Fear and freedom
Dear friends, (Since tomorrow is a holiday, you’re receiving this a day early ;-)
The most memorable stories from our own lives are often the stories of our most intense experiences. They are the stories of extraordinary happenings — whether good or bad — that bring excitement, joy, novelty, danger, surprise, change and upheaval to our lives. They are often the stories of situations in which our capabilities are tested and our ways of seeing the world are stretched.
‘Stories are maps of experience,’ writes Cynthia Kurtz in her book Working With Stories. If the mundane, ordinary routines and patterns that often fill our days occupy the well-worn middle of our map, Kurtz writes, ‘The most important stories are the ones that take us to the edge of our map.’
Lately I have been thinking about one of my own ‘edge of the map’ experiences, which happened when I visited Chile in October 2019. All stories are told from a perspective — and in this instance the perspective is my own. My intention here is not so much to detail events that I may not have deep context for as a foreigner who visited briefly, but rather to continue exploring themes around telling personal stories — picking up on a thread that I had introduced previously.
As it happened, I went for a conference in Santiago, the capital city, and was looking forward to a bit of solo travelling afterwards. As the conference ended and participants were leaving, the organisers warned us that protests had broken out across the city, shutting down the metro. Traffic was snarling everywhere, but I didn’t think much of it as I made my way to an outer suburb to meet some friends for dinner.
After an evening of relaxing talk and delicious food — we had gone to a restaurant specialising in the ancestral herbs, grains and fruits of Chile — I got into a taxi and fell into a state of contented relaxation on the drive back to the city centre.
Then suddenly, as we rounded the corner by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes near the flat where I was staying, things went crazy. Looking down the wide street, I saw flaming barricades blocking the road, and behind these were protestors shouting and throwing concrete rubble. I had been in my own world until that moment, and only then did I notice the sirens screaming all around us and the tense expression on the driver’s face.
Suddenly, I was right at the edge of my map.
The driver and I looked at each other in alarm and quickly he slipped onto a side street, rounded a corner and dropped me off in front of my building before making his own escape. In shock I walked past the concierge whose eyes were glued to a TV screen blaring with images of riot police and flaming buildings. I took the lift up to the 10th floor, with the surreal feeling that I’d just stepped into a movie.
Inside my flat, my eyes watered and my throat burned. I had left the window open to dry my laundry, and the flat was filled with smoke. Outside I heard people shouting, glass shattering, sirens, helicopters. I looked out the window and saw an armoured military vehicle charging down the street. Then it started to sink in: here I was, all on my own, in the middle of a civil uprising.
More surreal still, I had booked for the following day an AirBnb ‘adventure’ to hike in the Andes and visit some hot springs. My phone started pinging with messages. As chaos raged outside, I was messaging back and forth with a guy named Jesus. The trip would go ahead, but we would have to leave early. ‘Be waiting for us,’ said the terse voice message.
The sirens screamed through the night, but at last I drifted off to sleep. When my alarm chimed several hours later, it was dark and quiet. At 6 a.m. sharp, Jesus and I were speeding through an eerily quiet and empty city littered with broken glass and burnt detritus. We passed the empty shell of a burnt out bus, on our way to another hotel to fetch more guests.
We left the city behind and climbed into beautiful foothills. Jesus was telling us that he belonged to the indigenous Mapuche people, who had been waging a 1,000 year struggle against invaders. First they had fought off the Incas and after that the Spanish. They were fighting for their freedom still.
Jesus said the protests had broken out all over the city. He said his own grandmother was out in the streets, banging her pot with a wooden spoon in a form of protest called cacerolazo.
Through my own shock and disorientation, I sensed in Jesus’s words and in the explosive scenes I had witnessed, that something profound was stirring. I had the distinct feeling of being an outsider caught up in a very powerful moment whose significance I could not possibly understand.
This video, #Cacerolazo, released by the Chilean rap artist Ana Tijoux in the October 2019 uprising, gives a flavour of the moment (warning: contains strong images):
Writing in the Ethnomusicology Review of the University of California Los Angeles, Kaitlin E. Thomas describes cacerolazo as ‘a fixture in Latin American protests for decades’:
Women in particular were frequent cacerolazo actors, beating pots and pans to draw attention to the empty bellies of their families and children, to having no food with which to fill their pots, and to the lack of large-scale assistance to mitigate rampant shortages of basic essentials (Snider 2012).
