Haunting without Ghosts

Border Hispanisms
Jon Beasley-­Murray, Alberto Moreiras,
and Gareth Williams, series editors

Other books in the series

Alberto Moreiras, Against Abstraction: Notes from an Ex–­Latin Americanist
David E. Johnson, Violence and Naming: On Mexico and the Promise
of Literature
R. Andrés Guzmán, Universal Citizenship: Latina/o Studies at the Limits
of Identity
Eugenio Di Stefano, The Vanishing Frame: Latin American Culture and
Theory in the Postdictatorial Era
Sergio Delgado Moya, Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer
Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil
Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in
Colonial Mexico
Horacio Legrás, Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory, and the Making
of Modern Mexico
Samuel Steinberg, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico, 1968
Charles Hatfield, The Limits of Identity: Politics and Poetics in Latin America
Haunting without Ghosts
Spectral Realism in Colombian
Literature, Film, and Art

Juliana Martínez

University of Texas Press   Austin

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Martínez, Juliana, author.

Title: Haunting without ghosts : spectral realism in Colombian literature, film,
and art / Juliana Martínez.
Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2020. |
Series: Border Hispanisms | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020010938
ISBN 978-1-4773-2171-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-4773-2172-0 (library ebook)
ISBN 978-1-4773-2173-7 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Violence in art. | Psychic trauma in art. | Arts, Colombian—
Themes, motives. | Arts—Moral and ethical aspects—Colombia.
Classification: LCC NX650.V5 M38 2020 | DDC 700/.4552—dc23
LC record available at https://  lccn.loc.gov/2020010938

doi:10.7560/321713
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1. Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes of Disappearance  38

2. Beyond Vision: Haptic Perception and Contested Spaces in the

Films of William Vega, Jorge Forero, and Felipe Guerrero  77
3. The Revenants: Deferred Burials and Suspended Mourning
in the Works of Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González,
and Erika Diettes  122
Epilogue 164

Notes 182

Works Cited  200

Index 213
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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support, encourage-
ment, and generosity of mentors, colleagues, friends, and family members
near and far. Thanks to Claudia Montilla at the Universidad de los Andes
and to Natalia Brizuela at the University of California, Berkeley, for their
guidance, mentorship, and friendship throughout the years.
Many thanks to Peter Starr, Brenda Werth, and to my colleagues at the
Department of World Languages and Cultures and the College of Arts and
Sciences at American University for their intellectual camaraderie and in-
valuable support. I am particularly grateful to Nuria Vilanova, Ludy Gran-
das, Carmen Helena Ruzza, Luis Cerezo, and Gorky Cruz. Thank you for
making this daunting project deeply humane.
My gratitude also goes to colleagues who patiently and generously read
and commented on portions of this book at different stages: María Helena
Rueda, Gabriela Polit Dueñas, Amanda Petersen, Alberto Ribas-­Casasayas,
and Jeffrey Middents have all been extraordinary interlocutors and encour-
aging mentors. I am especially grateful to Rory O’Bryen for generously en-
gaging with the ideas at the core of this book and for providing invaluable
and insightful feedback.
I also want to thank copanelists and audience members at a number of
conferences, particularly those of the Latin American Studies Association,
the Association of Comparative Literature, and the Instituto Internacional
de Literatura Latinoamericana, who helped me think through and refine my
argument with their comments, questions, and recommendations.
I am grateful to the graduate students and colleagues of the Workshop
on Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of Chicago for their
valuable insights on chapter 3. Special thanks to American University stu-
dents. They have been true intellectual interlocutors; our conversations in
class and during office hours informed and helped shape this book.
vii
viii  Acknowledgments

At the University of Texas Press I want to thank Kerry Webb for believ-
ing in this project from the start and for seeing it through with unparalleled
diligence and care, and Gareth Williams from the Border Hispanisms series
for his knowledgeable comments and suggestions. I am also deeply grateful
to Abby Webber for her diligent and thoughtful editing work.
Writing in English has been a challenging and rewarding experience.
It would not have been possible without Allen Young and Annalisa Zox-­
Weaver, who read and edited several drafts of this book. I will be forever
grateful for their detailed comments and patience with my English.
This book is also a tribute to the artists and scholars who have devoted
their lives and careers to exploring the complex relationship between rep-
resentation and violence from an ethical standpoint. In particular, thanks
to Evelio Rosero for the many conversations (both online and over coffee)
throughout the years; his incisiveness greatly contributed to the ideas pre-
sented, and his dark sense of humor made the process of writing them much
more bearable. Thanks also to Erika Diettes for taking the time to read and
comment on my analysis of her work and for her generosity with the images
reproduced in chapter 3. This book is largely a tribute to the many survivors
who shared their stories with the writers, filmmakers, and artists featured,
and to the victims whose tragic fates unknowingly shaped their narratives
and continue to inspire my own work.
I am deeply grateful to all the friends and family members in and out-
side academia who nurtured me and kept me going throughout this long
journey in Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Barcelona, Berkeley, and Washington,
DC, to name but a few places. Lázaro Lima, Juanita Aristizábal, Alejandro
Herrero-­Olaizola, Manuel Cuellar, and Juan Sebastián Ospina also pro-
vided key support and encouragement at different moments. Thanks espe-
cially to the woman whose wisdom and fortitude I admire the most: my
mother. I also think of my father, who did not get to hold a copy of this
book in his hands, but whose unconditional support, strength, generosity
and ganas de vivir continue to carry me through life. Perhaps it is only fitting
that I finish these lines accompanied by his loving ghost.
Above all, this book would not have been possible without the unwaver-
ing love and support of Steven Dudley and the insightfulness, patience,
mentorship, and friendship of Salvador Vidal-­Ortiz. To them I dedicate
this book with immense love and gratitude; to the Queer Brown House,
muchas gracias.
Haunting without Ghosts
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Introduction

What would an aesthetics of the ghostly be?

T. J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony

Colombia is a country of ghosts. The violent deaths of thousands of people

lost to the country’s decades-­old ideological, political, and social conflicts
haunt its rivers, mountains, towns, history, and memory. Over the last forty
years, Colombia has experienced severe violence, in part due to the expan-
sion of powerful drug cartels that have spread terror, infiltrated the economy,
reshaped the social landscape, and fueled ongoing conflicts among guerrilla
groups, right-­wing paramilitaries, and the army. Despite important signs
of progress, such as the 2003 demobilization of the Autodefensas Unidas
de Colombia (AUC) and the peace agreement with the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)—the latter the oldest active guerrilla
group in the hemisphere—forced disappearances, displacement, and human
rights violations of all kinds persist.
The numbers are staggering. The Internal Displacement Monitoring
Centre (2015, 83) estimates that from 1985 to 2014 there were 6,044,200 in-
ternally displaced people in Colombia, which means that more than 10 per-
cent of the country’s population has been forced to leave their homes due to
violence. Forced disappearance is another brutal manifestation of this vio-
lence. Record keeping has been poor, and statistics differ, but as of Septem-
ber 15, 2018, the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (2018) reported
80,472 conflict-­related missing persons.1 Though shocking, the true number
is thought to be much higher. Based on its experience carrying out special
sessions to register disappearances in specific conflict zones, the Colombian
Office of the Attorney General warned that in hard-­hit areas, some 60 to 65
percent of disappearances went unreported (Haugaard and Nicholls 2010).

1
2  Haunting without Ghosts

As is often and tragically the case, the majority of the disappeared are civil-
ians (79,245 out of 80,472), particularly human rights defenders and young
men and teenage girls in rural areas (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica
2018). Apart from catastrophic human consequences, the conflict generated
a proliferation of works attempting to denounce, challenge, comprehend,
aestheticize, or profit from such violence.
In this book, I examine selected works by Colombian cultural practition-
ers who since the late 1990s, and especially in the new millennium, have been
addressing the ethical and aesthetic challenges that historical violence poses
to cultural representation by appealing to spectrality as a productive mode
of storytelling. In this sense, I owe a profound debt of intellectual gratitude
to Rory O’Bryen’s Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colom-
bian Culture: Spectres of La Violencia. In his seminal work, O’Bryen (2008)
engages with the works of novelists and filmmakers born in the 1940s and
1950s, a time when La Violencia, with a capital V, was ravaging the coun-
try.2 Drawing primarily from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and the
works of other Marxist scholars, such as Fredric Jameson, O’Bryen argues
that “notions of spectrality can provide conduits for exploring the insistence
of La Violencia in contemporary Colombian cultural discourse” (2008, 17).
Through this lens, he analyzes literary and cinematic works produced from
the 1960s to the late 1990s that, in one way or another, turn to ghosts and
to haunting to frame their discourse about historical violence. As O’Bryen
points out, however, attempts to “give voice to the spectre” on the part of
these writers and filmmakers are often “infelicitous” (77). The works exam-
ined by O’Bryen struggle with the ghosts they conjure, frequently becoming
“collective exorcism[s]” (13) that end up demonizing, laying to rest, or expel-
ling the repressed histories they so effectively invoke. Instead of welcoming
the ghosts and the foreclosed stories of violence they conjure, the invocation
these narratives perform may at times act not as “a way of giving voice to a
spectre [but] as a way of destroying it” (18).
I take O’Bryen’s premise further by broadening its breadth and scope
in two central ways: first, by extending its temporal framework; and, sec-
ond, by reframing spectrality primarily as a mode of storytelling in which
ghosts may or may not be present. As the title of his book suggests, O’Bryen
limits his discussion so that violence remains circumscribed to that con-
crete and defining period of La Violencia in Colombian history (1948–
1958). O’Bryen’s lens remains focused on how this complex, poorly under-
stood, and often-­repressed moment haunts the works of authors who grew
up during this troubled time, shaping their (mis)understandings of the
forms of violence they would come to witness and face decades later. In my
 Introduction 3

own work, I argue that this relationship between certain characteristics of

spectrality and La Violencia can be productively extended to the modern
armed conflict, from its unofficial beginning in the early 1980s to its much-­
publicized—yet still incomplete and somewhat botched—ending with the
signing of the peace agreements between the government of Juan Manuel
Santos and FARC in 2016.
This book also covers a broader scope by including artistic works by Juan
Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes and by begin-
ning, chronologically speaking, where O’Bryen left off: in the new mil-
lennium. In essence, I seek to further explore the productive relationship
among spectrality, violence, and cultural production outlined by O’Bryen
by continuing to think about how, why, and to what extent historical vio-
lence continues to haunt cultural production in Colombia. I argue that a
growing body of work is increasingly using representational techniques asso-
ciated with spectrality, thus setting the ground for a constructive hauntology
of historical violence in the realms of aesthetic representation and cultural
production in Colombia and beyond. In the last two decades, cultural pro-
ducers as diverse as novelists (Evelio Rosero), filmmakers (William Vega,
Jorge Forero, and Felipe Guerrero), and artists ( Juan Manuel Echavarría,
Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes) have produced notable works that,
though varied in scope and medium, share both a concern for that which
can no longer be seen—but which lingers—and a will to account for the
vanishings and silences that constitute Colombia’s recent history. Despite
the many differences between these aesthetic projects, the common use of
representational techniques that weave disappearance, ambiguity, and criti-
cal reflection into the narrative fabric converges into a visual and literary
grammar that, though broad, remains distinctive. By exploring the limits
and opportunities of this hauntology, I posit that the proposed framework
is a valuable tool to better understand and address the complex relation be-
tween representation and historical violence from an ethically informed per-
spective, which is at the core of much contemporary cultural work. Building
on Jacques Derrida’s landmark postulates on the specter and on the work of
scholars such as Avery Gordon and T. J. Demos, I call this mode of story-
telling “spectral realism.”
Spectral realism should not be confused with the fantastic, or with its
famous “magical” predecessor. Spectral realism is a mode of storytelling
that takes the ghost seriously but not literally. Rather, it formally assumes
the disruptive potential of the specter, shifting the focus from what the
ghost is to what the specter does. As Alberto Ribas-­Casasayas and Amanda
Petersen explain, spectrality “rises as an aesthetic opposed to conditions or
4  Haunting without Ghosts

