the trauma, the pain, the effort.

I felt as if I was inspired by them. By their fight. Their passion and conviction.

*

I see the effect on my family. I see them scared, careful. I feel their grieving for the brother and son they lost. I am not the same anymore. I am not the intense, intellectual, artistic child that I was. I am simple, lost, needy. I feel uncomfortable for disturbing the lives around me; but the only thing I can do is to keep trying. Keep trying.

*

It is not easy to listen, read or see the stories of the dictatorship. I remember reading a book with the stories of someone who was taken by the police and tortured. The things that they survived were dreadful.

It is not easy to listen to the stories of women tortured with mice in their vaginas, electrocuted in brass beds, raped. Not easy to listen that there were kids killed, that there were missing babies and pregnant women.

To see the mothers and wives of the disappeared men, dancing the cueca sola, the national dance that represents a courtship of a man and a woman, now danced only by the women, to represent the lost loved ones.

*

Innocent we could say. Innocent makes it more intense as if the moment carries additional energy. Innocent in the sense of not being able to do any damage; innocent in the sense of resisting no matter the consequences. These women dancing to this day the cueca sola are fighting to keep the memory alive; to not forget the horror. They keep calling for the ghost to come and dance with them, so we do not forget their fight.

Something intense happens, when it seems that our organized world collapses and we sense connecting with another energy, connecting to an arousal in our bodies. Affect is a manifestation of the intensive/virtual, something that disrupts linearity. Something that pushes for transformation. The intensive is always pushing into the event from an immanent plane (Massumi, 1995). Something is passing through me (and through us) when I see this suffering, when I see this passion, this fight. There is an affect that goes beyond me as an individual: “[t]he autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is” (Massumi, 1995, p. 96).

*

Shockingly, after all the suffering, I keep listening to people justifying the horror, saying, “Your relatives were killed because of their stupidity.” Election after election, a big part of Chile’s population vote for the people involved in the tortures and killings. It is enraging to read in El Mercurio, the bestselling Chilean newspaper, on September 11, 2019 (the 46th anniversary of the coup d’etat), an insert that defends the need for such a type of regime.

I find my traumatic memories out of the time of Chronos. They remain, always there, waiting. As fears, as crises, as a sudden cry. Some things do not stop happening. Some moments remain always present:

My aunt there,

writing on the wall,

a policeman coming up behind her

and shooting her in the head.

*

Daniel used to dress as Santa for me and my cousins.

Another cousin and I were a bit suspicious and one time we grasped at the fake beard. We felt so proud to have uncovered him.

That was probably our last Christmas together. I cannot remember. He died in summer, just after Christmas (in the southern hemisphere the seasons are reversed).

I have no more memories of him after that.

I like the pictures of him. His big smile, playing with the kids. Holding the hands of one of us and whirling us around until the centrifugal force makes us fly.

Inquiry as Activism

For an inquiry that aims for a change, we need to make new codes; we need to imagine different regimes in the research. We need to create practices that cannot be coded by a system.

The special issue of which this article is a part is about inquiry as activism. I wonder how my experience with “activists” can contribute to the understanding of what activism means. How my relationship with Pachi and Daniel and what they suffered inspires my inquiry as activism.

I remember their stories in a process of recalling some ghosts. These ghosts remind me of things that could have happened differently. Activism is always about a ghost, something that haunts us, that brings sorrow and hope. For activism to be able to activate, it needs to acknowledge a difference, a discrepancy between an actual and a possible, for which the ghost is its representative.

Revolutions happen in the “minor gesture” (Manning, 2016), in the fluxes that flow between the words. The minor refers to what is not controlled, to what emerges outside the rules—out of what is rationally plotted. The minor appears in actions, in gestures. In not understanding the smile of Daniel or the passion of Pachi. It is in those spaces that cannot be written about where a revolution starts to emerge. Activism starts with the invisible, with a ghost, with “something” that keeps rippling on after so many years.

They fought to have a voice at a time when their expression could lead to death, disappearance, torture. Now, their muted voice keeps calling for a better future.

*

Pachi appeared in the news. Some people said she “was doing bad things and that’s why it happened.” The family also appeared in the news. They started noticing there were people following them in the streets. Some arrangements needed to be made for our protection. Some family members left the country for a short time. My grandmother managed to make our Italian nationality valid, so we could have a place to escape, if necessary.

*

Pachi flew to Czechoslovakia.

My cousin was born there. He grew up speaking a different language. I remember him commenting about cartoons that we would not understand. Innocent.

We do not know how Pachi survived. And we do not know how my cousin survived too. That was the second shock/miracle of that day: when Pachi was in the hospital and they said “did you know you were pregnant?”