A spontaneous, loud, and free form of voicing dissent, cacerolazo had solidified its presence in the Chilean protest scene by 1973. After authoritarian dictator Augusto Pinochet assumed power, public political activity became a dangerous venture, thus quieting widespread cacerolazo until the 1980s when a period of economic crises ushered them back onto the scene. By the end of that decade, the consequences that the economic meltdown had on institutions like education, the agrarian sector, health care, and housing reverberated well into the 2000s.
Now, people continued to protest against the effects of decades of austerity, inequality and ruthless capitalism, Jesus told us. Chile’s tumultuous past of conquest and colonization, followed by a brief socialist experiment and then a violent coup and right wing dictatorship throughout the 1970s and 80s continued to cast a long shadow over peoples’ lives, he said.
As we climbed the steep road up into the towering mountains, Jesus recounted stories of historical figures who had escaped to find freedom here in the Andes. He told us that his son, aged 5 just like mine at the time, was learning the Mapuche language in school, and that he was learning it from his son.
We climbed higher, and I drank in the cataclysmic beauty of the landscape. The mountains, dry and desert like, scarred by aeons of rock falls and avalanches, were painted in the most exquisite shades of lime and emerald green and copper. Resilient life forms, moss and lichen, and glittering minerals all splashed their colours across the stone and scree. (My photo doesn’t really do it justice, but here it is nonetheless.)
This was also a brutalized landscape. We passed mining operations where heavy earth moving machines had gouged out craters and devoured the mountainsides in the thrall of the world’s insatiable greed for copper, plaster and other minerals. The beauty and the brutality seemed to be held softly together in these mountains. In the distance, a snow capped volcano rose above the dramatic peaks strewn in rubble and streaked with pathways cleared by floods and rockslides. These mountain slopes were shaped by violent forces — yet through it all they appeared so softly and vibrantly alive.
Climbing further to one desolate spot, Jesus pointed out a small, low slung forlorn blockhouse covered in graffiti and said this had been a prison holding political prisoners in isolation under the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1980s.
At the next bend, we saw a giant condor circling high up in the clear blue sky. My heart soared at the sight of the magnificent bird, described in various Andean folklore traditions as a powerful representative of the sky and a portent of change.
We jumped out of the van and climbed further up the mountain on foot. The wind whistled and I breathed piercing thin air into my lungs. The sky was an intense blue. As we climbed higher, I remembered a passage by Jay Griffiths, in her extraordinary book Wild: An elemental journey:
‘… mountains, of all landscapes, seem the freest. One peak of Kilimanjaro is called Uhuru, meaning Freedom, and it suits all mountains. Mountains are associated with the freest things we know: air, wind, the flight of birds and the wings of mind, for thoughts have a quality of glide, up here, and the human mind needs mountains as a mirror for its flight.’
All of a sudden Jesus shouted with joy, as the giant condor glided swiftly up out of the canyon behind us and circled right above our heads. After centuries of struggle, he said, the condor had come to symbolize freedom, strength and power to many.
Up there in the wild mountain air, I felt myself standing amidst cycles of chaos and destruction and creativity and reformation. I felt myself in a dynamic place of possibility — coursing with generative and cataclysmic energy.
Well — of course we had to leave the mountain. Jesus got word that things were heating up again in the city. A curfew was to take effect, and we needed to be back well before nightfall. On the outskirts of the city, the traffic once again snarled. We saw army trucks and riot police. Crowds of people lined the streets, banging their pots and pans, drawing horn blasts of support from passing cars.
Traversing the streets just before curfew with my rolling suitcase, trying to find the new flat I was moving to, I saw a big queue at the corner shop, where the shopkeepers were serving people through the bars of a locked metal gate. I immediately got in it, but when my turn came to be served, I couldn’t think what to ask for, and ended up with some bottles of water and packets of chocolate biscuits.
The city was in chaos. Protestors were gathering everywhere, and the government was cracking down with extreme and terrifying force. I thought of my family in Cape Town and grew nervous, fearing that the situation would get worse. But there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. The protests were spreading like wildfire not just in Santiago but across the entire country. The airport was in chaos, as throngs of passengers were left stranded by cancelled flights.
So, I breathed through my anxiety, and embraced the moment. For me, those next few days in Santiago were a dance of fear and freedom.
Walking the length and breadth of Santiago, avoiding the hot spots and always keeping a sharp eye out for trouble, I felt a resurgence of that tender feeling of possibility I had felt up on the mountain. Everywhere people were gathering to march and dance and sing and bang on pots. The army and the riot police dispersed them with water cannons and rubber bullets. Fires raged and sirens wailed. Buildings were boarded up and streets were covered in shattered glass, until the next morning brought out volunteer residents who swept up the litter with their brooms and dustpans.
