LITMIR.BIZ

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the authors state that allusions to being traumatized are abundant in the testimonies, with trauma understood as a state of confusion or disorientation as a result of the violence.¹³ They acknowledge that Quechua speakers learned the term as a result of NGO interventions. My point is that people were also “traumatized” as a result of the data coding process.

      I had several meetings with the PTRC’s mental health team in Lima, and our first conversation was a jolt. I presented some preliminary findings, outlining various memory afflictions, llakis, susto, irritation of the heart, la teta asustada (the frightened breast). At the end of my talk, there was awkward silence. I wondered what had gone awry. Someone finally explained the initial silence: with the exception of susto, this team of seasoned and committed mental health professionals had never heard of these ailments. As one person remarked, “It’s as though you were talking about another world.” What had happened?

      As we talked, the reason became clear. The mental health team was analyzing the relatos, understandable given the number of testimonies and the time constraints. In the relatos people were “traumatized,” and thus the various afflictions I discussed were absent. To their credit the mental health team attempted to rectify this problem. Midway through the TRC process, they obtained funds to have a sample of 401 testimonies transcribed in Quechua and subsequently translated into Spanish in an effort to capture what people had actually said they suffered from. This sample, however, was still limited because the interviews had not been designed to explicitly explore the theme of mental health; rather, the interview guide was aimed at collecting facts about the human rights violations people reported.¹⁴

      Truth commissions have pedagogical objectives. One didactic goal is to educate both domestic and international audiences about a violent past as a means of ensuring nonrepetition: in this case, memory is understood to exercise a deterrent effect. Individual testimonies provide the raw “memory material” that is processed and from which a collective narrative is forged. In an effort to produce “intelligible results,” there is a move to technologies of commensuration. This may include the standardized software program used to analyze data, the teams of international experts who move from country to country to provide technical assistance, as well as the discourse of trauma itself. These strategies are part of the globalized transitional justice industry and are marshaled in the interest of producing findings that are defensible and that allow a final report “to speak” beyond the context in which it was produced. For the PTRC, it allowed the Final Report to translate “inconceivable things” into science and thereby authorize the suffering and the text.

      These are worthy goals. However, I cannot shake off some doubts. When first thinking through this material, it was tempting to assert that the discourse of trauma involves the systematic erasure of local meaning. While this is true for the relatos and the coding process, trauma circulated in other spheres in other ways. Although being “traumado” was introduced into these communities by external agents, over the years I did hear some Quechua speakers use the term. “Estar traumado” became part of local dynamics as people mobilized the category to different ends.¹⁵

       Talking Trauma … and Other Modern Things

      When I started my work in Peru, I visited various NGOs to introduce myself and learn more about their programs. From the director of an NGO in Lima, I received my first lecture on “how they do not suffer.” I explained to the director that I was going to work in Ayacucho on the impact of political violence in campesino communities, and he responded in a tone reserved for children and gringos: “Señorita, what you need to understand is that they’ve already forgotten everything that happened.” He leaned forward. “Look. We are capable of abstract thought. That’s why we have suffered so much. But they only think in a concrete way—they only think about their daily food and their animals. They don’t think beyond that. That’s why they haven’t suffered like we have. They aren’t capable of it.” Evidently, being such concrete thinkers, “they” only have access to a range of primary emotions, while the loftier sentiments—love for a child, grief for the murder of a loved one, hope for a different sort of future—are reserved for “us.”

      There is no way to approach the themes of mental health, political violence, and its legacies without addressing ethnic discrimination, a form of psychological violence that cuts across every aspect of daily life for Quechua-speaking campesinos. Nelson Manrique has noted there is no sense of national tragedy in Peru, and this has to do with the characteristics of those who were killed or disappeared during the violence.¹⁶ In the politics of death in Peru, loss of life is measured according to a hierarchy of cultural and ethnic differences. So, evidently, is suffering. Pain and its expression are deeply cultural, and how one suffers and makes that suffering manifest will be contoured by the structures of discrimination that shape bodily experience, social hierarchies, and access to services. It is necessary to discuss ethnic discrimination, how this maps onto a geography of difference, and then situate “talking trauma” within this discussion.

      I recall the campesinos who described their experiences as internally displaced people during the violence. They found it agonizing to “wander in foreign lands,” and their poverty was extreme. As one woman recalled, “In the cities everything is money—even to urinate, they charge you fifty céntimos. We didn’t even have money for food.” However, although lamenting the poverty and hunger that characterized those years, what was poignant was her tearful insistence that “The poverty was terrible, but the mistreatment was worse. Chuto nikurawanchik they called us—chutos, filthy chutos.” In many conversations with “returnees,” the discriminatory treatment they endured in the cities enters into their motives for returning to their communities or for reconstructing them.

      According to the Diccionario de la Lengua de la Real Academia Española, the word chuto comes from the Aymara ch’utu, which means “of thick lips.” The definition continues: “Said of a crude, uncultured, dirty person; insulting; Indian of the puna.” There is a fusion of physical and geographical characteristics, constructing both the puna and its inhabitants as wild, as savage. However, the dictionary definition is relatively mild when compared to how the word chuto is used in daily life. Among ethnic insults, chuto is a word that is especially lacerating, and Quechua speakers learn at an early age how deeply the insult can cut.

      * * *

      The children came piling into our room in Huaychao and began enthusiastically spreading the colored pieces of a jigsaw puzzle across our rickety table. Active hands grabbed the pieces, locating them one way and another until a design began to emerge inside the wooden frame.

      The children completed the puzzle and then dumped the pieces upside down to start all over again. While they scrambled the pieces, Edith and Juanjo explained there would be a drawing competition in Huanta, part of a commemorative event that would take place in the municipal stadium. The children were invited to paint murals on the walls of the stadium as part of an effort to reinscribe the space following the years La Marina (navy) had used it as a detention and torture center.

      Their faces lit up with the idea: a trip to the city, painting, mandarin oranges, ice cream. They began to talk all at once about what they were going to paint, the volume increasing with their excitement. Suddenly, in the midst of the happiness provoked by the idea of a trip to the city, Edgar posed a question that silenced this group of boys—just little guys ranging from six to ten years old. “But if we go to Huanta, what if they call us chutos?”¹⁷

      * * *

      Ethnic hierarchies are mapped onto geography in Peru, and despite the massive movement of people, there is a tenacious cartography underpinning discrimination.¹⁸ While campesinos also mark territory and difference in a variety of ways, the capacity to define and assign inferior status to certain regions and their inhabitants follows broader power dynamics. Quechua speakers are acutely aware of where they are located (literally and metaphorically) in Peru’s ethnic hierarchy. Enter “talking trauma.”

      One institutionalized site of racism is the Peruvian health care system.¹⁹ In each community, people complain

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