moods generated by military, political, or economic violence in the context

of modernity. It is an aesthetic that seeks ways to counteract erasure, silenc-
ing, and forgetting that eschews melancholic attachment to loss. It seeks to
construct itself as an alternative to the linear, hierarchical, and rationalis-
tic. It also looks to subvert potentially alienating realistic or documentary
representations of the past by creating a deeper engagement with the reali-
ties suppressed by the simplified plots of market-­driven cultural production”
(2016b, 6). The language of the specter is thus justified not by the presence
of ghosts in these works but by the use of the ghostly as a means of parsing
the complex interactions among representational practices, historical vio-
lence, and ethical concerns.
These works do not speak of ghosts. However, in the disruptive force
of spectrality, they all find a way to explore the unresolved absences and
truncated histories that haunt them. Like Colombia, these works are spaces
haunted by the voices and demands of those who refuse to vanish despite
no longer being present. As a concept, spectral realism has no evolution-
ary or chronological implications. Spectral realism is not an overcoming or
a more accomplished version of other kinds of realism. It is part of an on-
going search for strategies and perspectives that allow cultural practitioners
to revisit, interrogate, and reframe the societies and conflicts of their time. I
use the term “realism” because it differentiates the spectral from the fantas-
tic and supernatural and highlights the will to convey history and memory
in the context of extreme historical violence, as well as the ethical anxieties
around the representation of atrocities at the core of this book’s selected
works and of realist projects. Therefore, if at first “spectral realism” sounds
like an oxymoron, the concept proves fruitful when thinking about works
that are deeply concerned with the reality of their time but, unlike other
efforts, understand such reality as fundamentally encompassing the voices
and stories of those who are “no-­longer-­not-­yet-­there” (Derrida 2006), and
that conceive artistic work as the disruptive and transformative conjuring of
these repressed and expelled forces.
The selection of works in this volume does not intend to be exhaustive or
prescriptive. I do not claim that these works constitute a movement with ex-
plicit goals and rules. In Colombia, there is no spectral manifesto. Further-
more, the artists that are the focus of this investigation have not been pre-
viously grouped together by critics, and even though in most, though not
all, cases they are familiar with each other’s work, they do not necessarily
see similarities, much less influences, among them. Rather, I have carefully
selected the works from the broad and extensive cultural production that
relates to violence in the last twenty years in the country because of the
 Introduction 5

individuals’ interest in and formal experimentation with the four disrup-

tive axes most associated with spectrality: a profound distrust of vision, the
challenging of the spatial coordinates of what Jacques Derrida productively
calls an “ontopology of presence” (2006, 103), the upending of the linear
chronology of modernity, and a deeply rooted ethical anxiety that reflects
upon the reach and possibilities of justice beyond the limits of the law. The
haunting works of Evelio Rosero, William Vega, Jorge Forero, Felipe Guer-
rero, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes have left
a profound imprint on Colombia’s ethical and aesthetic landscape and have
much to offer to the ongoing global conversation about the imbrications and
tensions among representation, historical violence, and ethics.

More Than One Hundred Years of Solitude and Violence

No imaginaba que era más fácil empezar una guerra que terminarla.
Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

Colombian cultural production is haunted by violence. Colombia is a coun-

try of missing people and silenced stories, but it is also a country of survivors
and storytellers. In La narrativa de Gabriel García Márquez: Edificación de un
arte nacional popular,3 Ángel Rama (1987) dates the first literary “boom” in
Colombia to 1953, five years after the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán,
a presidential candidate and populist leader whose violent death unleashed
the period known as La Violencia (1948–1958). This era was marked by a po-
litical struggle between the two major political parties, the Liberals and the
Conservatives, that took on the proportions of a civil war. Exact numbers
are not known, but some have estimated that in ten years, La Violencia took
the lives of two hundred thousand people. Inquiring into the effect this con-
flict had on literature and art, Rama notes: “El efecto es en primer término
el de un extraordinario acrecentamiento de la producción literaria de un país,
un país como Colombia que tenía muy escasa producción narrativa, que no
tenía editoriales, que no tenía sistemas de comunicación literaria perfecta-
mente organizados. En ese sentido hay que decir que este proceso significa
un cambio en la situación creadora del país. El país se apresuró a crear más.
Además, casi todos los escritores atendieron a una serie de sucesos y trata-
ron de expresarlos, de contarlos, de manifestarlos en sus obras” (1987, 81).
Violence as subject matter was not new. But the amount of work being
produced and the perspective that predominated made these works dis-
tinct. In “Nación y narración de la violencia en Colombia,” María Helena
6  Haunting without Ghosts

Rueda examines how the representation of violence changed in the period

identified by Rama as compared to the treatment violence had received in
the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. She main-
tains that throughout this earlier period, violence formed part of the dis-
course of the founding of the nation and in fact was not portrayed as a prob-
lem (Rueda 2008, 346). Violence was seen as an element of social cohesion
whose excesses were rationalized as necessary, even heroic. Furthermore, the
nation was regarded as a safeguard against such violence, and the most pain-
ful episodes were relegated to the distant past as part of the foundational
myth of the nation. During La Violencia, the discourse gravitated toward
a political partisanship in which the project of national foundation became
increasingly distant and improbable. This turn prompted a discursive crisis
that led to the emergence of new textual discourses that could no longer
contain the reasons for the bloodshed within a cohesive national project. The
very ambiguity of the expression “La Violencia” points to the crisis it desig-
nates.4 Its enunciation implies the impossibility of assigning agency or re-
sponsibility for the events and of containing, explaining, or justifying what
happened. The loss of agency, meaning, and justification associated with
extreme violence worsened as the rise of drug cartels in the 1980s and 1990s
provided a much-­needed source of revenue to the struggle between guerril-
las, paramilitaries, and the army and evidenced that the main driver of this
new wave of violence was no longer political or ideological but almost exclu-
sively economic in nature. For Rueda (2008), then, the period Rama (1987)
identifies is key because, for the first time, violence began to be perceived as
unnecessary and problematic both by the majority of the population and by
intellectuals and artists. The explosion in narrative output that Rama iden-
tifies came about as a part of this discussion: it stems from the necessity and
urgency of giving meaning to the senselessness that extreme violence, in the
absence of a discourse that justifies or channels it, creates. Since then, the
most representative voices in Colombian cultural production have sought
to explain this reality and this crisis—and the reality of this crisis—and to
forge an aesthetic that accounts for the horror and preserves the stories that
official narratives would prefer to elide.
This vast cultural production is uneven in quality, diverse in perspective
and technique, and polemical in nature, and its aesthetic qualities—beyond
its sociological, documentary, and monetary value—have been extensively
and heatedly debated by specialists and laypeople alike. These concerns are
made explicit in “Dos o tres cosas sobre la novela de la violencia en Colom-
bia,” a short text written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1959. Eight years
before writing his capolavoro—his masterpiece telling the dazzling and vio-
 Introduction 7

lent fate of the Buendía family—García Márquez decried the pressure put
on writers to take explicit political stands through their work and the ex-
pectation that art could, and should, respond immediately to sociopolitical
upheaval. Aesthetic representation, García Márquez argues, requires me-
diation both in terms of temporal distance from the events and, more im-
portantly, in terms of formal experimentation. Displaying equal amounts
of foresight and arrogance, the young García Márquez dismissed all the
novels written about La Violencia until then by simply and categorically
saying that “todas son malas.” He based his critique on what he saw as the
troublesome and gory fascination of these works with massacres, tortures,
and other horrors of war and on the preeminence of nonliterary techniques
of storytelling more related to journalistic and sociological discourses than
to aesthetic intentions. The many grisly trees, he seemed to say, were keeping
us from seeing the forest of Colombian history and politics.
But the rejection of what García Márquez perceived as an overreliance
on the crass and gruesome aspects of reality that leads to a litany of horrors
with little literary and analytical value is not new and can be seen as an itera-
tion of the old tension between realist and naturalist perspectives and tools.
That is to say, between two critical modes of artistic representation that seek
to account for the maladies of their time through varying degrees of prox-
imity and detail. Naturalism and realism are not opposed movements. De-
spite their differences,5 they share the belief “that art cannot turn away from
the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence” (Morris 2011, 3) and
are defined by the imperative to challenge official narratives and bear wit-
ness to the impact that social, economic, and political forces have on lived
reality. Since its first “boom” during La Violencia, Colombian cultural pro-
duction has been marked by the oscillation between representational forms
that appeal to a more direct approach to reality—even at the risk of appear-
ing vulgar or exploitative—and modes that, through formal experimenta-
tion, explore the omissions and silences that constitute official discourses
and challenge the assumed transparency and availability of reality, even at
the risk of appearing elitist or exoticizing.
As is well known, García Márquez’s quest to avoid narrative immediacy
and descriptive accuracy with regard to violence resulted in Cien años de
soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) (1967), the novel that would later
be recognized as the masterpiece of magical realism. Despite worldwide
recognition, however, magical realism has not been devoid of controversy.
Its conceptual framing has been criticized for being too broad and diffuse,
and the term itself has been cause for debate. Following Alejo Carpentier’s
(2004a) landmark essay on the topic, “De lo real maravilloso americano,”
8  Haunting without Ghosts

scholars such as Irlemar Chiampi (1983) advocated for the use of “marvelous
realism,”6 as this term has the advantage of providing a much-­needed his-
torical and cultural specificity to the concept, distancing it from European
versions of the fantastic and the surreal. As shown by the rhetorical question
that closes Carpentier’s text, marvelous realism is not one of many literary
and artistic movements. Rather, it is the direct result of Latin America’s
hybrid, layered, and often exorbitant history and culture: Carpentier asks,
“¿Qué es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real maravi-
lloso?” (2004a, 14).
Such discussions aside, “magical realism” is the term more broadly used,7
and in spite of its global resonance,8 it is by far the cultural referent most
associated with Colombia and Latin America. Broadly speaking, magical
realism became a useful concept for considering a representational mode
that, after World War II, found in the naturalization of the supernatu-
ral a powerful mechanism to decry the physical, economic, and epistemic
violence of colonial and neocolonial regimes. In magical realism, the re-
enchantment of the world comes hand in hand with a keen historical and
social consciousness and a deep concern with the region’s identity and place
in the new geopolitical order. Thus, magical realism can be regarded as the
region’s first major successful cultural attempt to “write back” to power.
Writers as diverse as Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel
García Márquez, and Isabel Allende engaged in a deliberate retelling of
Latin America’s history and culture as well as its political, economic, and
social ailments through a distinct and innovative language. In the case of
García Márquez, magical realism provided the aesthetic tools to account
for the fratricidal carnage at the core of Colombian history while avoid-
ing “el exhaustivo inventario de los decapitados, los castrados, las mujeres
violadas, los sexos esparcidos y las tripas sacadas” (García Márquez 1959),
which in his view was a path that did not lead to the novel but did provide
its “justificación documental.”
By the late 1980s, however, it was becoming increasingly clear that magi-
cal realism was a victim of its own success. Through the repetition of a stale
repertoire of señoritas too beautiful to be part of this world, hyperbolic
tyrants, and incestuous genealogies in which names repeated themselves
ad nauseam, magical realism had lost its critical edge and fallen prey to the
“pobreza imaginativa” through which, according to Carpentier, “los tauma-
turgos se hacen burocrátas” (2004b, 14). Furthermore, cultural practitioners
and critics were concerned that the hallucinating tales of magical realism
were turning the region’s most devastating historical events and social reali-
ties into mythic tales that left practically no room for reflection, much less
action, on the part of the mainly urban or foreign audience that consumed
 Introduction 9