The city remained under curfew, so in the evening I would go up to the rooftop deck of the apartment block where I was staying. As dusk settled, I would see people leaning out of their windows to bang their pots in solidarity and blast the ‘nueva cancions’ of Violeta Parra and Victor Jara - iconic Chilean folk musicians of former generations. This was the hauntingly beautiful anthem I heard one night, deeply felt in its history of tragedy, accompanied by wild applause from the neighbourhood and, naturally, the banging of a thousand pots:
People kept on going back to the streets, and their numbers grew. Doctors and medical students in their white coats and red cross armbands joined the marches in the street. Dancers gathered in the Plaza de las Armas to dance salsa and folkloric dances. Young women sat on church steps bearing placards that demanded a new Constitution.
An increase in the metro fare had been the spark that set off this great outpouring of anger and demand for change. Suddenly everything was bubbling up and spilling over. The lid had been knocked off the pot, it seemed. Or, to bring back the metaphor I started with, it appeared to me that the entire nation of Chile had lurched overnight from the grim and discontented centre of its map to the volatile, unknown edge. It felt as though rigid structures were collapsing, even if only for the moment, bringing a release of euphoric energy. Where it would go from there seemed equally a question of hopeful excitement and of terror.
But of course now, in retrospect, it strikes me that the metaphor of a map is a rather static one. If we are talking about maps of our individual and collective lives, then surely these must be dynamic maps, always in transition, reflecting the constant movement and cycles of change and growth, energy and inertia, collapse and decay and rebirth that are inherent in life itself —sometimes chaotic and volatile, sometimes almost imperceptible — but ever continuous.
The protests just kept growing and growing, until they appeared unstoppable. By the time I left Santiago, it was said that there were a million people marching in the streets of that city. I chatted to people in the street, met my friends for a beer in an outdoor pub offering a special chalkboard ‘Menu de Emergencia’, and then we wandered around drinking in the beautiful, imaginative street art murals. A part of me was reveling in the creative potential of the moment, whilst walking my own tightrope between fear and freedom, and feeling sympathy for the pain, trauma and upheavals that so many Chileans were going through. When all was said and done, at least 30 people died in the violence and hundreds more were maimed and blinded by rubber bullets.
My time in Chile certainly wasn’t the solo adventure I had been anticipating. Instead, I became a close observer of a cataclysmic drama. My experience was fraught with chaos, tension, uncertainty and, I must confess, moments of sheer joy and exhilaration. It wasn’t my country or my struggle, of course, but I was caught up in the intensity of it. Living at the edge is thrilling, because once the lid is knocked off the pot and the forces of change are unleashed, there is no telling what may happen. Like a tumultuous earthquake, the map of existence is expanding and contracting, stretching and reforming, under your feet from one moment to the next. And as much as we so often yearn for change, we also fear it. Perhaps there are times, I thought, when the only sane thing to do is breathe — and dance.
It touched my deeply to see so many people responding to the moment with dance — as powerful an expression of freedom, vibrancy and togetherness as there ever was. Like the mountains, where I had perceived such a soft and tender living beauty emerging through the violent and cataclysmic forces of earthquakes, volcanoes and human-driven resource extraction, I saw people in the streets of Santiago meeting this upheaval with a flow of music and dance. Wherever I looked, I could see expressions of beauty and solidarity, as people danced with the chaotic rhythms of the ground shifting beneath their feet. It left me in awe.
When the time came to leave, the city was still under curfew, so I made my way to the airport and slept on the floor before catching an early morning flight to Sao Paulo. As the plane lifted up into the clouds, I watched far below as we crossed the majestic and jagged cordillera of the Andes, thinking of Jesus, the condor, all the doctors and dancers and fellow travellers I had met on the streets, and the extraordinary intensity of the last few days. Although now of course the tension of the experience has long since dissipated, those sharp contours of fear and freedom remain — writ large across my own map of experience.
With love,
Megan
P.S. Perhaps you have your own story or reflection you would like to share? As always, I would love to hear from you!
Also, here is a short Twitter thread introducing some text (translated into English) of Chile’s newly approved Constitution, which I understand has been one outcome of the events of 2019 (click on the text of the tweet below to read the thread). This English translation of the text proclaims Chile as ‘plurinational, intercultural, and ecological. It is constituted as a republic of solidarity, with gender-equal democracy, and it recognises dignity, freedom, and the substantive equality of human beings, and their indissoluble link with nature, as intrinsic and inalienable.’