Inspiration

Ernest Hemmingway was famous for his concise use of the English language. He is famous for having said that the first draft of anything is shit. One day, at his home in La Habana, a friend challenged him to write a story in six words. This is what he wrote:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

sharing the podium

“Get in, get in,” says the taxi driver. “Hurry. Something amazing is happening.” Two friends and I jump in and slam shut the taxi doors while the driver, a dark, plump, middle-aged man, turns up the volume dial on the radio. “It’s incredible,” he says in animated Spanish, “I reckon he’s going to win. They’re not going to catch him.”

Juan Mauricio Soler Hernández, 25 year-old Colombian cyclist, is close to winning the mountainous ninth stage of the Tour de France. A thousand miles away, in central Medellín, our taxi driver is close to tears.

This is the beauty of sport: the rare occasion in which the larger than life achievements of one individual touch and inspire another person who shares the same accent, same slang, same favourite foods, music, liquor and humour as the person achieving greatness. It's not patriotism so much as a common place in the world. The cyclist and taxi driver might be brothers or neighbours, and so for a brief moment the achievement and greatness is shared.

The driver’s excitement is contagious. Goosebumps tickle my back and when the driver tells me the cyclist’s story, I too find myself close to tears. I think of another time, ten years ago, huddled around a radio in the misty, Blue Mountains bush at dawn with my dad and his two brothers, listening to Pat Rafter winning the US open. We were five days walk from the nearest tennis court, but that didn't matter.

2007 is the first year Hernández has competed in the tour de france. Normally it takes a cyclist many years to reach his or her peak, but I need only look out the taxi window to see the big, steep advantage Hernández has on a mountainous course. He started cycling at age 17 and within a couple of years won several national competitions, without a coach, fancy bike, or sponsorship. There’s no such thing as a Colombian Institute of Sport, just determination.

An Italian cycling team scouted Hernández, and the rest is (a short) history. A week later he wins the spotty ‘King of the Mountain’ jersey in his very first tour de france, and for a brief moment he takes our taxi driver to the podium.

Peace and Justice

On the last day of a recent trip to Colombia I meet Marleni, a woman from an indigenous nation whose woven shoulder bags I’ve long admired. 


The Kankuamo live in the highest coastal mountain range in the world, where green mountains saturated with equatorial rainforests rise abruptly from the coast to snowy peaks within sight of the sea. The earth was born in those mountains, the Kankuamo say.

Marleni is part of a women’s cooperative that makes and sells the traditional Kankuamo bags. She explains to me how the bags are made from a fibre spun from the bark of a mountain cactus, how the fibre is coloured with vegetable dyes and woven by the Kankuamo women using their hands and feet. We talk at length about life in the mountains, and happily I choose a bag.

The next morning, waiting to board a plane in Bogotá, I read in the Sunday paper that a paramilitary officer known as ‘El Paisa’ has been caught in Colombia’s coffee region. He is accused of having lead massacres of at least 200 Kankuamos. I read the words but in my mind I see Marleni’s broad smile. Inside I cry, silently, and without tears.

Paramilitary groups - or ‘auto-defense’ groups, as they call themselves - have long been the heavy, hired hand of the government, landowners and corporations. Where the interests of such groups collide with the land rights of indigenous groups or peasants, the paramilitary is sent in to write the law. According to Human Rights Watch they are responsible for two thirds of all human rights abuses in Colombia.

In the quest for national peace, it is said, the government of Alvaro Uribe is trying to disband paramilitary groups, offer them amnesty for their crimes, and facilitate their re-entry into normal society through work programs.

Last month president Uribe tried to pass a law that would make all paramilitary offences political crimes, and hence pardonable by the State. The Colombian High Court ruled against the law, stating that political crimes must be waged against a State. Because paramilitary groups have always acted with the tacit endorsement and in the interest of the Colombian government, their crimes cannot be deemed political, the judges said.

The issue of amnesty is a knotty one. The Colombian people want peace, and, on the face of it, disarming the groups that most terrorise the nation makes sense. Furthermore, entering the paramilitary is often a last-resort choice for young, bored youths who are denied education or employment.

The nature of their crimes (playing soccer with a child’s head, cutting the foetus from a woman before she dies from loss of blood) may suggest otherwise, but surely these people are human too, as much a victim of a system of oppression as those they kill.

Uruguyan journalist Eduardo Galeano writes: “The torturer is a functionary. The dictator is a functionary. Armed bureaucrats, who lose their jobs if they don’t do their tasks efficiently. That, and nothing more than that. They are not extraordinary monsters. We won’t grant them that grandeur.”



Nevertheless, paramilitary crimes are heinous, and above the rank and file are the bosses, commanders and captains who join the paramilitary for sinister, selfish and calculating reasons, or rise through the ranks because they enjoy what they do. The man who lead the killings of 200 Kankuamos was one of these.