*

We are not sure how Daniel died. Some think it was an accident, others think he was killed. We do not know. He was in the south of Chile camping and hiking. They found his body in a small river. The person who found him seems to have taken him out of the river having tied him with ropes and then pulled his body out of the river with a horse. The body was destroyed and there was no way of knowing what exactly happened.

“We prefer to think it was an accident,” my mom tells my siblings and me. “It is easier, it is better.” It is more traumatic to think about another intent of murder. It is harder to feel the need to make a case against a system that is corrupt.

We know Daniel was in a political movement that made small protests against the dictatorship, shouting and showing banners in front of important buildings. After a couple of minutes, they would run away and disappear in the streets (acknowledging the risk of protesting as they did so). He had a girlfriend and friends who continue to remember him. My grandma still has some of the presents they gave her: there is one painting of his face as Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man; there are pictures of Daniel in a boat in the south; pictures with his girlfriend.

*

We know that he was studying psychology. He earned some money from being an entertainer at children birthday parties. He was Santa. He made us fly.

*

When I began the psychology degree, I went to my grandma’s and took Daniel’s psychology books and photocopied papers. My mum lent me the book he liked the most: The Tree of Knowledge by Maturana and Varela (1987). She said, “I loved it when he came by with new authors and he would try to explain all the concepts to me.”

*

My aunt made a case against the “aggression” (the gunshot) toward her. She won after many years. The first sentence, for grievous body harm, gave him 540 days of prison, which was then reduced to 61 days by the court-martial. Finally, the police officer’s sentence was suspended under the condition that he signed into an attendance book for 61 days—instead of being incarcerated. He continued working as a policeman.

*

Can writing work as activism?

Like writing graffiti; like that graffiti causing a riot?

*

My dad is standing at the front of a room, where the neighborhood’s community has gathered. I do not know what he is saying, but I can see the faces of many people looking at him. He is the leader and I feel proud of him.

Some days later, we would record a tape of his voice inciting the neighborhood to go to the elections and vote against the dictatorship, followed by the song of the campaign. He borrowed a speaker that we attached to the car and we went through all the little alleys of the neighborhood with the tape running.

I felt so excited. Nervous. I felt part of something big: “Chile, the happiness is coming,” I heard through the speakers again and again.

*

Making activism. Challenging the regime.

I am writing in an old building in Edinburgh. I have a scholarship that pays my bills. I am far away from my family. I am writing and I want to write as activism. Part of me feels the activism happened when I was a child. When we were fighting for something big when our lives were at stake. I wonder how to make activism now.

My writing as activism recognizes those actions that challenged a whole regime, the activists risking their lives. Of the wives dancing the cueca sola. Of those rioting, of those protesting, of those calling for democracy out of the windows of old cars.

I write as activism feeling that this cannot end in a publication. Cannot end in a database. I write as activism pointing out to those practices that are not in the academic classroom.

I write with a tear on my cheeks remembering the dead, the shot, and the traumatized.

*

“Thanks to life,

That has given me so much,

Has given me the laughter and the tears.”

Says a popular song in Chile (Gracias a la Vida by Violeta Parra). My aunt plays the melody on the piano, making small variations.

I see her playing and I do not understand all that passion. Her capacity to practice for hours and hours each day. I do not understand why, when she visits us in Chile, she hires a piano to keep practicing. “If I don’t practice then my playing level drops and I will not be ready for the next concert,” she says.

Pachi managed to graduate from her piano studies after years of rehabilitation. She continued playing after losing the mobility of her left side. Even today, she stumbles a bit when she walks, reminding us (and herself) that some pieces of the bullet remain inside her.

I understand a revolution as the change of codes of desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013)—desire as the affect what moves our lives and our societies. Desire as something open, something that does not want to end in personal pleasure, but to keep playing. Desire as passion.

Sometimes when I see her playing, I feel I cannot grasp what is happening there. Her fingers moving fast, her eyes concentrated, the music appearing from her assemblage with the piano.

*

I keep thinking that what made Pachi recover was her passion. I keep thinking that passion is the force that can challenge a broken brain. Passion and desire, something that pushes with intense affect, something that moves our body even after the gunshot and the trauma.

In my own recovery, I found that certain activities were easier to do; in certain activities, I had more energy and I started getting better on them. I came back to the things I liked, came back to paint, to play, to have fun with friends. I started valuing simple things, where I could feel an affect pushing inside of me.

Until today, I feel I stumble. Some things are hard to do; I fail, but I keep working to find what moves me, what makes my desire arise and make me go forward.