them as part of their entertainment diet. They denounced the commodifica-

tion that had turned magical realism into little more than a profitable pack-
aging of cultural difference, an exoticized version of Latin America made to
satisfy the international market. What was once an effective vehicle of cre-
ativity and dissent was having an asphyxiating effect on other perspectives
and voices in the region. Thus, a new generation of writers, filmmakers, and
artists abandoned Macondo and headed to McOndo.
In 1996, the writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez published an an-
thology of short stories titled McOndo. The name, which comes from García
Márquez’s mythical village of Macondo—a proxy for Colombia and for
Latin America more broadly—is both an “ironía irreverente al arcángel San
Gabriel y también un merecido tributo” (Fuguet and Gómez 1996, 14). In
the introduction, Fuguet and Gómez explain that the idea for the volume
that would later become a literary movement came when one of Fuguet’s
texts was rejected for publication in a “prestigiosa revista literaria” (9) in
the United States “por faltar al sagrado código del realismo mágico” (10).
Fuguet says that to his frustration and disbelief, the editor had no problem
disdainfully telling him that “esos textos bien pudieron ser escritos en cual-
quier país del primer mundo” (10). There and then, “en medio de una plani-
cie del medioeste,” the McOndo movement was born (10). The McOndos
sought to actualize the imaginary around Latin America by focusing on
the existential and material troubles of the modern and cosmopolitan urban
dweller, such as alienation, looming ecological tragedy, drugs, and the im-
pact of mass media in local contexts. As Fuguet and Gómez explain, “en
McOndo hay McDonald’s, computadores Mac y condominios, amén de ho-
teles cinco estrellas construidos con dinero lavado y malls gigantescos,” and
if people fly, it is because they are either traveling by airplane or very high
on drugs (15). The emphasis on postmodern, globalized conditions of exis-
tence was accompanied by a move away from the sociopolitical toward the
individual realm. Their works were not meant to be “frescos sociales ni sagas
colectivas.” Instead, “el gran tema de la identidad latinoamericana (¿quiénes
somos?) pareció dejar paso al tema de la identidad personal (¿quién soy?)”
(13). With the biting irony that characterized their project, Fuguet and
Gómez shrug off criticism by saying that “suponemos que esto es una de
las herencias de la fiebre privatizadora mundial” (13). And, to further dis-
tance themselves from the previous generation and to reinforce the notion
of a depoliticized, globalized mode of writing, they explain that “si hace
unos años la disyuntiva del escritor estaba entre tomar el lápiz o la carabina,
ahora parece que lo más angustiante para escribir es elegir entre Windows
95 o MacIntosh” (13).
Despite the McOndos reference to Colombia’s most famous imaginary
10  Haunting without Ghosts

village, however, their mode of writing was not particularly popular in the
country. While the McOndos were writing about the spleen produced by
watching too much MTV, Colombia was facing one of the biggest political
crises of its existence and experiencing extreme and unabated violence. In
the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia suffered intense political and social upheaval
due to the rise of powerful drug cartels and growing conflict among the
military, guerrillas, and right-­wing paramilitaries. Violence moved from the
countryside to medium and large cities, causing panic in the general public
and threatening a social class and a political elite that had not suffered the
most violent consequences of the war. Furthermore, the immense sums of
money produced by the lucrative drug trade invigorated the local economy
at a time when, as in most other Latin American countries, Colombia was
undergoing a severe crisis due in part to the aggressive neoliberal reforms
that characterized the decade in the region. This influx of money helped ail-
ing private and public finances but also shook up the traditional class sys-
tem, as powerful families and the government itself became dependent on
capital of dubious origins generated by newcomers with no social creden-
tials. In this anxiety-­ridden context, literature, art, and film became valuable
means of expressing the uneasiness that characterized the period and of re-
flecting upon the social, cultural, historical, political, and human impact of
these rapid and threatening changes.
Most cultural producers agreed with the McOndos that magical realism
as an innovative and critical artistic mode had been exhausted and sought
to distance themselves from the seemingly omnipresent shadow of García
Márquez’s legacy. Like the McOndos, they turned their attention from the
countryside to the cities. But if their works followed the privatization in-
stinct of their cosmopolitan counterparts and were no longer “sagas colecti-
vas,” they were powerful “frescos sociales.” Writers such as Alonso Salazar,
Fernando Vallejo, Jorge Franco, Darío Jaramillo, Laura Restrepo, and Óscar
Collazos and filmmakers such as Víctor Gaviria explored the role of histori-
cal violence in the sociopolitical and moral decomposition of the country.
Despite the differences among them, their aesthetic proposals share an incli-
nation toward visual immediacy and linguistic verisimilitude and an intense
interest in the more deprived social echelons. Thus, they have been grouped
into the larger trend of realismo sucio, or “urban realism,” as it has sometimes
been translated into English to mitigate confusion with North America’s
“dirty realism.”9
The term “dirty realism” is more a false cognate than a literary homo-
logue of realismo sucio. Bill Buford, who coined the English-­language term
in Granta magazine, defines “dirty realism” as
 Introduction 11

strange stories: unadorned, unfurnished, low-­rent tragedies about people

who watch day-­time television, read cheap romances or listen to country and
western music. They are waitresses in roadside cafés, cashiers in supermar-
kets, construction workers, secretaries and unemployed cowboys. They play
bingo, eat cheeseburgers, hunt deer and stay in cheap hotels. They drink a lot
and are often in trouble: for stealing a car, breaking a window, pickpocketing
a wallet. They are from Kentucky or Alabama or Oregon, but, mainly, they
could just about be from anywhere: drifters in a world cluttered with junk
food and the oppressive details of modern consumerism.
This is a curious, dirty realism about the belly-­side of contemporary life.
(Buford 1983)

This definition shares more similarities with the stories written by the
McOndos than with the fast-­paced, violent narratives associated with
Colombian cultural production of the time. Though it also tells tales “about
the belly-­side of contemporary life,” Colombia’s realismo sucio tackles social
decomposition at both the individual and the structural level.
The work of the filmmaker Víctor Gaviria is perhaps the best example of
realismo sucio. His films focus on the grim realities of the most dispossessed
inhabitants of modern cities: children and adolescents struggling to survive
in a world plagued by economic injustice and social violence. In general, his
characters do not watch TV during the day—or at any other time—because
they do not own television sets, and they do not eat hamburgers because
they cannot afford them. Hence, films such as Rodrigo D: No futuro (1990)
and La vendedora de rosas (1998) could be better interpreted as postmod-
ern heirs to Latin America’s Third Cinema.10 Like the films of the New
Latin American Cinema, they have an intense concern for social justice
and economic violence and use hybrid forms and techniques that blur the
line between documentary and fiction.11 They differ, however, in their po-
litical disillusionment and the lack of any ideological affiliation that could
be translated along party lines. In realismo sucio, one sees the despair and
alienation of the young and the disillusionment and loneliness of the old.
But one is also faced with the stark contrasts that make up Latin America’s
modernity: the uneven distribution of wealth, the ruthless consequences
of new globalized economies, and the unmet promises of neoliberal states.
One sees the slums and the malls, the cocaine-­snorting college kids and the
homeless children fighting to survive in the streets. Another characteristic
of realismo sucio is its emphasis on the present. If magical realism proposes
grand narratives that encompass the mytho-­historic life of a people, rea-
lismo sucio focuses on immediate reality. Its characters have no interest in
12  Haunting without Ghosts

either the past or the future; the here and now is all that matters. As the
title of Víctor Gaviria’s film Rodrigo D: No futuro suggests, the dire condi-
tions of existence for most of these characters create the sense of a future-
less, apocalyptic world.
In the Colombian context, the lethal combination of the booming busi-
ness of illegal drugs and the growing military might of the seemingly all-­
powerful cartels aggravated the situation. Cultural practitioners did not re-
main silent. The vast majority of novels, films, and art produced in Colombia
in this time period revolved around the sociopolitical chaos and the human
consequences of the war on drugs and the longest armed conflict in the
hemisphere. This crisis was personified by the figures of the sicarios, boys
between fourteen and twenty years of age who worked as hitmen primarily,
though not exclusively, for the cartels.12 The fascination with sicarios gen-
erated a new boom in cultural production. The works produced about this
topic were retrospectively classified under the productive and profitable label
of sicaresca. The term was coined by the Colombian writer Héctor Abad
Faciolince in his 1995 article “Estética y narcotráfico,” and it combines the
words sicario and picaresca, the word used to designate the picaresque liter-
ary genre. The term points to the transformation of a social phenomenon
(the sicariato) into a cultural one (the sicaresca genre), grouping a variety of
novels and films about the lives of the young sicarios, and in general about
the violent and exuberant world of the narcos, that became popular in the
late 1980s and are still very well received by the public.13
As Margarita Jácome explains, these works revolve around “los nexos
entre los traficantes de droga y los jóvenes asesinos, en los que el sicario apa-
rece como objeto, y las prácticas culturales heredadas del narcotráfico, espe-
cialmente el afán consumista y un énfasis en ritos religiosos de protección
y agradecimiento” (2009, 205). Formally, the novels are characterized by
superficial, racialized, and sexualized depictions of the sicarios; fast-­paced
narratives with detailed descriptions of the inner workings of the crimi-
nal world and the violent acts perpetrated by criminals; the extensive use of
parlache, the slang associated with the underworld of the narcos; an ideal-
ized and nostalgic view of the past that produces a sharp contrast with the
chaos of the now; and the presence of a literate narrator who acts as a cul-
tural and linguistic bridge between the violent lives of the young assassins
and the reader, with whom he shares presumed socioeconomic status and
values.14 The predilection for marginalized characters, the use of crass lan-
guage, and the reliance on explicit images of violence and social decompo-
sition make the sicaresca more closely related to naturalism, with the works
sharing many of the characteristics of the novels of La Violencia that in
 Introduction 13

his time García Márquez questioned and sought to abjure. Representative

works in the genre include El sicario (1990), by Mario Bahamón Dussán;
No nacimos pa’ semilla (1990), by Alonso Salazar; Morir con papá (1997), by
Óscar Collazos; Rosario Tijeras, in both novelistic ( Jorge Franco, 1999) and
cinematographic (Emilio Maillé, 2005) form; and Sangre ajena, by Arturo
Álape. In part because of the cinematic rendition (2000) by the French film-
maker Barbet Schroeder, the best-­known example, however, remains La
Virgen de los sicarios (1993), written by Fernando Vallejo, the enfant terrible
of literature whom Colombia loves to hate.
Largely because the war on drugs and drug traffickers themselves—with
their glamorous lifestyles and sensational crimes—hold such fascination for
the global imagination, violencia (now with a small v) replaced the hyper-
bolic exoticism of magical realism and came to be seen as the country’s most
distinctive historical and cultural feature. Violence became a double synec-
doche of representation for Colombia; its cultural production was expected
to represent the violence both of drug trafficking and of the anachronistic
and discredited revolutionary struggles that the country itself represented
in the new world order. Furthermore, the enthrallment with all things narco
created an international market that the literary critic Alejandro Herrero-­
Olaizola (2007, 43) describes as a “comercialización de los márgenes” that
promotes “cierta exotización de una realidad latinoamericana ‘cruda’ dirigida
a un público más atento e instruido en cuestiones socio-­políticas de América
Latina y ansioso de leer algo nuevo, algo más light . . . pero con cierto ‘peso
cultural.’ ” Similar to what occurred with magical realism, “narco” became
a powerful commercial prefix, and the critical drive that catalyzed many of
these works was diluted by the demands of the market and the need to con-
form to the expectations of an audience eager to read something new, some-
thing light, but with a certain “cultural weight.”15
In this context, the question posed by the film critic Juana Suárez be-
comes more pressing: “Si el tema más frecuente de [la producción cultural]
colombian[a] sigue siendo la violencia, cabe indagar si hay un cambio de en-
cuadre y otro lente de acercamiento al mismo. . . . En el centro del dilema,
entonces, subsiste la discusión sobre mirar la violencia, ser indiferentes o
encontrar otra manera de abordarla” (2009, 182). Since the late 1990s, but
especially in the new millennium, Evelio Rosero and other writers; film-
makers such as William Vega, Jorge Forero, and Felipe Guerrero; and art-
ists including Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes
have been part of an ongoing search for a different perspective from which
to look at Colombia’s recent historical violence without simplifying, exoti-
cizing, or commodifying it. They have done so by exploring the aesthetic
14  Haunting without Ghosts

and ethical possibilities of the ghostly—what I am calling “spectral realism.”

