1
The schizoid condition that ontologically fragments and morally degrades intellectuals in our time is not without historical precedent. In La ciudad letrada, Angel Rama portrays with brutal honesty the ugly role that intellectuals have played in shaping the reality of Latin America. From the period of conquest and colonization, through the era of independence, to the whirlwinds of the Mexican revolution, Rama underscores the lust for power, wealth, and fame, as against the thirst for truth, equality, and justice which has too often motivated Latin America’s all-too-human intellectuals. Precisely by reason of this brutal honesty, Rama’s critical history is an example that intellectuals would do well to follow today: for our time is as devoid of the courageous self-reflection that Rama practices in La ciudad letrada as it is plagued by the timid forms of self-deception that he denounces in this provocative book.
While the tension between intellectuals who lust for power and those who thirst for justice informs every chapter of Rama’s history, this tension achieves a particularly dynamic quality in his final chapter, where he studies the roles that intellectuals played in the Mexican revolution. To that end, he recalls how Mariano Azuela, in his famous novel about the Mexican revolution, Los de abajo, places his revolutionary hero, Demetrio, at the center of a triangle whose angles are occupied by the intellectuals Luís Cervantes, Alberto Solís, and “El Loco” Valderrama. This triangle symbolically represents the diverse ways in which would-be revolutionary intellectuals in Latin America have sought to associate their linguistic prowess with the power of the sword. Cervantes represents the opportunistic and sycophantic intellectual; Solís, the disillusioned and melancholic idealist; and Valderrama, the madman who, because he is mad, can both acknowledge and withstand the terrible truth of his relationship to power. And what is that truth? What is this brutally honest truth that neither Cervantes nor Solís dare to articulate, and much less incarnate? According to Rama it is that Valderrama, “El Loco,” and that the others too --the opportunists and idealists-- are at best half-hearted heroes of the revolution.
By highlighting the triangle of positions that the intellectuals in Azuela’s novel take vis-à-vis the Mexican revolution, Rama draws attention to the conflictive relationship that often forms between intellectuals who join revolutions and those downtrodden people –los de abajo-- on whose behalf such revolutions are purportedly made. At issue in this conflict is the verbal prowess of intellectuals. On the one hand, their ability with language helps intellectuals prove that they are loyal to the ideals of the revolution and deserve the trust that los de abajo place in them. On the other hand, this linguistic artistry is precisely what makes intellectuals suspect in the eyes of their revolutionary brethren. For how can los de abajo know for certain that the intellectuals mean what they say and say what they mean? Where does their artistry begin and end? What are the limits of their solidarity with the revolutionary masses? Unable to secure comforting answers to these unsettling questions, los de abajo are left with a nagging doubt. Could it be that the intellectuals who have joined the revolution have done so in order to attain positions of power within the very same lettered city that the revolution aims to overthrow?
As ugly as it may be, this suspicion is neither the product of some popular paranoid delusion nor an instance of mass hysteria; rather, it is grounded in historical reality, in the historical memory accumulated over centuries by the downtrodden, in the experience, precisely, of those on whom intellectuals have tread in their bid to associate their power over words with the coercive powers of the state. Indeed, the historical record that Rama critically reconstructs throughout La ciudad letrada demonstrates the extent to which los de abajo have had plenty of reasons to mistrust intellectuals, especially those who have presumed to speak on their behalf about the importance and value of revolutionary ideals.
Although Rama’s assessment of the dubious role that intellectuals have played in Latin American history ends with an analysis of the intellectuals who participated in the Mexican revolution; the doubts it raises concerning the legitimacy of intellectuals are still as pertinent today, at the start of the twenty-first century, as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century. My recent experience in Colombia, where I went to study the flight and plight of that country’s more than three-and-a-half million forcibly displaced people, is paradigmatic in this regard. This experience taught me that, in spite of my wishes to the contrary, I am in fact similar to the intellectuals who Rama analyzes in Azuela’s novel. But there is one significant difference between them and me: whereas, according to Rama’s analysis, intellectuals will tend to occupy one of three positions in regard to the crises they mean to resolve, in Colombia I came to occupy all three positions simultaneously; I became, in a matter of speaking, a schizoid intellectual: one in whom opportunism, idealism, and paranoia compete at cross purposes, undermining his sense of integrity.