Under the new amnesty laws he would have spent a maximum of eight years behind bars had he delivered himself to the authorities. Having fled from the law (partly because he had reportedly stolen nearly $1.5 million from the commander of his paramilitary block) he is now a criminal scapegoat for a criminal State. Even so, if he cooperates and admits his crimes he’ll likely spend no more than 20 years in jail. And the Kankuamo will have little to no say in his judgement.

The disbandment of paramilitary groups receives much scepticism and criticism from many Colombian journalists, academics and human rights groups, who claim that the paramilitary organisations do not disarm at all, as outlined in a recent letter to president Uribe from Human Rights Watch.

In the last ten years, an average of around 1000 Colombians have been forcefully displaced from their homes and lands every day, as a result of the country’s ongoing civil war in mineral rich rural areas. Colombian economist and activist, Hectór Mondragon, writes, “It is not merely a case of displacement because of war, but rather that there is war so there will be displacement.”



Millions of hectares of land have been stolen by paramilitary groups, some of it rich in minerals, some of it perfect for growing illicit crops. In the process of amnesty, the stolen lands are not returned to their rightful owners. Guns are (ostensibly) handed in, not crops, homes or livestock.

Amnesty International writes, “In practice, hundreds of thousands of people in Colombia could be faced with a lethal dilemma: either continue to be homeless or move back to their land and live with the very same people who tortured, raped and killed their loved ones and forced them to move out in the first place."



Colombians want peace. They also want justice, and they know that one can never exist without the other.

Abundance and Starvation

Colombian meals are big, and there’s a simple reason why. In rural areas feasts fall from trees, and regardless how much (nuclear) families of up to 20 people eat, food inevitably rots on the ground, nourishing the dark, moist humus. Although a majority of Colombians now live in cities, the countryside is still the cradle of national culture and tradition. Most city restaurants serve country-style meals.

A $3 lunch also comes with soup, coffee and fresh fruit smoothie

It is curious then that in spite of such abundance, Colombians eat as though their food might disappear if it’s left on the plate too long.

Beyond curious, however, is the fact that in such a bountiful country children die of hunger. Three kids a day. Not in the countryside, but in city outskirts where blocks of land that measure six metres by two metres are sold to displaced and marginalised families for $400. Twelve square metres to build a family home, and the families rarely have $400.

Corrupt politicians and businessmen know this. Families who can’t afford to pay for the land work in indentured labour for whoever might ‘own’ the land. ‘Own’ because men with power and influence claim public land as their own, and rent it to families in need of shelter, even though they themselves have no legal right to it.

In reality, the families do not actually buy the land, since there is no owner; instead they pay a kind of feudal tax. At the end of the first year, when the family may have nearly payed the $400,
they are charged $800 for the right to live there a second year. In the poor and rapidly expanding south of Bogotá, this is an unspoken normality. Nobody says or does a thing, because corruption is institutionalised. Land is the source of power in Colombia, and the key to understanding a conflict whose beginning nobody remembers, and whose end few can see.

Poetry

The rain began falling at six pm on a thousand odd heads in the amphitheatre. Thunder cracked and the sky fell in sheets of rain. Many people left, nearly as many stayed. At 10 o’clock, after six hours of recitals, Alhaji Susso from Gambia, the last of 57 poets, rose to the stage to close the 17th International Poetry Festival of Medellín. He sang and plucked the strings of his kora, and the soaked audience danced and clapped beneath umbrellas. When he finished and the audience sang out for more, nobody doubted that what so many poets had said was true. Medellín is the world capital of poetry.

This is no small achievement. In 1991 Medellín, the capital of Colombia's coffee region, was the most violent city in the world, and a global centre for drug trafficking. “The poetry festival was founded in [this] context as a macro form of cultural resistance,” says festival organiser Fernando Rendón. “It is a voice for peace, and a protest against injustice and terrorism, including state terrorism.”

The festival is now the largest of its kind in the world. Over eight days, free poetry recitals are held in public parks, university theatres, high-security prisons, and schools and libraries in poor, marginalised suburbs. To date, Medellín has hosted 820 poets from 142 countries, and many indigenous nations.

Such contact with foreign visitors is an anomaly in Medellín. The city’s infamy has served to isolate it from contact with the world. The massive green mountains that surround it are a geographic metaphor for seclusion. Penetrating the valley like dust in a vacuum, the words, thoughts and solidarity of 60 poets each year bring hope, interest and dialogue to a city that for too long has been a black stain on the world map, rather than a black dot. The poets, in turn, leave the city with love and gratitude for its people and their compulsive generosity.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” says Nepalese poet Chirag Bangdel. “Thousands of people come to hear our poems. They cheer and ask for our autographs. It’s like being a rock-star. I don’t want to leave. In fact, I’m looking for somebody here who might adopt me.”

Miguel Barnet, from Cuba, has similar impressions. “I’m accustomed to see masses of people come together with a cultural motive,” he tells an audience of thousands, “but I’ve never seen an amphitheatre full of so many people gathered to hear poetry. UNESCO must declare Medellín the international capital of poetry!”