Spectral realism is a response to the cultural and political landscape of its
time, but it should not be thought of as an overcoming of magical realism
or of the sicaresca. Rather, it can more productively be analyzed alongside
them. A short stroll into any local bookstore or a quick search on Amazon
will suffice to show that magical realism and the sicaresca are alive and well.
Young and not-­so-­young authors still find the resources provided by these
narrative modes productive, and thousands of readers and viewers are en-
thralled by the worlds they represent. More than a break from or a rupture
with the two realist modes that precede it, spectral realism is another itera-
tion of the old haunting at the core of Colombian cultural production that
Suárez mentions.
Furthermore, even if it is essential to analyze spectral realism in its spe-
cific context, its scope is not limited to Colombia, and it can be a useful
conceptual metaphor for analyzing the representation of historical violence
elsewhere. For the purpose of this book, however, I focus on Colombian cul-
tural practitioners who, in their search for a way to tell the violent tales of
their native country, have found themselves sharing García Márquez’s in-
sight that “la novela no estaba en los muertos de tripas sacadas, sino en los
vivos que debieron sudar hielo en su escondite, sabiendo que a cada latido
del corazón corrían el riesgo de que les sacaran las tripas” (1959); but they
have disagreed with him in one fundamental aspect. It was not true that “los
pobrecitos muertos ya no servían sino para ser enterrados” (García Márquez
1959). On the contrary, they needed to be summoned, and the violent deaths
they encountered had to be told not in spite of, but precisely because of, the
profound disruption their untimely but necessary return provokes. To better
understand what this summoning of specters entails, it is crucial to differ-
entiate the ghost from the specter and ghost stories from spectral narratives.

Haunting without Ghosts: Spectrality as Conceptual Metaphor

At the end of the twentieth century, a major shift took place in the humani-
ties, the social sciences, and the arts in the way that ghostly matters were
comprehended and mobilized. During this time, ghosts ceased to be per-
ceived as supernatural entities or fictional tropes relegated to the fantastic
or the allegorical. This change in perspective shaped a productive critical
framework in which to rethink both academic disciplines and cultural pro-
duction. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren call this tectonic theo-
retical shift “the spectral turn.” Under this rubric, they mark the transition
 Introduction 15

whereby “the ghost ceases to be seen as obscurantist and becomes, instead,

a figure of clarification with a specifically ethical and political potential”
(Blanco and Peeren 2013, 7). The publication of Jacques Derrida’s Specters
of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International
in 1993 is a landmark in this regard. While there are important anteced-
ents, including Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality
and Modern Culture (1993) and Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny:
Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992), Specters of Marx was the catalyst of the
more recent wave of academic interest in all things spectral.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida rehabilitates the figure of the specter as a
much-­needed disruptive and critical force, using precisely the two systems
of thought that in the first part of the twentieth century produced some of
the most scathing criticism against it: psychoanalysis and Marxism. Born as
a response to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992),
Specters of Marx cautions against triumphalist and eschatological visions of
history that obscure the injustices that uphold them, and explores the re-
lationship between the intellectual and the specter as a way of resisting the
historical, economic, and ideological homogenization proclaimed after the
fall of the Berlin Wall. Within this discourse, the figure of the ghost appears
as an enabling metaphoric vehicle with which to revisit the past and recog-
nize those who have been physically and symbolically banished from it in
its transition into official history. The characteristics associated with ghosts
and haunting make the spectral ideal for this disruptive task. The liminal
position of the specter with regard to life and death, presence and absence,
materiality and immateriality; the disruption of the spatiotemporal coordi-
nates of modernity it produces; and the demand for justice it brings along,
turned the ghostly into one of the most productive conceptual metaphors of
the last decade of the twentieth century. Unlike a regular figure of speech, a
conceptual metaphor “performs theoretical work” through “a dynamic com-
parative interaction, not just of another thing, word or idea and its associa-
tions, but of a discourse, a system of producing knowledge” (Blanco and
Peeren 2013, 1).
Specters of Marx is but one example of such productive conceptual meta-
phor at work.16 The book redefines the role of the intellectual amid the eu-
phoria produced by the consolidation of liberal democracy and capitalism as
the only legitimate political and economic ideologies of the West. It high-
lights the ethical problems of such an epistemological position and invites
scholars to disrupt this homogenizing impulse and embrace uncertainty,
heterogeneity, and multiplicity as essential parts of their academic and ethi-
cal endeavors. Hence, spectrality is primarily concerned with relations be-
16  Haunting without Ghosts

tween modes of production and violence. It asks destabilizing questions

about the erasures underlying dominant ways of producing goods, knowl-
edge, affect, history, and time and seeks to mobilize alternatives, primarily
from within the cultural and academic realms. In order to not neglect the
“obvious macroscopic fact . . . that never before, in absolute figures, have so
many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated
on the earth” (Derrida 2006, 106), the intellectual, like Horatio in Hamlet,
must be capable not of talking about those who have been physically and
symbolically exiled from this eschatological vision of history, but be willing
and able to speak to and with them. Therefore, Derrida calls for a “haunt-
ology”: a move away from the “spirit” that informs (Hegel’s) ontology and
toward Marx’s specter, not as Marxism but as a disruptive critical force,
“an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets” (Derrida
2006, 63).
Derrida is not interested in ghosts; rather, he pursues “that which haunts
like a ghost and, by way of this haunting, demands justice or, at least, a re-
sponse” (Blanco and Peeren 2013, 9). Through the asynchronicity of the
specter, and the exploration of the silenced histories it enables, spectrality
explores the possibilities of justice precisely when such a quest seems more
doomed and foreclosed. Haunting, then, is a will to seek justice beyond the
law,17 because the law is bound to the exclusionary, and often violent, dy-
namics of ontopology. Above all, haunting is a quest for the possibilities of
uttering such will.
To summarize, spectrality does not entail a belief in the supernatural;
rather, it assumes the characteristics of the specter to advance critical and
ethically oriented academic and cultural products. The specter makes the
familiar unfamiliar, or unheimlich. It unhinges time, rarefies space, questions
materiality and presence as the only forms of being, and demands justice.
These characteristics make the reach and appeal of spectrality broad. The
copious bibliography about spectrality shows that the figure of the specter
as a means of rethinking cultural production, and of haunting not only his-
tory but also storytelling, has been used by cultural producers in varied loca-
tions, times, and ways.18 Hence, to avoid spreading the concept too thinly,
careful contextualization and site-­specific analysis is essential. When cul-
tural, historical, and geographical specificities are taken into account, spec-
trality becomes a productive theoretical tool that allows a more compre-
hensive understanding of the operations and effects of late capitalism and
modernity, underscores how these processes make certain subjects prone
to sociohistorical erasure, and explores the representational challenges and
possibilities enabled by this hauntology.
 Introduction 17

In the following chapters, I focus on selected Colombian iterations of

the spectral as a mode of storytelling and artistic expression in a historical
moment when the country is attempting to make sense of its past, grapple
with its present, and forge a future after decades of a conflict that—at least
in its traditional form—has reached its end. To do so, it is first necessary
to ground the ghost and to briefly look into the long and rich genealogy of
Latin American specters.

Ghostly Genealogies, Spectral Realism, and Storytelling

Ghosts have haunted Latin American cultural production for decades, from
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845) to the
short stories of Horacio Quiroga; from María Luisa Bombal’s La amortajada
(1938) to Juan Rulfo’s groundbreaking Pedro Páramo (1955); from Ernesto
Sabato’s Sobre héroes y tumbas (1961) to Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años
de soledad (1967) and Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (1982), a staple
of high school curricula. As these all exemplify, the trope of ghosts and the
talking dead figures prominently in Latin American fiction and has played
a key role in the development of the region’s modern narrative. Since Sar-
miento’s famous conjuration of the “terrible shadow” of Juan Facundo Qui-
roga as the starting point of his foundational book,19 ghosts have entered
Latin American cultural production to denounce unresolved feuds, to de-
mand justice, to challenge official accounts of violent events, and sometimes
simply to soothe and accompany the living. Most notably, the works of Sar-
miento and García Márquez established the link between the ghost and the
region’s violent history and troubled modernity, underscoring the histori-
cal and aesthetic importance of talking to the dead. As previously noted,
however, not all ghost stories constitute spectral narratives. Despite the im-
portance that ghosts have for diegetic time and events and for symbolic
meaning, in almost all of the examples referenced previously, the reader re-
mains mainly unaffected by the unsettling potential of the ghost. For both
Sarmiento and García Márquez, the ghost is primarily a revelatory, almost
messianic, figure through which the destiny of the living is revealed and ac-
quires its full meaning.20 Such is not the case in the work of Juan Rulfo. If
Sarmiento and García Márquez provided important conceptual tools for
the development of spectral realism, Rulfo’s contribution is pivotal from a
formal point of view. In this sense, Pedro Páramo (1955) is the most signifi-
cant precedent to spectral realism.
In his first and only novel, Juan Rulfo tells the story of Juan Preciado, a
18  Haunting without Ghosts

young man who after the death of his mother travels to Comala, a town in-
habited by ghosts and spectral murmurs, to meet his father and demand re-
payment for years of abandonment. But Pedro Páramo is also, and more im-
portantly, a tale of the disastrous consequences of years of plundering and
sexual and physical violence that resulted from the revolutionary struggles
and the Cristero War, frustration with the unfulfilled promises of the Mexi-
can Revolution, and the results of Mexico’s uneven process of moderniza-
tion. Rulfo’s literary work mirrors the destabilization and anxiety produced
by this situation. His text not only speaks about ghosts and haunting but
also extends the experience to the readers. The readers partake in Juan Pre-
ciado’s inability to navigate the space, tell apart the living from the dead,
identify the origin of the echoes and murmurs that haunt him, and accom-
plish any sense of closure or fulfillment. Comala is a place “donde anidan los
sobresaltos” (Rulfo 2002, 28), and where the spatiotemporal coordinates
used to navigate and make sense of the surroundings are suspended. In Co-
mala time shrinks (20) and moves backward (57), and light does not pro-
vide clarity because it is “[una] pobre luz sin lumbre” (116). Additionally,
even though Preciado is able to see and hear, the sensory horizon is both ex‑
panded and radically altered. “Mis ojos, tan sin mirada” (67), says Preciado,
summarizing the reworking of vision in the novel: a gaze that does not pro-
duce epistemic or visual clarity. The role of sound is similar. Comala is a
town of auditory contradictions. Silence is rife with voices “que se quedaban
dentro de uno, pesadas” (14), words are felt but cannot be heard (50), and
streets are crowded by “ruidos. Voces. Rumores” (49) with no discernible
origin. Furthermore, Comala is filled with echoes (44) that beset Preciado—
so much so that murmurs are literally what kill him: “me mataron los mur-
mullos” (60), he says calmly, in one of the most powerful and ambiguous
moments in the book. But death is not the end in Comala. Both Preciado
and the reader learn to listen to the ánimas that share the streets with the
living (54) and must eventually abandon the quest to set them apart. The
question of whether somebody is dead or alive is repeated throughout the
book and is either never resolved or passed off with contradictory answers
that further confuse characters and readers alike, thus making it impossible,
and unnecessary, to establish any difference.
Rulfo’s specters have little in common with García Márquez’s wise, ir-
reverent, and melancholic ghosts. Unlike Macondo, Comala is a haunted
town for both protagonists and readers. The readers of Pedro Páramo do not
sympathize with Juan Preciado’s anxiety, frustration, and failure to achieve
clarity; they share it. Most of the time, Preciado cannot map or navigate the
space, establish a clear chronology of the events, or identify the source of the
 Introduction 19

voices that address him. Initially, this disorientation terrifies and confounds
him and disconcerts the reader. But the haptic reworking of the senses is
one of the key contributions of the novel and is what allows mobilization of
the demands for justice that the spectral voices evoke, not as an individual
claim, but as a collective demand that will not be silenced. If Sarmiento
conjures the specter as a key voice with which to complicate the founda-
tional narratives and historiographic discourses of modernity, and García
Márquez reenchants the world by allowing the ghosts of the past to freely
walk into the present and converse with the living while fanning themselves
in the parlor’s rocking chairs, it is Rulfo who models the spectral as a mode
of storytelling in Latin America. Spectral realism draws on this ghostly lin-
eage specifically as it relates to formal experimentation with regard to the
representation of historical violence. It draws upon realist tenets and con-
cerns but finds in spectrality its means of expression.
Peter Brooks defines classical realism as “that species of literature for
which the careful registering of the external world counts most” (1993, 3);
and the literary critic Georg Lukács notes that one of the key elements of
realist writing is that it was the first literary form to escape what he con-
sidered the two main pitfalls of artistic representation: the pernicious de-
historicization implicit in the creation of universal tropes, and the narcis-
sistic and bourgeois overemphasis on the individual. According to Lukács,
realist writing historicized universal types in literature for the first time.
That is, heroes were no longer portrayed as atemporal entities representing
humanity as a whole. Instead, they were depicted as both representatives
and products of their own historical and social circumstances. Also, despite
the intense focus on specific characters, the realist novel of the nineteenth
century remained firmly grounded in social and economic forces, which kept
it from falling into the crass dogmatism of the naturalist novel and the mel-
ancholic ruminations of modernist writing.21 In a similar guise, spectral real-
ism is deeply concerned with the human side of historical forces. As Avery
Gordon notes in her classic Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination (1997), “The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but
a social figure” (2008, 8). As in other iterations of realism, in spectral realism
characters “are conceived historically. Their personalities and the events of
their lives are wholly shaped by the larger social forces in which their exis-
tences are enmeshed” (Morris 2011, 64). Even if not explicitly thematized,
historical density in spectral realism is enmeshed in the plot and informs the
traits and actions of the characters.
Classical realism is also defined by an ethical anxiety that often leads to
scathing social critique. At its core is a profound questioning of the values
20  Haunting without Ghosts