Surely, I am not the only erstwhile naïve intellectual who has thus been disenchanted and must today endure this schizoid condition. The insanity of a world that violently displaces millions of people –whether in Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Sudan—and that does so in the name of security and progress, imposes this condition on anyone who feels compelled to discover and acknowledge the unsightly truths of our social reality. Whether we like it or not, for better or for worse, we are all of us disillusioned idealists, sycophantic opportunists, and disturbed madmen and madwomen.
Is this too brutal an assessment of the current condition of intellectual life? Perhaps it is; but honestly, there is too much at stake in our world today, there are too many crises to be resolved, for intellectuals to care too much about themselves and not enough about the world they live in.
2
I live in a lettered city, in what is perhaps the paradigmatic lettered city of our time: Washington, DC. From the White House, to the Capitol, and from the Capitol to the Supreme Court; or from the Pentagon to the State Department, and from the FBI to the CIA; or again from K Street, where lawyers and lobbyists congregate, to the Universities, where students cultivate their minds, Washington, DC is populated by men and women of letters. It is populated by lettered people who, in keeping with the regular rhythms of political elections, displace and replace those who preceded them.
These transitory lettered elites come to DC always wanting to start one kind of revolution or another. I moved to DC about eleven years ago, just as the Newt Gingrich-led congress, which had signed its “revolutionary” Contract with America, was busy impeaching President Clinton because he had lied about having his penis sucked dry by an office intern. And who was the unsung hero of this righteous revolution? Why, a man of letters, of course! Kenneth Star, that most punctilious lawyer, left no paper unearthed, unturned, or unread. He, the great man of letters, proved to one and all and beyond any reasonable doubt the moral depravity to which the White House had sunken under Clinton’s watch. Shortly thereafter, elections were held, pitting a “concerned” Al Gore against a “compassionate” George Bush. When the Bush-Cheney ticket won, the neo-liberal revolution of the previous years turned neo-imperial. Again, men and women of letters were at the forefront of this new revolution, citing memos according to which Saddam Hussein had played a leading role in the attacks of 9/11; crafting memos according to which torture was no longer torture; and justifying the imperialistic invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as wars of liberation. This neo-imperial double-speak worked its strange magic on the “revolutionary” masses of America for eight interminable years, but the damage that it has done to democracy in the States and elsewhere in the world is now evident for all to see. Today, the Obama administration, which is itself headed by a lettered man –Obama is a lawyer, but also the author of two books, is busy with a revolution of its own. Seeking to undo the damage done by the neo-liberal, neo-imperial revolution of the right and re-establish the social and economic bases for a newer New Deal, the Obama administration has begun to set in place the revolution of the timid American left.
What sort of relationship has this “revolutionary” lettered city sought to cultivate with Colombia in the time I have lived here? When I first arrived and Clinton was President, Washington gave birth to Plan Colombia: $800 million over eight years to help bolster the Colombian government’s so-called War on Drugs. Curiously, when the Pastrana government first came to DC with a proposal for Plan Colombia, these monies were to be distributed according to the following formula: 80% to address the underlying socio-economic problems that lead so many people in Colombia to participate in the illicit cultivation and distribution of marihuana, cocaine, and heroine; 12% for restructuring Colombia’s financial industry; and the remaining 8% to bolster the Colombian military and police forces. By the time the U.S. Congress was through debating this proposal, these allocations had been flipped upside down and turned inside out: 80% for the military and police; 12% to address money laundering schemes; and 8% to help ameliorate the poverty, hunger, and desperation that fuel both Colombia’s drug-trafficking industry and the armed, violent conflict that has displaced close to four million people. Thanks to the lettered men and women who are employed by the military-industrial complex, Plan Colombia was summarily turned into what should be called Plan America: after all, most of the monies designated for this plan have actually wound up in the pockets of US-based helicopter builders, arms distributors, and other economically driven humanitarians.
