Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

It was early February in Barranquilla, Colombia, and I was confused. Instead of facing the whipping winter wind and listening to the rustle of dried leaves, we were still walking the city in flip-flops, the women in halters, the men in linen shirts stuck with sweat to their backs.

The weather here hadn’t changed much since July. Sometimes a breeze off the coast would carry away the smell of Barranquilla—a campfire smell of fried plantains and burning brush—and replace it with the salty freshness of Caribbean waters.

When it rained, as it did often, the streets became rivers, paralyzing the city, carrying along hotdog carts, whole packs of street dogs, household trash, and even pieces of sidewalk. Once, I saw a 900–pound steer, escaped from the slaughterhouse, save his life again by grasping at a rubber tree root with his teeth.

All of this chaos and noise was everyday living in Barranquilla. But in the midst of the disorder, I was unable to camouflage. I am 100-percent Oklahoman, born in Tulsa, reared among rattlers and feral hogs. I sport cowboy boots and bangs. I carry an Oklahoman’s geography with me. Things here seemed backwards.

I had long been the odd one out, the one who caused trouble by crossing both real and cultural borders. I was sick of small-town protocol—of chitchat and gossip, of Southern meanness and judgment. I wanted to cuss, throw fits, cry, and talk about real emotions without being labeled as a hothead, a bitch, a hysteric, or the worst, “unladylike.”

Was the escape worth the risk? When Americans hear the mention of Colombia, what first comes to mind? This is supposed to be the land of kidnappings, drug cartels, revolutionaries, censorship, guerillas, and paramilitary forces. A place you would never want to visit, let alone live.

Yet there I was, a resident gringa, forced to examine pre-conceived “truths” about a people, a land, a culture. I suffered from the storyteller’s itch to paint revealing pictures with words. But I also felt helpless. How could my small, good stories match up to the stereotypes propagated by the photos of guerillas and paramilitaries, stacks of bundled cocaine, and displaced refugees marching into big cities, fleeing the terror of their rural homes?

Here's one story. On September 17, 2004, a professor of sociology, Dr. Alfredo Correa, a charismatic “anti-Yankee,” was shot and killed at 2:30 p.m. near his home in Barranquilla. At the university where he taught, photocopied pictures of Correa began to mysteriously show up where they shouldn’t, plastered onto the main university sign, on official-use-only bulletin boards, glued to palm trees, and stuck onto four-story-high library windows. The janitorial staff would tear them down or scrape them off with soap and water, only to discover the same picture glued in the same place the next morning.

A month after his death, I went to the restroom during a break in an investigative journalism seminar. When I closed the stall, I found myself facing one of these pictures of Alfredo Correa, a large, bearded man with a ponytail. In the picture, he was speaking, his lips slightly parted, his eyes glowing white with emotion. I sat there on the toilet with the chills. I was proud of the students—their ingenuity kept him present in their lives.

No one knew the identity of the picture placers. Their reactions were particular to Colombians who hear of death every day. The students of Correa did not feel sorry for themselves. They did not bunker down in solitude and despair. They lived with his death.

Just after receiving the news of Correa’s murder, I accompanied some of his former students to a dance hall, where they danced to the music of carnival: brass horns, accordions, flute, and washboards. My friends referred to the evening as “The Disorder.” Let’s go for some Disorder, they said.

Every corner in the place was painted a different, brilliant color; stairs led up and down to different levels of the building. Half a surf board had been embedded into the wall, jutting out among other disparate objects like children’s chairs, a burro’s saddle, weathered shutters, copper pots, a golden lion’s head, and small palms and vines that you had to push past to reach the bathroom. The llamadora, or “the caller,” was a drum that for me immediately conjured up ritual, its deep, trembling resonance calling the dancers to attention.

BOOM… BOOM… BOOM. I could think of nothing, only feel my body drawn to move. Two men in their 60s shook it up on top of the bar for hours, and no one else but me found the sight hilarious. They reminded me of the way Bill Cosby danced in his skits, sticking out the belly and the butt, a slight bend in the knees, and a look of extreme satisfaction. I tried to copy the way they moved, but I knew that they had been listening to the llamadora since birth, that they had danced before they spoke.

Colombians keep their dead alive in a creative and daily struggle. There would be reckoning and remembering. At dawn, the sun caused us to squint as we busted out the door. We danced out into the steaming street with swollen feet and began a new day, complaining of the heat and arguing over the price of the taxi.

My Colombian friends had taken me in when I was at a crossroads. They were helping me to live a different rhythm, a rhythm with Disorder. Disorder was letting go, breathing the air and filling the lungs, no matter how heavy the rain, or how bad the stink.

At home, I might be the small-town eccentric who wed herself to men with accents, but I was also the woman who now heard a drum in her sleep. BOOM. The llamadora, faint, in the distance. BOOM. The vibrations rolling through me. BOOM. Getting closer.