of its time and a will to denounce the moral corruption and violence that
upholds the status quo. Despite its often grand and totalizing narratives,
classical realism intersects with the imperative to bear witness to and speak
for those without a public voice. Realism’s “insistence that art cannot turn
away from the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence” (Morris
2011, 3), and that these situations are not the result of fate or tragedy, but
the direct consequence of historical and socioeconomic processes, has been
of great aesthetic and ethical value. As a genre, however, realism was devel-
oped toward the end of the eighteenth century and was consolidated dur-
ing the nineteenth century in Europe, particularly in England and France.22
Thus, realism is strongly associated with the rise of capitalism as the world’s
main economic system, the bourgeoisie as the new social class in power,
and many of the values of the Enlightenment: rationality, secular forms of
knowledge that prioritize observation and reasoning, and, later on, natural
and social theories about evolution, progress, and development. Through its
incorporation of spectrality, spectral realism undermines these claims to epi-
stemic mastery and denounces their collusion with systems of physical and
symbolic subjection. Following Juan Rulfo’s lead, spectral realism under-
scores that ethical issues cannot be separated from representational ones,
thus enacting a turn toward the spectral that refocuses one’s attention on
“the aesthetic aspects of the problem, whereby beings and presences enter
uneasily into, or insistently disturb, representation and the stability of its
visual, temporal, and spatial logic” (Demos 2013, 9).
As is the case in Pedro Páramo, in spectral realism, the clash of political,
economic, and social forces does more than affect the characters and the
denouements of the plot. The narrative itself is unhinged by it. Violence is
not aestheticized, exoticized, or normalized. The instability, confusion, and
fear that violence engenders are incorporated into the works in an attempt
to shake the reader or spectator out of his or her cultural and ethical stu-
por. The spectralization of the narrative elicits complex questions about the
ethical pertinence and aesthetic relevance of works that deal with violence
and, like all specters, aspires to set readers, spectators, critics, and other cul-
tural producers into political, social, or artistic motion. It does so through a
careful reworking of the four axes critical for realist practices: vision, time,
space, and ethical concern with the implications/complications of the artis-
tic representation of historical violence.
 Introduction 21

Unpacking Spectral Realism: “La vista sin

perspectiva de la niebla”; or, The Limits of Vision

There is something unsatisfactory about the

field of vision: it can never quite see.
Peter Brooks, Body Work

Classical realism is the literary child of the Enlightenment. It shares with

it a secular and scientific understanding of the world, an empirical view of
knowledge, and a totalizing ethos that seeks to comprehend and apprehend
the world primarily through the supposedly objective and rigorous observa-
tion at the heart of the scientific method. From the birth of academic disci-
plines such as anthropology and ethnography, and the boom of botanical
expeditions in South America that aspired to catalogue the entire fauna
and flora of the continent, to the development of technologies of the visual
that radically altered the perception of the world, such as the daguerreo-
type, the X-­ray machine, and the cinematograph, toward the end of the
eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, white European men
embarked on an unprecedented quest of observation that encompassed bio-
logical, social, and human nature.23 The rise and consolidation of the realist
novel is part of this epistemological project. In his 1842 avant-­propos to The
Human Comedy, Honoré de Balzac explicitly declares that his literature has
been heavily influenced by the work of biologists such as Georges-­Louis
Leclerc, Georges Cuvier, and Étienne Saint-­Hilaire and describes his own
project foremost as the careful observation, registration, and analysis of
social life to discover the causes and effects of social forces and human be-
havior. Balzac’s success in achieving his own project is debatable; indeed,
his status as one of the West’s greatest writers may partly stem from his
failure to follow this narrow conception of literature. His frantic writing
pace left little room for meticulous scientific analysis,24 and what Peter
Brooks calls his melodramatic, and highly moralistic,25 imagination, and
what Erich Auerbach (2003) labels his bombastic nature,26 made his most
memorable books prodigious treatises on human passions and scathing cri-
tiques of contemporary society that have little to do with the balance and
rigor adjudicated to scientific writing. But the idea that literature should
partake in the scientific endeavors of the time continued throughout the
nineteenth century and reached its peak years with Émile Zola’s Le roman
expérimental (1893). Modeling this work on Claude Bernard’s Introduction à
l’etude de la médecine expérimentale, Zola claimed that the novel was a privi-
leged space for social and psychological experimentation because it allowed
22  Haunting without Ghosts

authors to create a controlled environment that was not replicable in real

life. It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the details and merits of
the works of Balzac and Zola, but it is relevant to my project that in both
instances the impulse to account for the maladies of their time translated
into a formal investment in vision applied to the sociopolitical and eco-
nomic realms of the time.
Vision is central to realism’s epistemic claims and narrative style. As
Peter Brooks explains in Realist Vision, realism, more than any other mode
of literature, “makes sight paramount—makes it the dominant sense in our
understanding of and relation to the world” (2005, 3)27—hence its associa-
tion with painting and other visual arts. In fact, as Brooks also points out,
the term “realism” “comes into the culture, in the early 1850s, to characterize
painting—that of Courbet in particular—and then by extension is taken to
describe a literary style. It is a term resolutely attached to the visual, to those
works that seek to inventory the immediate perceptible world” (16).28 One
of the main literary consequences of this investment in vision is the quantity
and relevance of descriptive prose. Realist authors believe that “sight is the
most objective and impartial of our senses” (16) and thus dedicate a signifi-
cant amount of narrative time and space to visually inspecting and account-
ing for the material world the characters inhabit. In this context, objects
are not merely decorative or functional. They are cues that provide crucial
information about their owners’ social background, age, gender, political
affiliation, cultural anxieties, and more. They are pieces of data that must
be properly identified and analyzed by both characters and readers in order
to make sense of the sociohistorical fresco meticulously and painstakingly
being (re)constructed in front of their very eyes.
Consequently, the realist novel also partakes in the strong correlations
among vision, knowledge, and mastery common to the Enlightenment proj-
ect as a whole. That is, the desire to see overlaps with the desire to compre-
hend and to apprehend in the political, social, and artistic realms. For ex-
ample, through a judicious reading of travel books written starting around
1750 by Europeans about non-­European peoples and territories, Mary
Louise Pratt (2008) identifies how aestheticization became one of the most
effective tools used by the white, male subject to claim authority for his
vision and to assert his political and economic hegemony in the shifting
world order; and Michel Foucault famously recognized in Jeremy Bentham’s
panopticon of 1790 the powerful embodiment of the entanglement of hier-
archical vision and social control.29 In fact, the act of seeing without being
seen, the authority, the knowledge production, and the control that the pan-
opticon symbolizes, is, for Peter Brooks, precisely what lies at the core of
 Introduction 23

the realist epistemological project, and the panopticon is also the image that
most effectively represents its narrative focalization and voice.
Based on analysis of Balzac’s main works but noting that his conclu-
sions illuminate classical realism more broadly, Brooks claims that “Balzac’s
narrative vision corresponds to the model of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon
prison, in which a centrally posted surveillant can, himself unobserved, ob-
serve and interpret the appearances and movements of others” (1993, 84).
Vision, in classical realism, is the preferred medium of acquiring the knowl-
edge required to control and master a particular environment. Characters
and readers must learn a way of seeing that allows them to access the infor-
mation needed to successfully navigate the social and textual space in which
they are immersed. This is why the positionality and directionality of the
gaze is vital. As in the panopticon, the gaze that classical realism pursues
is hierarchical and penetrative. The main task of the narrative voice of the
classic realist novel is to illuminate, to bring to the fore the darkest aspects
of the human heart and psyche as well as the hidden dynamics that sustain
the sociopolitical status quo. The all-­seeing, all-­knowing narrator of realism
achieves and retains control by constantly zooming in on the houses, lives,
and minds of the characters and by revealing their darkest secrets and the
unexpected significance of objects and gestures to the reader in a meticu-
lously planned textual denouement. This ability to see, know, and reveal is
what Peter Brooks calls the “x-­ray glance” (1995, 134) of realism. But Balzac
(2018) himself best described this technique as a process of psychological—
and, one might add, sociopolitical—optics that leads to the epistemic and
social command of the world presented to both characters and readers. In-
deed, the final scene of Balzac’s Père Goriot is paradigmatic in this sense.
After the burial of old Goriot, Rastignac goes to the highest part of Père-­
Lachaise Cemetery and, from this position of visual command, shows that
he has achieved full legibility of Parisian society—and is therefore ready
to master it. Looking down upon Paris, he addresses its society directly:
“ ‘Now it’s just the two of us!—I’m ready!’ And then, for the first challenge
he hurled to Society, Rastignac went to have dinner with Madame de Nun-
cingen” (Balzac 1994, 217). Rastignac is finally able to move from vision to
possession, thus achieving a position analogous to that of an author: “From
his state of limited vision . . . he has risen to dominating heights, seized the
knowledge of his way into and through the world, and become master of his
destiny” (Brooks 1993, 141).
The strong correlations among visibility, knowledge, and mastery that
traverse classical realism are also a fundamental part of the reading experi-
ence because they produce a strong textual scopophilia; that is, a dynamic
24  Haunting without Ghosts

in which the desire to see is imbued with the drive to unveil and to possess.
This economy of desire keeps the reader engaged and gratified. Despite the
grim stories, readers are rewarded with the reinforcement of their privileged
epistemic position and a clearly defined code of values with which to judge
characters and events. By the end of Balzac’s novel, the reader is standing
next to Rastignac and, like him, has achieved full legibility and command.
In contrast, the most salient and productive trait of spectral realism is a
profound distrust of visibility and elucidation that leads to the formal explo-
ration of alternative perspectives to the hierarchical, objectifying, and rapa-
cious gaze of realism. Epistemic and visual clarity are replaced by an oblique
gaze that does not present, transcribe, or explain. In a world plagued by
technologies of hypervisibility ready for consumption through social media
platforms, these works complicate vision by exploring the limits and unreli-
ability of the visible. They do so in part by focusing on disappearance as a
key narrative driver. All of these works feature an ongoing search not only
for those who have disappeared due to the war but also for all the things that
have vanished with them, from objects and buildings to the ability to make
sense of a world once familiar and now unheimlich and hostile. But disap-
pearance is more than a thematic preoccupation. As Avery Gordon argues,
“The power of disappearance is the power to control everyday reality, to
make the unreal real. . . . The power of disappearance is . . . to be vanished
as the very condition of your existence” (2008, 131). Spectral realism ex-
tends the destabilizing force of disappearance into the formal composition
of the works. Evelio Rosero’s novels En el lejero and Los ejércitos are cases in
point. In the latter, the protagonist himself turns into a ghost after the dis-
appearance of his wife, Otilia. In the former, the reiterative and extensive
use of different modes of the verb desaparecer mediates the description of
the novel’s space, environmental conditions, and plot denouements and is
indicative of how disappearance not only spectralizes the people who have
been forcefully banished but also disrupts the ability to perceive, to com-
prehend, and to inhabit the world for those who search for them.30 In this
sense, the statements of the film director William Vega about the preva-
lence of fog and other visual impairments in his film La sirga is expressive
of spectral realism as a whole: “The fog doesn’t let us see beyond certain
limits, and this provokes an inevitable suspense. I think that is what the
film is about; human incapacity to see it all” (Comingore 2013). Seeing, in
spectral realism, is a difficult and frustrating task because to see in spectral
realism is always to witness something, or someone, disappear. It is to con-
front the limits of vision.
Spectral realism does not attempt to dispel the fog of war but is instead
 Introduction 25

narrated from within that fog. It reenacts the crisis in looking, propos-
ing that violence turns visuality “from a transparent tool into a felt uncer-
tainty” (Baer 2002, 106). As a result, shock and bewilderment, not clarity
and seduction, define the experience of reading these novels and watching
these films. This difficulty in seeing undermines our privilege as readers and
viewers and forces us to engage more actively and critically with vision. By
steering away from scopophilic desire and its triangulation of sight, knowl-
edge, and power, spectral realism reflects on the violence implicated in the
construction of visibility. It explores the disproportion between those who
see and those who are seen, the intangible but all-­too-­real persistence of
what cannot be seen, and the aesthetic, social, and political dynamics that
lead to the visibilization or effacement of certain bodies, voices, and experi-
ences. Spectral realism invites us to follow the lead of Jeremías Andrade, the
protagonist of En el lejero, and instead of searching for illumination and elu-
cidation, to learn to see through “la rara luz de la niebla” (Rosero 2003, 73).
To be able to see in spectral realism, we need more than our eyes; or, rather,
our eyes need to be able to do more than just see. If “to know, in realism, is
to see, and to represent is to describe” (Brooks 1993, 88), the spectral gaze is
more closely related to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “haptic”
vision, a synesthetic mode of seeing whereby the eye has a tactile, “nonopti-
cal function” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 492). This way of seeing affects
the experience and perception of space as well.