When Bush came into office, there was no plan to discontinue Plan Colombia; but there was also no intention to increase it. After the attacks of 9/11, when the Bush administration declared a global War on Terror, Plan Colombia was accordingly refashioned and re-funded. No longer would Washington think of Colombia as the frontline of the US government’s War on Drugs; it would now become a frontline in the War on Terror. The Bush and Uribe governments designated Colombia’s drug-trafficking paramilitary and guerrilla armies as terrorists. While this designation included both the paramilitaries and the guerrillas, the Uribe government was quick to design a program for demilitarization and re-incorporation to civil society of the paramilitaries. In exchange for agreeing to participate in this program, the Uribe government promised the paramilitaries that they would not be held accountable as terrorists. Thus, Plan Colombia under the Bush administration was redefined as a policy intended to bolster the Uribe government’s war against Colombia’s guerrilla armies, primarily the FARC.
As the Obama administration settled down after its first one-hundred days in office, Washington had yet to publicly demonstrate how its policies vis-à-vis Colombia would amount to a “change we can all believe in.” Still, if Obama’s warming toward Cuba was any indication, it seemed reasonable to expect the Obama administration would seek diplomatic rather than military solutions to Colombia’s on-going internal strife and the illicit drug-trade that continues to help finance the awful violence that has forcibly displaced millions of people: more, in fact, than anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. But in the summer of 2009, all hopes for such a radical shift in U.S. policy vis-à-vis Colombia were shattered. Pursuing a Bush-era policy that seeks to consolidate U.S. military presence in Latin America within Colombia’s borders, Washington and Bogotá have recently (and secretly) reached an agreement according to which U.S. armed forces will be permitted to use seven Colombian military bases. And so it seems that the U.S.-abetted Wars on Drugs and on Terror will continue to define U.S. and Colombia relations for the foreseeable future. This is not exactly the change I had hoped we might all believe in, but it is very much in keeping with Washington’s double-dealing culture as the paradigmatic lettered city of our time.
3
It was 2005 when I decided to travel from DC to Colombia. My decision to leave DC stemmed from the fact that, after 9/11, life in this lettered city had become anything but intellectually stimulating. Perhaps in other cities across the United States this was not the case, but in DC the government’s obsession with national security meant that slowly but surely life in this city on the hill had come to be governed by fear. The police were everywhere, especially in my neighborhood on Capitol Hill. And on the highways and interstates surrounding the city, signs would flash announcing the color-coded threat level for the day. When I complained to my neighbors of the government’s attempts to govern our city by fear, I discovered that many of them felt comforted by those attempts, not threatened as I did. In the years following the attacks of 9/11, it seemed as though far too many of my fellow fallow Americans were a bit too eager to give up their freedoms in exchange for security. Indeed, anyone who dared critique the Bush administration’s overly zealous defense of the nation’s security was simply deemed un-American, even anti-American. The enemy, or so many of my fellow Americans seemed willing to accept, was not only without but also within.
While it is certainly true that I distrusted the Bush administration’s emphasis on security and criticized those who sympathized with it, it is also true that at the time I was struggling to achieve a comparable level of security in my personal and professional life. I too, it turns out, was obsessed with security at the time: in particular, the kind of security (which is almost unheard of these days outside the hallowed halls of academia) that comes only with tenure. In order to achieve this level of security, I had had to publish regularly in academic journals. To do so, I had to write in a scholarly fashion on scholarly concerns. Anything that was not rendered in this style was summarily censored, ignored, or even worse, vilified. Thus, in order to get tenure and be promoted to the level of security I now enjoy, I felt I had to internalize, not just the codes of scholarship, but the figurative “death threats” that hide behind the censorship practiced by so many academic journals. “Publish or perish!” Behind this cute little quip, which is meant to summarize an academic intellectual’s struggle for survival, there hides a terrible truth: that those who survive are often enough precisely those who most willingly accept the authority of others to censor their work, their thoughts, and their minds. There is very little about this that can qualify as revolutionary, which may help to explain why so much of academia today is bogged down in ritualized forms of self-censorship.
