Fun and Noise... Silence and Reflection... are Strategies of Resistance

Last Friday was over the top, the cup brimming full. It was fun, deep, emotional, and extremely creative. Besides for playing trust games, group rhythm exercises and silk screening t-shirts with messages like “No Army Defends Peace,” we used council practice to open up a space in which folks from the U.S. could share their personal experiences. Council practice brings with it certain principles: speaking from the heart, deep listening, and offering what you have to say spontaneously, without too much planning from beforehand. In the midst of the incredibly vibrant and energetic space of the Red Juvenil house, we created a quiet circle in which each person picked up a green plastic ball in the center when he or she was ready to speak. The question was: what has been your personal experience of violence?

Not surprisingly, the answers were diverse. Some folks shared about violence in their families: experiences of suicide, domestic abuse, and parents who had fought in wars and came home only to face years of trauma. Some talked about their neighborhood, the gangs that control it, and the violence that those gangs bring along with them. Another long-time Colombia activist and myself talked about an experience of violence “lost and found” -- not the kind of violence that was part of life growing up, but the kind of violence that came closer and closer because of doing human rights work in Colombia. A kind of violence that even though it is not “my own” it becomes mine as others’ stories of torture, assassination, threats, massacres, and the rest, sit in my consciousness, lodge themselves in different corners of my body.

After we completed the initial circle, Red Juvenil youth activists reflected on how important it was to hear about the violence lived “over there” and to connect in our commonalities. Many of them shared their common experiences of having grown up in “hot” neighborhoods. They had seen friends and family members die from bullets in the streets, victims of neighborhood wars, guerrillas, paramilitaries, narcos, and state actors.

It was a powerful exercise … almost unbelievable to hear how much each person had experienced violence: whether it was lived within the confines of four walls at home, the structural violence of poverty and racism or the violence of gangs, drugs, or illegal armed groups controlling the neighborhood. Or whether it was threats and harassment for doing human rights work in Colombia. Through story telling and personal narratives, we were challenging an unsaid assumption that many people hold – Colombia is the violent place, not the U.S. People come from the U.S. to be in solidarity with Colombians as they face violence.

After the council practice, we broke out into three discussion groups: arts and education, recruitment and counter-recruitment, and violence and trauma healing. Each group was given the task of returning with a report back using a creative form. The violence and trauma healing group led us through an exercise to explore physically the experience of violence: they had us lay down on white sheets, interspersed with candles and music playing. They told us to close our eyes and think about a memory of violence. Where did we feel it?

My chest began to tighten.

Breathe, they said.

After a few minutes, we were asked to sit up and take the white piece of paper in front of us and change it in any way we felt, to represent the physical experience of violence. I crushed mine into a tight ball. The violence I’ve experienced makes me feel tight and small, constricted. Some people ripped their paper into shreds representing a fractured social fabric. Others ripped theirs into hearts with holes in the middle. Each one of us was asked to explain, in a few words, how and why we had transformed our piece of white paper.

With these narratives hanging like low, dense clouds in the room, the question remained: how do we transform these experiences?

The daily practice at the Red Juvenil of transformation is to be as loud as possible, to laugh hard and play hard. The violence can’t get you down, you must out live it, out play it, out laugh it, out run it, out dance it, out paint it. You might think the folks at the Red Juvenil are just a just a bunch of crazy kids. But having fun and making noise are strategies. Strategies of resistance.

The practice of transformation offered by the U.S. delegates was quiet and introspective. It was the practice of deep listening, it was creating a space for reflection and emotion, it was an acknowledgement of those scars we carry, it was personal, political, and physical.

Sandra, a long-time Red Juvenil activist, ended our morning of exercises with tears running down her cheeks, reminding us that it is because many of these people who are no longer with us, that we continue to struggle; their absence gives us energy to build something different; the fact that violence took them away from us means that we commit ourselves even more to the practice of nonviolence, to the transformation of ourselves and those around us.