Spectral Landscapes and Smooth Spaces

Realism is built on a recognizable and navigable conception of space. The

construction of a clear cartography that corresponds with actual places, and
is attuned to the nuances of inhabiting the specific cities and towns where
the action takes place, is fundamental to its narrative structure. References
to local landmarks and distinguishable aspects of city life strengthen the
reality effect for the readers and provide important information for the de-
velopment of the plot, which is why it is not uncommon to find maps of
Paris or London in well-­curated editions of Balzac and Dickens. The ability
to map out social and physical space is vital for realist readers and characters
alike. Readers and characters must learn to navigate the space and recog-
nize the dense historic and symbolic meanings of these sites in order to
fully comprehend—and dominate—the social, epistemic, and textual space
of the novel. Realismo sucio remains grounded in the city, but the ability to
reliably move through and master the space is lost. Cities become chaotic
and undecipherable, even apocalyptic, but are still recognizable as concrete
26  Haunting without Ghosts

sites with specific histories and dynamics. Fernando Vallejo’s literature is in-
separable from his Dantesque and nostalgic vision of Medellín, and Víctor
Gaviria’s tales of despair are intrinsic to the violent inner workings of mod-
ern Latin American metropolises.
In Colombia, spectral realism, following the lead of the novela de la tierra
and magical realism, returns to the countryside.31 Its milieus are remote and
secluded villages torn by war, lakes ensconced in páramos, jungles plagued by
mosquitoes. An anecdote that Evelio Rosero often recounts is telling in this
regard. When asked about the mysterious title of his book En el lejero, he re-
plied that “lejero” derives from “lejos,” the Spanish word for “far.” “Lejero,”
then, would mean something like “faraway land.” The word, he clarifies,
is not his; it came from his mother. When he told her he was going away
to Paris to be a writer, she snubbed him and said that it was ridiculous to
go to “semejante lejero” (such a lejero) just to be a writer. Rosero went to
Paris anyway, but both the word and the idea—that to be a writer he didn’t
have to distance himself, symbolically or physically, from Colombia—stuck
with him. Spectral realism inhabits and is narrated from within the lejeros
of Colombia, the spectral sites that haunt the national imaginary because
they are the spaces in which violence has gorged itself. In most cases, the
towns do not have proper names, specific geographical referents are either
completely elided or vaguely mentioned, and few or no landmarks help the
reader or viewer recognize them as discrete locations. What is readily rec-
ognizable and disturbingly familiar is the devastation of war, the deserted
streets, the terrified eyes behind the shutters. What is recognizable is how
unrecognizable a space becomes once it has been afflicted by violence.
This unmooring of stable spatial coordinates is linked to the visual ambi-
guity spectral realism mobilizes. If in perspectivist vision one’s eye is guided
by a hierarchical construction of space, in spectral realism one’s gaze wan-
ders restlessly, unsure of where to land or what to look at. As in the photo-
graphs of traumatic historical events that Ulrich Baer analyzes in Spectral
Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (2002), in spectral realism we are con-
fronted with a space that does not accommodate our viewpoint and does
not engender a sense of place. A key characteristic of this spatial ambiguity
is that it does not necessarily subside as the plot progresses. In fact, in many
instances it intensifies as the violence worsens, and it becomes impossible
for one’s focus to stay grounded. The substrate upon which stability itself de-
pends literally vanishes into thin air and turns into darkness, water, “niebla
en lugar de tierra, niebla y cádavares” (Rosero 2003, 14). As a consequence,
efforts to map and effectively navigate the space frequently fail. For both
readers and protagonists, the spaces remain unfamiliar, and there is a strong
sense of vulnerability and menace. Variability, disorientation, and opaque-
 Introduction 27

ness are the coordinates of these spectral topographies of disappearance and

desolation.
In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari explain that there are two kinds of spaces: striated and
smooth. Striated spaces are “defined by the requirements of long-­distance
vision: constancy of orientation, invariance, . . . constitution of a central per-
spective”; they prioritize and rely on the scopic regime (1987, 494).32 Deleuze
and Guattari’s conceptualization of the scopic regime closely correlates to
Brooks’s scopophilic impulse in that they both understand perspectivist
vision as a device of control and mastery. Therefore, “one of the fundamen-
tal tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, 385). It is key for a nation to (re)produce a space that
is measurable, that has defined boundaries, that can be perceived clearly—
in maps, aerial photographs, and so forth—and that has well-­defined geo-
graphic and historical landmarks that remain stable through the years. On
the other hand, smooth spaces move away from vision and rely instead on
what Deleuze and Guattari call “haptic” perception: “Where there is close
vision, space is not visual, or rather, the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical
function: no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance;
there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor out-
line or form nor center” (1987, 494). Striated spaces are part of the onto-
pology of presence that seeks to turn space into territory in order to control
and dominate it, both economically and physically, through militarization,
while the smooth spaces advanced by spectral realism relate to Derrida’s
hauntology.
If ontopology grounds and stabilizes, hauntology sets into motion and
seeks to transform. If ontopology is tied to the “stable and presentable de-
termination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in gen-
eral” (Derrida 2006, 103), hauntology is “an interpretation that transforms
the very thing it interprets” (63). Cities are the striated spaces par excellence,
while smooth spaces are sites that retain a sense of placelessness, since they
cannot be measured or contained by metric systems or cartographic abstrac-
tions. Spectral realism embraces haptic perception and explores the possi-
bilities of smooth spaces. As Santiago Lozano, the assistant director of La
sirga, explains, the difficulty of seeing in La sirga creates a more holistic sen-
sory experience. La sirga is not a film that can merely be watched. It has to
be experienced as an atmosphere. It has to be absorbed through the pores:
“Esos espacios donde no te muestran las cosas literalmente, donde no hay
una narración evidente son las que te pueden dejar entrar en una atmósfera.
[La sirga] es una película totalmente atmosférica. . . . No es una cosa que le
entra a uno ni por los ojos ni por los oídos, sino por los poros” (Navas 2012).
28  Haunting without Ghosts

Sound constitutes another distinctive trait of this multisensory configu-

ration of space. Spectral realism heightens auditory perception. As vision
becomes increasingly obscured and unreliable, sound plays a greater role
in the creation of the atmosphere that permeates these works. In Specters of
Marx, Derrida notes that “the spectral rumor resonates, it invades every-
thing” (2006, 169). As previously noted, this auditory haunting is present
in Pedro Páramo and extends to spectral realism. Characters and readers are
surrounded by shreds of conversations that do not necessarily generate cohe-
sive and coherent speech, are frightened by dreadful moans, or are interpo-
lated by voices that cannot always be identified. But haptic perception is not
only about voices; it is also about sounds. If the emphasis on (in)visibility
invites us to experience a mode of seeing through the mist—and not in spite
of it—what at first seems like silence or background noise takes prevalence.
Miguel Hernández, the sound designer of La sirga, encapsulates this idea
well when he says that as spectators we must “descubrir esa otra sonoridad,
esa otra sonoridad que no es evidente, que no es estridente, que no es como
la ciudad” (Navas 2012).
This “otra sonoridad,” or other sonority, is a fundamental part of the hap-
tic perception and the smooth spaces that spectral realism seeks to create.
The insistent pattering of raindrops on the hostel’s tin roof and the con-
stant howling of the wind in La sirga are as important to the story as the
film’s scarce dialogues. But perhaps the best example of this sonority that
is neither “evident” nor “strident” can be found in Felipe Guerrero’s Oscuro
animal. The film, which tells unrelated stories of three women seeking to
flee armed conflict and reconstruct their lives, relies entirely on environ-
mental sound. In its 107 minutes, nobody speaks. But the film is not silent
or unintelligible. It is teeming with background sounds and subtle visual
cues to which the viewer is likely not accustomed to paying attention, thus
making the film confusing and exasperating for many viewers. The absence
of an omniscient and reliable narrative voice, explicitly providing the in-
formation we have come to expect when making sense of cinematic story
lines, understanding the details of the historical context, penetrating the
innermost secrets of the characters, and figuring out the space, makes view-
ers restless and uncomfortable and requires a readjustment of their expec-
tations and senses. Furthermore, as Felipe Guerrero says, this “dispositivo
sonoro radical,” or radical auditory device, is not vacuous formalism, it is a
“propuesta política” that uses the power of “verbal absences” (International
Film Festival Rotterdam 2016a) to raise awareness about how, in war-­ridden
contexts, silence is more often than not the result of (sexual, physical, and
other forms of racial and gender) violence, an imposed individual and col-
 Introduction 29

lective situation that seeks to efface or repress the memory of the very acts
and conditions that bring it into being. Therefore, this “other sonority,” as
well as the realignment of the senses and the uneasiness it produces, is key
to encouraging a more active engagement with space and a reflection upon
one’s own positioning within recent Colombian history. Through its haptic
reworking of vision, sound, and space, spectral realism performs a readjust-
ment of the senses that expands the limits of ontopology.
The treatment of sound in these films (and in spectral realism more
broadly) brings to the fore what Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2014, 118),
drawing on Idelber Avelar, calls “a politics of the unsaid.” That is to say, the
films embrace a mode of auditory perception that seeks to listen to “the spec-
tral history of silencing” (119). This is of great relevance in contexts of ex-
treme violence and national refounding, because, as Ochoa also highlights,
it begets questions about whose voices count as legitimate interpellators of
the state, particularly in times of major sociopolitical transitions, be it the
postcolonial period examined by Ochoa or the postaccords era dawning in
Colombia. Through its haptic reworking of vision, sound, and space, spec-
tral realism performs a readjustment of the senses that expands the limits of
ontopology. But doing so requires letting go of the temporal coordinates of
modernity that structure and govern the pace, functioning, and discourse
of the city and the state and entrusting oneself to the disruptive temporality
of the specter.

The Disjointed Temporality of the Specter

Specters produce disjointed times.

Alberto Ribas-­Casasayas and Amanda Petersen, Espectros

Allá te acostumbrarás a los de repentes.