The combination of a political realm obsessed with security and my own professional obsession with job security began to wear on me; I felt I was turning into a timid political being, a timid intellectual, a sickly thinker of superfluous thoughts. By allowing myself to be conquered by this conspiracy of security, I also felt I was betraying myself. True enough, I was an intellectual who was living in a city populated by hypocritical, sycophantic, opportunistic intellectuals; but I had always naively liked to think of myself as being somehow different: I was, or very much wanted to be, the sort of intellectual who did not suck up to power, who challenged and resisted abuses of power, and did so always in the name of freedom, of equality, and of justice for all. In order to save face and continue to see myself in this favorable light, I felt I needed to get away from DC. I needed to get away from all those other DC intellectuals in whose pasty faces and gray eyes I saw reflected back to me the horrible image of who I was fast becoming.
So I decided to flee from DC and went to Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. It was there that, much to my chagrin, I was forced to recognize that as an intellectual I too can be perfectly repugnant, opportunistic, disillusioned and cynical, brow beaten, and weakened by bouts of paranoid insanity. But I am anticipating my conclusions, whereas I should first narrate the story of how I arrived in Santa Marta with great expectations, then proceeded to occupy the position of an intellectual opportunist, and eventually, after I’d become a disillusioned idealist, entered directly into a state of paranoia.
4
When I first decided to study forced displacement in Colombia, I tried to do so objectively. I read up on twentieth-century Colombian history. I also read a good deal of books that studied displacement in Colombia from legal, political, and economic points of view. Written in a dispassionate, objective, and impartial tone, these academic books all seemed to assume that in order to attain a broad view of the causes and effects of displacement I had to get personally far away from it. While these broad visualizations did help me to perceive displacement abstractly, they also blurred my perception, allowing me to perceive only generalities and encouraging me to treat these as if they were accurate descriptions of reality. Sensing, from what I could see on the streets, that this was utterly wrong, I then started to read other sorts of books, written mostly by journalists, sociologists, or anthropologists who had spent time with some of Colombia’s internally displaced people. These books were rendered in the more intimate tone of memoirs or interviews and they did get me closer to displacement. Yet, insofar as these books approached displacement from the universal perspective of human rights advocates, they failed to get me as close to the experience of Colombia’s internally displaced people as I felt I needed to get in order to fully understand their plight. I wanted to do justice to the actual experience of displacement; so I decided I would need to get as close to it emotionally as I possibly could.
The first step I took in this direction was inward. I figured I could mine my own experience in an attempt to better understand the emotional structures and traumas involved in displacement. Indeed, as the son of a Spanish mother and an American father who grew up in Spain, Argentina, and the United States, I was no stranger to displacement. Early in life, I had learned to discriminate between the competing cultural values that pertained to my homes, regardless of their geographic locations. As a cultural half-breed, to this day I make my home out of the ambivalent cross-cultural conflict that I inherited. Internalizing that conflict and sometimes surmounting it through irony, I have learned to be at home, as it were, in exile. Idealistically, naively, stupidly I assumed that my experience of cultural displacement would prepare me for the study of forced displacement in Colombia.
So I confidently set out to contact some of the displaced people living in Santa Marta. I asked around town and eventually met some social activists who worked with a local NGO that had, for several years already, been attending to the needs of displaced people in and around the city. They agreed to take me around to the outskirts of town, where we visited makeshift neighborhoods populated by thousands of displaced people. These people lived in hovels, where there was no running water or electricity; their mud and cardboard and tin-roofed houses were built precariously on steep mountain ridges; the grown-ups had little if any work at all and only money enough to feed their families occasionally; the children had no shoes; they had no school to attend; and many looked to be simply overwhelmed by their condition, sulking, unwilling to smile. It was during a visit to one of these marginal neighborhoods built out of desperation by the displaced victims of Colombia’s on-going civil war that I met a woman who agreed to speak with me at length about her experience of displacement. At long last --I opportunistically congratulated myself-- I would now be able to test my theory on displacement against the experience of someone who had been forcibly displaced.