*

When I graduated, I felt it was not just for me. I felt it was a symbol of strength. A symbol of moving forward after the trauma. Of closing the gestalt of Daniel’s studies. Of acknowledging the effort of the rehab and the effort of the people around me that trusted I could move ahead.

Personal and Political

Activism activates. Makes the passive active. Awakens. Activism is to move your fingers after the bullet breaks all the connections. To play the piano in the theaters of Paris, after years of effort. Activism is to be able to play the song Thanks to Life after horror and trauma.

Inquiry as activism needs to acknowledge the political in the personal and the personal in the political. Local stories carry political weight, not just in their content, but also regarding when and where they are written.

I could not write without people saying after I read some of this aloud, “we want to listen to those stories.” I realize how traumatic it all was, only after I see someone moved by my words. Sometimes it seems that I have gotten used to it; I have developed a numbness.

As I get numb, I forget the trauma and the trauma becomes invisible. Then, the numbness seems to embrace more of my memories. It is when I approach with compassion the numbed areas of my memory that things start to appear as connected. The gunshot, Daniel’s death, and my crisis, they all seem to be a part of the same arc.

*

To embrace myself with compassion has been a hard path to walk: I need to hold the pain that resides in myself. Be ready to un-numb all those traumas that are passing through generations.

I have the privilege to be in an academic context where I have been asked to show my fragility. To follow the hard path of opening the traumatic. To be allowed to “write as inquiry” and enter in those terrains of numbed-pain.

*

“Mom, I will take my brothers’ hands and go to my nanny’s,” I said one night, “Mom, if you and dad die, I will go there, I know how to go.”

*

I used to imagine myself in prison for thinking different. To have many books for reading, being an intellectual “activist.” I was probably 10 years old.

Politics can change fast. In Chile, books were burned: if you had a Marxist book, you would immediately go to prison.

Writing-against is always a risk. Nonconforming. Resisting. Trying to find new ways of doing politics.

What happens if the regime changes again?

*

It is so hard to describe the traumatic. It is so hard to describe an experience that does not fit with any category. My notion of identity got broken. My capacity to think clearly, to remember. I felt dead. I was ready to give up.

*

It was weird to feel loved by people when I felt as if I was “nothing.” When I felt as if I was not interesting, not intelligent, not creative. My grandma would take me to a gallery or to a music event, or to a nice café. Different family members and friends would be around. I received a type of love that was not about me being “great". A way of trusting in me that I did not feel before.

*

This writing is part of my activism as I challenge my own codes: I challenge what defines me. After the horror and the trauma, I keep trying to heal my wounds and find my way.

This writing as inquiry works because I am able to open a space for listening to my own trauma—hold the broken pieces, caress the old wounds. I feel how my body responds; I can explore my memory with ease and I can see what was invisible before. Sometimes it feels as if I was recovering a lost arm or a leg—something emerges where there was nothing before. New things emerge challenging what I know, and I realize that there is so much hidden in the dark.

*

My friend read this draft at a moment when I was avoiding it. I did not want to see it again; I did not want to work on it. “You need to honor this story,” she tells me while she reads these traumatic words. “There is so much here, Gabriel, any of these fragments deserve a whole paper,” she insists. I feel a bit threatened. More? Can I write more? Can I hold even more of this story?

*

Innocence, a word that divides how we understand an event. Does innocence make this story more human? Does it make my trauma more valid?

Innocent seems to carry a call for compassion, connection, identification with the other who suffers. Meanwhile, its polar opposite, “guilty,” makes me detach and disconnect. When I engage with the innocent, my affect engages in the affect of the other. When I see someone as guilty, I detach and I stop sharing my affect.

Does innocent make the image of me and my cousins playing with Daniel easier to relate, easier to identify with?

*

I wrote this paper through an affective engagement with my trauma. Following not the linear configuration of events, but memories that followed each other by their affective association. My affect does not need to be understood as (purely) personal, because affect has autonomy over the bodies containing it. In this way, my ghosts are not only mine. My ghost can haunt others as well. Through sharing my ghosts, I am doing affective activism, “[f]or the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2014, p. 280).

When I am finishing writing this paper, I decide to look for Pachi on the internet. I play some of her music on Spotify (I use her full name now: Maria Paz Santibañez) and let myself go with the soft music of the piano.

Post Scriptum

I finished this paper a couple of weeks before the big social movement that emerged during October 2019 in Chile. I decided not to change the content of this paper as I think it is relevant the moment it was written. The comprehension of affect as something not personal but belonging to the “pack” allows me to understand a social movement what for many was out of the horizon.