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

Specters are figures of the untimely. Their (re)appearance disjoints the as-
sumed homogeneity and universality of modern time, actualizes foreclosed
elements of the past, and inscribes responsibility for the unresolved onto
the present. As Rory O’Bryen explains, “Spectres . . . disrupt the order-
ing of time in ontological terms of a succession of ‘états présents.’ They are
‘revenants,’ the ‘return of the repressed,’ but belong exclusively neither to
the past, present or future. Instead, they bring about the experience of a
more profound ‘anachronicity’ putting time itself ‘out of joint.’ Secondly,
such ‘anachronicity’ is political and stands for the postponement of mourn-
30  Haunting without Ghosts

ing and justice” (2008, 23). The political “anachronicity” of the specter
is key in the Colombian context, particularly in the wake of the govern-
ment’s peace agreements with the two main illegal armed forces in the
country, the AUC in 2003 and FARC in 2016. These massive historical
events have prompted a rhetoric of postconflict that, fueled by powerful
economic interests, uses the discourse of progress and development to en-
courage rapidly overcoming the wreckage of war. According to this narra-
tive, the armed conflict is a regrettable but now resolved hiatus from the
teleological vision of the nation, the biggest roadblock to the fulfillment of
its promise of well-­being and abundance. To get back on track, the coun-
try should abandon its anachronistic ways and struggles and reinsert itself
into the homogenous chronology of history as soon as possible. The “post”
in “postconflict” denotes a will toward closure, an urge to just move on.
But is it enough to just move on? Is there a way to welcome the future in a
more just manner? Spectral time reminds us that when injustices have been
committed, there is something to be acknowledged, grappled with, and re-
quited, not simply surpassed.
Furthermore, even though much has changed, violence has not stopped
in Colombia. Drug cartels continue to wreak havoc and profit from the
criminalization and growing consumption of narcotics, led by the United
States; guerrilla factions that did not demobilize or that have rearmed ha-
rass and cause panic in the civilian population; and criminal organizations
such as the Águilas Negras and the Rastrojos still extort, deal drugs, engage
in illegal mining, and rape and murder for a living. Thus, with T. J. Demos
(2013), I consider the term “neoconflict” more appropriate, as “neo” signifies
a continuation by other means. This persistent violence must be emphasized
as a guard against a teleological vision of the nation. The “temporal unruli-
ness of haunting” (Lim 2009, 12) allows for discrepant temporalities to co-
exist and presents a way to resist the homogenizing thrust of modernity’s
linear chronology. The return of the specter alters the presumed emptiness
and homogeneity of modern time. The unsettled grievances it represents dis-
rupt uniform chronology by pointing to those who are missing from histori-
cal time, either because they were assassinated, displaced, or kidnapped or
because they were unseen or unheard in its making. By assuming the unruly
temporality of the specter, spectral realism denaturalizes modern concep-
tions of temporality and encourages the disruption of a historical discourse
that claims to have exhausted other possibilities of being in time and space.
But this does not mean that all violence is the same. One must be cautious
not to obliterate historical context by equating events that vary in scope,
actors, and consequences. As O’Bryen aptly explains, spectrality does not
 Introduction 31

foreclose careful contextualization; it requires it, because it conceives of vio-

lence as “historical but not dated” (2008, 23). That is to say, what spectrality
questions is the “fixity” and “pastness” of historical violence, or the portrayal
of violent situations as enclosed and bygone events that do not, and should
not, affect, much less disrupt, the present. Through its temporal disruption,
spectrality supports a contextual historical understanding of violence more
aligned with what Slavoj Žižek has famously conceptualized as objective
violence.33 Instead of remaining captivated by the “all-­too-­visible” (Žižek
2008) and gruesome acts of subjective violence that commonly dominate
cultural production, media discourses, and historical narratives, spectral
realism rarifies temporality as a way of shedding light on how certain forms
of historical becoming, social understandings, and daily habits systemati-
cally efface the structural oppressions that underlie and constitute them. By
immersing the viewer or reader in a haunted temporality that moves slowly
and capriciously, and by insisting on what remains unknown, unresolved,
and unmourned, these works point out, as Žižek suggests, that the persis-
tence of violent dynamics that continue to constitute everyday life for thou-
sands of people in Colombia and around the world, as well as the enduring
consequences of disavowed individual and collective trauma, “ha[ve] to be
taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seems to be ‘ir-
rational’ explosions of subjective violence” (2008, 2).
Hence, the works I analyze in this book decelerate and confound tem-
porality, not in order to escape historical specificity but as a way of allowing
systemic and symbolic conditions of dispossession and violence to acquire a
fuller meaning by encouraging the reader or viewer to experience the pen-
sive, historically imbued, multidirectional, and unresolved temporality of
the specter. In these works, time is elliptical, capricious, and “out of joint”
(Derrida 2006, 20). It moves slowly, it accelerates, it halts. It is pensive, it
weighs, it brings back. It is subjective and questions the assumed univer-
sality and cultural neutrality of modern time. As is the case with vision, this
is partly done through spectral realism’s emphasis on disappearance. Avery
Gordon notes that “death exists in the past tense, disappearance in the pres-
ent” (2008, 113). The suspension of time produced by disappearance, and the
impediment to closure that it brings with it, is embedded in both diegetic
and narrative time. Characters, readers, and spectators experience the tem-
poral unfastening of the specter. For example, as Los ejércitos progresses—if
such a word can be used in this context—it becomes increasingly difficult to
measure time. From the beginning of Evelio Rosero’s novel, temporal refer-
ences are tainted by doubt due to the unreliability of the narrative voice. But
after the disappearance of the protagonist’s wife, Otilia, either a question
32  Haunting without Ghosts

mark or explicit expressions of skepticism begin to accompany references to

days and time. This gesture culminates in chapter 17, in which all of the sec-
tions start with a day of the week followed by a question mark. By the end
of the novel, the reader has given up on establishing a timeline and has to
agree with the protagonist, Ismael, that “no era posible adivinar qué horas
eran” (Rosero 2007, 196).
In Réquiem NN, Juan Manuel Echavarría’s documentary about the prac-
tice of adopting unidentified bodies, known as NNs, that float down the
Magdalena River in a remote town in Colombia, narrative time is elongated
and punctured by the long and idle sequences of the river and its whirlpools
and the unpredictable disruption of the tombs of the NNs throughout the
film. The prolonged shots of tree trunks caught in the swirls of the river
and of vultures waiting patiently and attentively at the shore, as well as the
capricious reappearance of the graves interlaced without diegetic justifica-
tion, make the simple act of looking a disquieting and uncanny experience.
The film suspends the viewer in the whirls of the Magdalena, and, because
one already knows that the river is the watery grave of the region’s disap-
peared, one now looks at it with fright and expectation. Echavarría’s river
simultaneously pushes things forward and brings them back. The camera-
work and temporal disruption of the film turn the river into an eerie and
haunted site, a space that acknowledges what has been lost but refuses to
lose it completely. In doing so, the film appeals to the pensive, disruptive
time of hauntology—the transformative time of the specter.
Spectral realism also escapes the trappings of nostalgia. If the past haunts
the present, it does not do so in an idealized form. In that sense, spectral
realism is far removed from Fernando Vallejo’s melancholic conjuration of
beloved ghosts, his bourgeois lament of times gone by, and his overuse of the
ubi sunt trope. What the irruption of a different temporality mobilizes in
spectral realism is not a longing for a lost paradise but a demand for justice;
a call to action that comes from the past but is actualized in the present, in
the name of the future. As Gordon explains, “Haunting, unlike trauma, is
distinctive for producing a something-­to-­be-­done” (2008, xi). The return
of the specter hopes to set characters, readers, and spectators into motion
(Derrida 2006, 192), redirecting us toward a “something-­to-­be-­done” in
the name of justice. Alongside the haptic reworking of vision and space,
the temporal disruption of spectral realism provides an alternative in order
to address ethical concerns regarding the complex relation between artis-
tic representation and historical violence at the core of Colombian cultural
production.
 Introduction 33

Ethical Anxieties, from “Pornomiseria” to Spectral Realism

The tension among representation, violence, and ethics is neither limited to

Colombia nor new. As María Helena Rueda (2011) points out, violence has
been at the heart of cultural production in Colombia for most of the twen-
tieth century, and questions about the ethical implications of its aesthetic
representation have haunted writers, filmmakers, and artists for years. In
the first chapter of her book La violencia y sus huellas, Rueda argues that
this dilemma was succinctly articulated in an open letter that José Eustasio
Rivera, the author of La vorágine (1924), wrote in response to a harsh cri-
tique of his novel. Tormented by the reception of his novel, Rivera wrote:
“Dios sabe que al componer mi libro no obedecí a otro móvil que el de bus-
car la redención de esos infelices que tienen la selva por cárcel. Sin embargo,
lejos de conseguirlo, les agravé la situación, pues sólo he logrado hacer mito-
lógicos sus padecimientos y novelescas las torturas que los aniquilan” (Rivera
2013, lxxxvii). Years later, amid the excitement originated by the New Latin
American Cinema, seminal texts such as Julio García Espinosa’s “For an
Imperfect Cinema” (1969) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s
“Towards a Third Cinema” (1969) would grapple with a similar urgency of
denouncing Latin America’s social problems while at the same time ques-
tioning whether the emphasis on the region’s misery reinforced the precon-
ceptions that First World viewers had about Latin America and profited
from the exhibition of poverty and injustice. Glauber Rocha accurately ex-
pressed this concern. In his influential “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” written
in 1965, he states, “Thus, while Latin America laments its general misery,
the foreign onlooker cultivates the taste of that misery, not as a tragic symp-
tom, but merely as an aesthetic object within his field of interest,” later add-
ing, “The formal exoticism . . . vulgarizes social problems [and] provoke[s]
a series of misunderstandings that involve not only art but also politics”
(Rocha 1997, 59).
In Colombia, the filmmakers Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina coined
the term “pornomiseria” “to articulate a problem that became endemic to
Colombian filmmaking in the 1970s but that continues to haunt any discus-
sion . . . about the representation of socio-­economic hardship” (L. Ospina,
n.d.)—and, I would add, violence. Like many filmmakers and critics of their
time, Mayolo and Ospina were keenly aware of the thin line between de-
nunciation and exploitation and were aware, as Michèle Faguet explains,
that the desire to represent marginality and violence “always carries the risk
of producing the opposite effect: that of a cynical indifference which comes
from a saturation and fetishisation of this visibility in the absence of proper
34  Haunting without Ghosts

analysis or even basic code of ethics” (Faguet 2009, 7). Hence, for Mayolo
and Ospina, the most harmful movies and texts are not the ones that avoid
social issues altogether or those that pander to an “excruciatingly trite na-
tionalism” (12). The most detrimental are the ones that engage in a pseudo-
denunciation of social injustice, since they are “guilty of the worst kind of
exploitation, one that justifies its ambiguous intentions in a distorted and
vulgar version of the call for cinematic realism” (12).
This search for a different frame by which to consider violence is what
Rueda (2011) calls “ética ansiosa,” or anxious ethics. That is, the different
aesthetic practices that filmmakers, writers, and artists use in an effort to
represent historical violence without aggravating it or oversimplifying it
for commercial purposes. As its title suggests, the complicated relation be-
tween exploitation and commodification is at the heart of Derrida’s Specters
of Marx and traverses spectrality. Cultural practitioners and scholars who
engage with the spectral are well aware that, as Derrida put it in good old
Marxist manner, “the commodity haunts the thing” (2006, 189). This con-
sideration is of heightened importance for spectral realism because of the
double bind that violence—in great part produced, sustained, and intensi-
fied by the war on drugs—represents in Colombia. On the one hand, there
is a political economy, led by the United States, that ensures a market for
drugs and then declares a war against those whose labor (and lives) keeps
the supply steady. On the other hand, the same economic dynamic creates
and feeds a cultural appetite for products related to this violence. Spectral
realism is haunted by the ethical anxiety produced by this quandary and, in
its reworking of sight, space, and temporality, finds a viable alternative to
thwart the uncritical consumption of historical violence. The cultural prac-
titioners of spectral realism believe, with Jacques Derrida, that to find more
just ways of representation—be they political or artistic—one must conjure
the ghost and converse with him or her.
The works of Evelio Rosero, William Vega, Felipe Guerrero, Jorge
Forero, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes op-
pose market-­driven conventions of storytelling aimed at easily digestible
products with faux cultural weight. This does not mean that the works are
self-­reflective in a metacinematographic or literary way. They do not talk,
explicitly, about literature, film, or art. But the commonplace stories they
tell through the lives of their historically oppressed characters are neither
revictimizing nor focused on individuality to the point of effacing their his-
toricity and relevance or the urgency of their plight for acknowledgement,
reparation, and justice. Spectral realism can thus productively be thought of
as a process of cultural mediation and remediation. As Gordon (2008, 19)
 Introduction 35

explains, haunting performs a very specific kind of mediation. Mediation in

general is a process that connects “a social structure and a subject, and his-
tory and a biography. In haunting, organized forces and systemic structures
that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way
that confounds our analytic separations and confounds the social separa-
tions themselves” (19).
Spectral realism builds on this process by establishing subtle yet key links
between individual struggles and larger historical forces and socioeconomic
processes, as well as by offering an array of formal tools through which some
of the many stories of disavowed loss and mourning produced by histori-
cal violence are expressed rather than repressed. But spectral realism is not
only an instance of mediation; it is also a medium, an invocation that brings
back to life, a materiality (paper, film, or artistic object) that offers itself
as a body to be haunted, a space to be occupied by presences and murmurs
that seek a voice and strive toward justice. Furthermore, the formal impli-
cations of this mediation make it harder to capitalize on violence. The land-
scape and the temporality of the specter do not comfortably fit in the film
trailer or the advertisement—and do not incite erotic or consumerist desire.
By focusing on what cannot be seen or understood with clarity, then, and
by dislocating the spatiotemporal coordinates of striated spaces and modern
historical discourse, spectral realism offers an incomplete and evolving, yet
effective, symbolic remedy against the eroticized/exoticized commodifica-
tion of historical violence and its facile incorporation into the official nar-
rative of postconflict.