This woman –who, because I met her in Santa Marta, I will refer to here as Marta, told me that she was the victim of a double displacement. Upon hearing her say this, I could not contain myself and vainly told her that I too was the product of a double displacement. Although in my case the displacements were only cultural and metaphorical, I aimed to assure her that this meant I had an intimate knowledge of the emotional traumas and surprising emotional rewards that arise as a consequence of displacement. Like her, I was a nomad. Like her, I was a displaced subject. Like her, I was a post-modern border crosser and cross-cultural translator of half-truths. She looked at me suspiciously then, sensing the extent to which my readings of Jameson, Derrida, and Mignolo divorced me from life; but she resumed her narrative nevertheless. In the two hours we spent together, whispering in a tiny corner of a hidden café, she told me the story of her double displacement.
Her first displacement came about shortly after the school where she worked as a teacher was riddled with bullets in a fierce battle between guerillas and paramilitaries. As a result of that battle, which the paramilitaries won, the school was permanently closed. And the teachers, among them Marta, were told that they could no longer work as educators. For, according to the town’s new masters, they were not simply teaching the children how to read, write, and do arithmetic but indoctrinating them with the leftist ideology of the guerrillas. So Marta, who had for years worked as a school teacher, was reduced to farming the small plot of land that she had inherited from her father and on which she and her husband had built their home. But the paramilitaries who had taken over the town did not allow her to reinvent herself simply as a farmer. They started to visit her home regularly, accusing her always of sympathizing with the guerrillas and threatening to take her two boys from her, so they could join the paramilitary army and in this way receive a proper education. Marta always denied their accusations and pleaded with them to leave the education of her children in her own hands. Then one night, the paramilitaries paid Marta another visit. This time they told her that she could no longer stay in town, that neighbors had been talking to them about her clandestine activities as a guerrilla sympathizer. When she vehemently denied these latest accusations and dared the paramilitaries to name her accusers, they told her that they believed her, that they did not want to hurt her or her children, and that they would be willing to help her leave. They offered to “buy” her farm, telling her that in this way she would have enough money with which to relocate her family. At first she refused. But when the paramilitaries returned one night to her house in a pick-up truck (a truck that Marta and all of her neighbors knew was used to dispose of dead bodies), she agreed to “sell” her property. The following morning she and her two boys fled the town where her parents, brothers, and sister all lived.
Thus began her first displacement. She went to live in a town that was about two hours away from her home by bus. She found work as a librarian, who had to travel by bus from one town to another, distributing books. She liked this work because it meant she could still contribute to the education of children in towns other than her own. But she missed her home dearly, felt very lonely, and could not really make enough money working as a librarian to feed herself and her sons well. Then one day, a bus that she was traveling in was stopped by a band of armed paramilitaries. These men recognized her; they showed her a list of names that they had with them and showed her the cross that was next to her name. She knew what the cross meant. That she was marked for death. She pleaded with them to please let her go and insisted that they were mistaken about her, that she was truly nothing but a dedicated school teacher who never once spoke to her students about the guerrilla and their beliefs. Miraculously, they let her go; but they warned her never to ride that bus again and travel to the towns her job as a librarian required her to visit. Having been found by her enemies, she was overcome by a paralyzing sense of paranoia. She could not leave the house she had moved to for fear that at any moment she would be shot dead. She had no job, no money, and was losing all hope of ever being able to live a normal life again. Her brothers sent her money so she could send her sons out onto the streets to buy food for the house. Marta was slowly but surely being crippled by terror. The world had collapsed on her, breaking her spirit, pushing her to the brink of insanity. She could not sleep; she would lay awake all night worrying and remain in hiding all day, worrying. One of her brothers came to visit her in the jail that her home away from home had become. He bought her and her sons passage by bus to another city, much farther away, where an aunt of theirs lived. So she fled. Marta fled this second time to a far-away city where she could hide in anonymity, re-invent herself, and bring up her children in relative peace and prosperity. That city was Santa Marta.