With the exception of the current Medellín city council, the festival has never received support from any level of government in Colombia. The festival organisers are vocal critics of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, and his government’s ongoing links to right-wing paramilitary groups.

As a voice of dissent, the festival is yet to receive the national and international attention it deserves, however last year it received a Right Livelihood Award, also known as ‘The Alternative Nobel Peace Prize’, and the annual event receives funding from several European nations including Germany and Switzerland.

Swedish Poet Bengt Berg and his wife dance with local kids at La Cruz, a suburb of displace people, while Gambian poet Alhajir Susso plays the kora.

Colombia is still a country at war, but Medellin is no longer a place where the majority live in fear. Walking to a poetry recital with friends, two young men on a motorcycle speed around a corner and pass us, accelerating up a busy street. “Ten years ago,” say my friends, “one would turn the corner and expect to see a dead body. There’s a saying here – a threat – ‘I’ll send the guys on the motorbike.’ Two men on a bike meant hit-men.”

We turn the corner. A man with a trolley sells juicy slices of papaya and fresh pineapple rings for 30 cents, and a lady walks in the opposite direction selling cups of sweet black mountain coffee from a thermos.

A repercussion of enforced isolation is authenticity. City buses are boisterous with local rhythms, and restaurants serve regional dishes. It has also made its people resilient, resourceful, independent and curious.

Jorge, 12 years old, is one of many people gathered to hear poetry in his primary school high above the city centre. In his suburb, La Cruz, 95 per cent of the population are internally displaced, victims of the ongoing civil war in Colombia’s mineral rich rural areas. “I don’t know much about poetry,” he says, “but it’s cool to see so many new people here, people from Africa and Europe. I like to hear them talk in different languages, and to hear their stories.”

Typical of Colombia kids, Jorge asks me more questions than I ask him. The first two questions are givens, as though they were taught in school: Where are you from? And, are you happy here in Medellín?

The Medellín International Poetry Festival is an annual opportunity for people to break open the vacuum, and say ‘yes’ to the latter.

Nnnnerves

We walked to the river along an old train line. Men were digging sand from the riverbed when we arrived, tipping it into wooden canoes moored to the shore. They dived beneath the water with a bucket and appeared again ten seconds later, heaving with the weight of wet sand above their heads. The midday sun was burning, but the men’s muscular bodies stayed cool in the water. An old tip-truck reversed into the river in a rocky, shallow section, and the men shovelled their canoe loads into the back. Truck drivers will sell the sand to construction companies that use it to make cement.

The railway line crosses the river on a rickety old bridge. Adrian was the first to jump. Fifteen metres, I reckon - high enough to count ‘one dinosaur two’ before hitting the deep brown water. I climbed out onto the frame of the bridge from the old railway sleepers, and looked down. Adrian stood by my side, wet and happy. My heart was thumping so hard my entire stomach and chest jumped with each beat. Adrian laughed. I jumped.

A week later I stood in a room with a phone in my hands, dialling the organisers of the Medellín International Poetry Festival. Underneath my shirt, my heart was on a bridge again. Thump, thump, thump.

Definitions

Nine and ten year old kids in public schools around Medellín were asked to define things, feelings and ideas. These are some of the responses...

Body
It’s what covers our bones.

A very necessary organ.

Government
People dressed in green.

Person
Something covered in skin.

Earth
What they cover dead people with.

Memory
The reason for living

Night
Very dark daytime.

When the family gathers together.

Empty
It’s when there’s nothing in a jar.

President
Somebody who doesn’t value our complaints.

Hope
I hope that when I get home there will be food.

Dust
It’s when somebody coughs.

News
Information, or important gossip.

Mud
Something women put on their face to stop wrinkles.

Ingenuity Two

Door to door laundry... washing machines are rented at 50 cents an hour in poor suburbs.

waste

Wastage is global. Garbage bins outside of restaurants pile up with good food that has no value because somebody has touched it. Half a pizza is not worth half as much as a pizza; it is garbage.
This is irrational, but the greater waste is that which has never been: the human wastage on city streets, where intelligence and creativity are abused in menial labour. A massive loss of thought.
Life is dedicated to survival.
Protein has a price tag and remains in the butcher’s.
Brains atrophy.
Where there might have been a doctor, there is a shoe shiner. Where there may have been a young student with a book, there is a boy sheltering from the world under a newspaper he cannot read. What art? What literature? What medical breakthrough? What bridge is lost? This is the great waste of things, and people, that never were.

The Law

The gears creak and crunch with every shift. The jeep is orange, partly from rust, partly from a 1960s paint job. Eight fellas stand on the back, holding on as best we can. We don’t exceed 40 kilometres an hour on the way to the river. Going downhill, the driver puts it into first gear. Everything in the car is original – I guess – including the brakes. Other cars, buses and trucks rush past, honking and overtaking on blind bends. Two boys stand on the back ladder, each with one foot and one hand attached to the jeep. Inside, the driver says earnestly to the girl in the passenger seat, “put your seatbelt on. The cops around here are really strict.”