By the time that Marta and I met, she had been living in Santa Marta for two years. When she first arrived with her two boys, they stayed in the house of a family friend. But they were welcome only for a month before the stigma of having displaced people living with them made her hosts push her and her children out onto the streets. Marta fended for herself as best she could, but eventually turned to the state for assistance. Having registered as an Internally Displaced Person, she became eligible to participate in a program run by a local NGO that helped the victims of forced displacement with small business loans. Marta produced a business plan –she proposed becoming a baker—and secured a small loan. With those monies, she was able to purchase the necessary materials to start up her business and rent out a house where she could both work and provide her sons with shelter. She told me that she no longer considered herself to be displaced, that Santa Marta was now home to her. But she also told me that to many of her neighbors, her two boys and she would always be displaced. Her neighbors, she explained, seemed to believe that she had fled from her home because she had done something wrong. This infuriated and pained her. What was she guilty of? Of wanting to bring her boys up in peace? Of wanting to provide her boys with a safe place to call home? Of not wanting to live a life governed by terror? Of refusing to go mad? She had committed no crimes, she insisted, and yet she and her children were ostracized. She then told me, with conviction, that she could forgive the men who threatened her, persecuted her, and took her previous life from her, but would not and could not forgive the rest of society for not holding these real criminals accountable for their dastardly deeds. Justice, Marta told me, would never come to Colombia’s four-million Internally Displaced People until the rest of the country acknowledged their innocence and recognized the fact that they were the victims of a terrorist plot by the paramilitaries and the para-political politicians to control the land.
Just in case I had not understood what she meant by this, she told me another story of displacement: this time, it concerned her father and mother. When Marta had first been forced to “sell” the plot of land that her father had given her and flee her home for the imagined safety of another home in a nearby town, her father had told her that he would never sell his property to the paramilitaries and that they would have to kill him before he’d sell. He had meant to assure her that she would always have a real home to return to some day. But the paramilitaries came one night for her father. They insisted that he knew where the guerrillas hid their arms and forced him to march for three days in search of some imagined stockpile of weapons about which he knew nothing. At the end of three days and nights of constant marching at gunpoint, they returned him home, beat him to a pulp, and left him for dead. When news of these terrible events reached Marta, she left Santa Marta and returned “home,” as it were, to her father’s house. He was not anywhere to be found. Her mother was also gone. None of the neighbors wanted to tell her where they had gone, but she eventually learned from an old friend of the family’s that they were in a neighboring town, in the hospital, where her father was slowly recuperating his strength. With tears in her eyes, she told me that her father and mother would soon be joining her in Santa Marta. It seemed her father had finally been persuaded to “sell” his property after all.
Marta’s story impressed me then, as it still does now, as being precisely the sort of story that can guide those who hear it into the unique, peculiar, and plural places that displaced people are forced to call home; it is the sort of story that asks us all to occupy these places emotionally. I believed then, as I still do now, that such emotional intimacy is required of us all if we are to fully understand the moral and political implications of forced displacement in our time. The horror we feel when confronted by the brutal cruelty that Marta and her family have faced; the anger we feel when we learn of the injustices she has suffered; the sympathy we feel when we contemplate Marta paralyzed by paranoia: all of these emotional responses bring us as close to displacement as we must get in order to understand just how unbearable it is. Knowing this, we will surely want to make it stop. Won’t we?
The first thing I did after I heard Marta’s story was to write it all down in great detail. In a fit of quixotic idealism, I had convinced myself that, if I could only publish Marta’s story in the United States, it would help improve US-Colombia relations. After all, I reasoned hopefully, who could read such a terrible story and not be moved by it to demand that the US government seek a non-military solution to Colombia’s on-going civil war: a war that is funded in large measure by Americans, whether illicitly through the drug trade or licitly through Plan Colombia. The fact that I have here decided to retell this story, even if only in a summary fashion, suggests that I still harbor this idealistic hope for an enlightened US policy vis-à-vis Colombia. Be this as it may, it is also true that the magnitude of the violence and human suffering in Colombia has forced me to place checks on this hope and acknowledge the very real limits of what I or anyone else who retells such stories can do to help resolve the conflict and ameliorate the suffering in Colombia.
Maybe a week or two after I had sat down with Marta, an anonymous phone call was placed to my home in Santa Marta. The voice on the other end of the line delivered a cryptic message: “Tell Mr. Britt that he is running into danger.” Was this a warning? Was it a threat? Everyone I asked agreed that, given the situation in Colombia, I would be wise to interpret it as a threat. So I did. Initially, I was angered by my situation and wanted to lash out at my enemies. But since I did not know who they were, I could do nothing but stew in my wrath. Then, this anger turned against me in the form of a paranoid delusion. Like Marta before me, I feared to leave my home, imagining that at any moment I would be shot to death. So I found myself re-living what Marta had experienced. I hid during the day, worrying; and I did not sleep at night, unsettled as I was by anxiety. I lived those days in disbelief, alienated from myself and from a life I no longer governed. I was fast becoming a slave to fear, to terror, to death.
One day, I mustered up enough courage to flee. I fled to another city in Colombia. But the distance I had managed to place between myself and my anonymous enemies in Santa Marta was not enough to quell my paranoia. I had recurring nightmares where I found myself strapped to a chair, surrounded by enemies who were threatening to cut out my tongue and force me in that manner to obey their command to shut up, to say nothing, to write nothing about displacement in Colombia. Feeling persecuted and in desperate need of security, I fled Colombia altogether and returned to my home in DC, the very home from which I had fled months before because I was feeling stifled by the security for which I now longed.
When I arrived in the States I passed through security gates at the airport in Miami. Usually, I take offense at the extent of such security measures; but on this occasion, I felt comforted by the sight of so many Homeland Security officers, so many sharply dressed policemen and policewomen. Their presence meant I would no longer need to fend for myself. The Department of Homeland Security was there to protect me. My enemies, the terrorists who I had left behind in Colombia, would first have to get passed this formidable shield of security if they wanted to get to me. Taking refuge in this knowledge, I began to relax; but only a little bit. Although I did feel that America’s security forces had lifted a terrible burden from my shoulders –I would no longer need to defend myself by myself—I still also felt unsure of myself. The death threat that I had received had shaken me to the core; my confidence had been shattered; I had lost my hope. I felt tiny, scared, and ashamed.
After a month in DC, which I spent nursing my wounds, I returned to Santa Marta. Was I being courageous by going back or just stupid? I still could not know. All I did know then was that my wife and son were in Santa Marta and that without them at my side my life could not be whole. So I returned to my home away from home in Santa Marta hoping to gather together the shattered pieces of my life and come whole again. But I never did. I could not go back to that place where my life had been threatened and resume the life of the person I had been prior to that threat. My brush with death had transformed the eagerness, idealism, and bold conviction with which I had initially investigated displacement into attitudes I now regarded ironically as opportunism, cynicism, and timid bravado. In fairness to myself, I should say that by returning to Santa Marta I did face my fears, which suggests that perhaps I was not quite as opportunistic, cynical, and timid as I was making myself out to be at the time. But in all fairness to historical truth, I should also say that, once I was back in Santa Marta, I never did go again to visit those marginal neighborhoods in the city where thousands of displaced people eek out their existence, and I never did speak to any of those people again. I wanted to believe that by returning to Colombia to face my enemies I was conducting myself after the manner of an epic hero, as someone who would face his enemies and reclaim his rightful place at home; but the truth of the matter is that I was only conducting myself as an erstwhile naïve intellectual whose brush with death had disenchanted him.
Being threatened with death taught me to keep my place as an intellectual: I could presume to speak for the displaced; I could retell their stories and reflect on their horrible experiences; but I was to do so from a safe distance, secure in my knowledge that, insofar as I was an intellectual, it was perfectly legitimate for me to talk and write about displacement without actually needing to imitate it. Yes! Being an intellectual in a lettered city has its definite advantages. Chief among these is the ability to express one’s solidarity with the displaced from the comfort and security of one’s own displaced reality: the displaced reality of one’s metaphorical, linguistic, and cultural displacements: the displaced reality of one’s theoretical sympathies for the down-trodden: the displaced reality of one’s own schizoid condition as an opportunistic, disillusioned, double dealing intellectual.
5
Prior to moving to Colombia for a year, I had become disenchanted with the limited role that I had devised for myself as an intellectual. I was simply a private intellectual, working at a private institution of higher learning, where I regularly taught classes on the public intellectuals of nineteenth and twentieth century Spain and Latin America. Would I ever cease talking privately about the virtues and vices of the public intellectuals of the past and try becoming a public intellectual myself? Would I ever move from the comforts of arm-chair theorizing into the discomforts of real life practice? Or would I simply spend the rest of my adult life teaching, preaching, and leeching off the past? Courageously, or so I thought, I dared to step beyond the circumscribed limits of my field of expertise and made a concerted effort to get involved as a public intellectual in one of the major moral and political crises of our time viz., the forced displacement of millions of terrorized people in Colombia. I had wanted to take these matters into my own hands, as it were, and proffer both a critique of this crisis and attest to a better way of life. Doing so, however, implicated me in the very terror I had sought to denounce, and it set me fleeing also in search of a better life. Rather than mediate the crisis I had set out to resolve, I naively imitated it. To the crisis of Colombia’s forcibly displaced people, I had added my own crisis of legitimacy as an intellectual. I had failed as a public intellectual. My failure was due, in no small measure, to the naïveté with which I approached the on-going crisis in Colombia; I truly believed that as an intellectual I could and would conduct myself with integrity; I genuinely believed that there could and would be no limits to my professed solidarity with Colombia’s downtrodden.
Today, I am doubly disenchanted. In addition to being disenchanted with the limited role I have tended to play in our world as a private intellectual, my failed attempts at re-inventing myself as a public intellectual have also disenchanted me. This second disenchantment has compelled me to turn toward an analysis of my unhappiness and to acknowledge the role that I have unwittingly played in creating its conditions. Although I wish it were not so, I am in truth responsible for the sense of shame that I still feel today when I remember how, in the face of death, I elected to flee from Colombia. The truth, the ugly truth, is I cared more for my own life and my own well-being than for the lives and well-being of Colombia’s terrorized, dispossessed, and displaced. The truth was then and remains today that my professed solidarity with the downtrodden had and has very real limits. Those limits are my own happiness, my own health, my own freedom. They are selfish. They mark my difference from those downtrodden people to whom I offer my solidarity.
Is this too harsh an assessment of my intellectual interventions in Colombia’s humanitarian crisis? Perhaps it is; but such brutal honesty serves to illustrate that there really can be no better critique of how intellectuals conduct themselves save their conduct as intellectuals. Earlier in this essay, I claimed that there is far too much at stake in our world for intellectuals to care too much about themselves and not enough about the world they live in. When this statement is properly re-contextualized within the overall narrative structure and confessional themes of this essay, it resonates with definite irony. For, although it is certainly true that I have here re-told the terrible story of Marta’s double displacement, it is also true that, in the process of doing so, I have indulged in precisely the sort of self-consumed and self-obsessed intellectual self-analysis that I earlier claimed intellectuals should avoid. No doubt, my unhappiness as a disenchanted intellectual seems rather inconsequential when it is set alongside the suffering of people like Marta, whose lives have been shattered by terror. Yet, the crisis of my legitimacy as an intellectual does matter, if for no other reason than that it gets in the way of what matters even more, which is the ability of intellectuals to effectively denounce the moral degradations of our time while attesting to the possibility –however remote it may be—of a better form of life.
Christopher Britt Arredondo teaches Spanish and Latin American literature at George Washington University (Princeton University Ph.D., 1998). He is the author of Quixotism (2005) and is currently revising a book manuscript on cross-cultural displacement, titled Exiled at Home. He is the author of various essays that study the role of the intellectual in the formation of nationalist and pan-nationalist identities in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. His research centers on the conjunction of aesthetic and political discourses in national, imperial, and post-colonial contexts.
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