The Exorcists

Colombia is currently facing the daunting question of how to address and

redress its recent and violent history in the aftermath of the demise of its
most powerful and violent drug cartels, symbolized by the assassination of
Pablo Escobar in 1993, and the demobilization of its two biggest illegal
armed forces in the first decades of the twenty-­first century. As meaningful
as they are, these events will not suffice to bring durable peace to the coun-
try. Violence will endure so long as the war on drugs continues to criminal-
ize the production and sale of narcotics, thus producing sizable profits for
criminal organizations, and so long as stark inequalities and lack of access
to basic social services and opportunities for professional growth and per-
sonal advancement persist. But the demobilization of FARC, which marked
the end of an era by de facto halting the hemisphere’s longest armed con-
36  Haunting without Ghosts

flict, also brought to light fundamental disagreements over the meaning of

the country’s recent history and inspired profound aesthetic, ethical, and
political questions about how to advance narrative practices that encourage
reflection and reconciliation without promoting further animosity or invit-
ing forgetfulness. In the following pages, I highlight the recent efforts of
cultural practitioners who found in spectrality a productive language to face
this task. As a mode of storytelling, spectral realism is imbued by the his-
torical density, critical perspective, and ethical anxiety at the core of both
spectrality and realist writing. To varying degrees and with varying em-
phases, all the works selected share the traits outlined here as constitutive
aspects of their visual and narrative grammars and seek to haunt Colombia’s
national imaginary and symbolic repertoire in a key moment of the coun-
try’s history.
In the following three chapters, I provide close analyses of works that I
consider representative of spectral realism. Each chapter focuses on a par-
ticular artistic medium and highlights the formal elements of spectral real-
ism more intensely explored in those concrete works. I have already presented
the theoretical scaffolding of this project and defined my understanding of
spectral realism as a productive mode of storytelling. In chapter 1, I exam-
ine Evelio Rosero’s En el lejero (2003) and Los ejércitos (2007), homing in on
ethical considerations about the visual representation of violence and high-
lighting how Rosero’s spectral spatiality brings the predicament of Colom-
bia’s disappeared to the forefront. In chapter 2, I analyze three films—La
sirga (2013), directed by William Vega; Violencia (2015), directed by Jorge
Forero; and Oscuro animal (2016), directed by Felipe Guerrero—and con-
centrate on the exploration of haptic modes of perception and their impli-
cations for narrative time and space. In chapter 3, I look at specific works
by the artists Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes
that focus on the conundrum that forced disappearance entails for represen-
tation and mourning, and provide examples of how communities and artists
negotiate these losses. Overall, by pointing out common ethical concerns
about the representation of violence and highlighting similar modes of ad-
dressing them, I offer a broad but recognizable critical grammar that brings
together the apparently unrelated works of various cultural practitioners
within the current Colombian context. I do not claim that the framework
of spectral realism exhausts these multilayered and complex works, but I do
hope it provides a fruitful and rigorous critical approach to them.
The reach of spectral realism is broad, but due to time and space limita-
tions, I focus on its Colombian variations in a historic moment of profound
sociopolitical change and national soul-­searching. Cultural practitioners
 Introduction 37

have much to offer in this process of aesthetic, cultural, and political resigni-
fication. Art, film, and literature can be powerful artifacts. As Evelio Rosero
often says, such works have the ability to make us uncomfortable, to con-
front us, and to shake us.34 They help us reflect on our society, opening the
possibility that we might act upon that resulting thought; they help us see
and hear that which is no longer there, that which cannot speak anymore or
was never able to do so; and they are proof that “in the face of disaster, vio-
lence, and terror, in the presence of enduring war, hence as in the present, . . .
art is a worthy—even indispensable—contribution to the collective efforts
toward making societies livable” (Bal 2010b, 54). My analysis features the
work of cultural practitioners who have found in haunting—understood as
a disruptive force that mobilizes critical reflection and demands reparation
for unacknowledged or unresolved physical and symbolic violence—a way to
do just that. In this sense, Evelio Rosero, William Vega, Jorge Forero, Felipe
Guerrero, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes are
exorcists: men and women who deal with specters, who know how to con-
jure them. But unlike traditional exorcists, the exorcists of spectral realism
do not expel the ghosts once they have arrived. Rather, through Derrida’s
“impure impure history of ghosts” (2006, 118), these cultural practitioners’
novels, films, and artworks mobilize an aesthetically enthralling and ethi-
cally viable way of narrating a reality that has to account for the many dis-
appearances, appearances, and reappearances that constitute it. Above all,
my discussions here are an invitation to further the analysis of how contem-
porary cultural work is engaging with, and challenging, the conventions of
the representation of historical violence in Colombia and elsewhere.
CHAPTER 1

Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes

of Disappearance

Él buscaba en la rara luz de la niebla, como si sólo así pudiera

encontrar la respuesta por fin, al fin el fin de su búsqueda.
Los sobrecogía esa vista sin perspectiva.
Evelio Rosero, En el lejero

If light is the element of violence, one must combat light with

a certain other light, in order to avoid the worst violence, the
violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference

Evelio Rosero is an introvert. Like many of his characters, he prefers to

watch, and to write, from the shadows; and he is well known for avoiding
reporters and scholars. Indeed, he is such an introvert that when a reporter
dared to go to his house and made his way to the living room, determined
to get an interview with the elusive writer, Rosero hid in the closet and
stayed there for over an hour as his partner assured the journalist that the
writer had left and she did not know when he was coming back. When the
reporter finally left, Rosero had a sore back, cramped limbs, and the begin-
ning of a new novel, Señor que no conoce la luna (1993), the story of a ghostly,
two-­sexed creature who finds refuge from the violence that surrounds him
in a closet, from where he seeks to fulfill the scopophilic fantasy that tra-
verses many of his works: “Mirar todo lo que ocurre afuera, sin que nadie
sepa qué ocurre conmigo, aquí dentro” (2010, 9). Success has made Rosero
slightly more comfortable with the spotlight. He doesn’t hide in closets any-
more. But even now, after winning prestigious literary awards—the Premio
Pedro Gómez Valderrama, for his novel El incendiado (1988); the Premio
Tusquets Editores de Novela in 2007 and the Independent Foreign Fiction

38
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 39

Prize in 2009, both for Los ejércitos (2006); and Colombia’s Premio Nacional
de Literatura in 2014, for La carroza de Bolívar (2012)—when he heads to
an interview or university talk, he seems more resigned than eager to talk
about his work. Instead of the glow people have when receiving honors and
accolades, Rosero looks disoriented and impatient. But more than bothered,
he looks terrified, deeply uncomfortable with so many eyes staring at him.
These anecdotes are more than literary gossip. They reflect one of the most
defining aspects of Rosero’s project: exploring the relations between expo-
sure and vulnerability, scopophilia and objectification, the desire to see and
the desire to control, visibility and violence. These questions that haunt his
works are also at the center of this chapter.
Born in Bogotá in 1958, Evelio Rosero is one of Colombia’s most prolific
and eclectic writers. His first publications date from the early 1980s, and in
the past three decades he has produced a body of work that includes fiction
for children and young adults, a book of poems he claims he wants to for-
get, plays, short stories, and nine novels: Mateo solo (1984), Juliana los mira
(1986), and El incendiado (1988), which together make up the Primera Vez
trilogy; Señor que no conoce la luna (1993); Las muertes de fiesta (1996); Plu-
tón (2000); Los almuerzos (2001); En el lejero (2003); Los ejércitos (2006); La
carroza de Bolívar (2012); Plegaria por un papa envenenado (2014); and Toño
Ciruelo (2017). Within this broad and varied literary production, I focus on
the two novels that according to Rosero constitute his most explicit effort
to address the historical violence of the armed conflict in Colombia: En el
lejero and Los ejércitos.1 Published only three years apart, En el lejero and Los
ejércitos were written during one the country’s most violent decades, and
they both engage with some of the most egregious human rights violations
committed during that time: kidnapping, forced disappearance and dis-
placement, and the (para)military takeover of small towns, which often re-
sulted in gruesome massacres.
The reorganization of the drug market following the demise in 1993 of
Pablo Escobar—perhaps the world’s most infamous drug lord—coincided
with the expansion of the most powerful paramilitary group in the country,
the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), and the growth of and sub-
sequent quest for resources by the two largest guerrilla organizations, the
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Ejército
de Liberación Nacional (ELN). These factors created an explosive cock-
tail, making Colombia one of the most dangerous countries in the world,
particularly for peasants, indigenous and Afro-­Colombian peoples, union
leaders, and human rights defenders.2 This violent context frames En el lejero
and Los ejércitos in terms of both content and form. The plots revolve around
40  Haunting without Ghosts

the impact the armed conflict has in small towns and upon their inhabitants,
and the literary devices deployed by Rosero explore and enhance the fear,
bewilderment, and disorientation that violence causes. The link with reality
is particularly strong in the case of Los ejércitos. When speaking about the
novel, Rosero is clear, even adamant, insisting that even though he is a fic-
tion writer, “todas las anécdotas que narro son reales. Los dedos que le man-
dan al hombre que le secuestraron a su esposa y su hija. El coronel que dis-
para en la plaza a diestra y siniestra porque ‘ustedes son guerrilleros.’ Nada
es inventado por mí, solamente los personajes alrededor de los cuales giran
las anécdotas verídicas” ( Jiménez 2007).
Furthermore, Rosero explicitly describes both novels as part of his effort
to find a language to address the country’s dismal recent history, and he
places them in direct relation to each other. In an interview with Antonio
Ungar (2010), he even says that his most celebrated novel, Los ejércitos, is
actually a rewriting of En el lejero and that the novel should be understood
as part of an ongoing search for literary devices to address the vexed ques-
tion that violence poses—particularly when it relates to disappearance—to
cultural and aesthetic representation. The similarities between the two plots
attest to this genealogy. They both tell the story of a disoriented old man
who desperately looks for a woman who has vanished in the midst of war.
Narratively speaking, they are very simple. En el lejero follows the journey
of Jeremías Andrade as he goes from town to town carrying around an old
photograph of his orphaned granddaughter, a young girl who disappeared
on her way to buy roses in their hometown. When the novel begins, he has
made his way to a mysterious, cold, and fog-­shrouded town “que limitaba a
un lado con el volcán y al otro con el absimo” (Rosero 2003, 15), wherein lies
his last hope of finding Rosaura. Los ejércitos tells the story of Ismael Pasos,
an old schoolteacher wandering through the war-­torn streets of his native
San José as he desperately looks for his wife. Otilia has disappeared after an
unidentified army attacked the village, and Ismael, confused and caught in
the cross fire, tries to make his way back home while searching for clues that
might lead him to Otilia.
In spite of the resemblance between the two novels, the publication of
En el lejero went virtually unnoticed. It wasn’t until the notoriety and many
awards received by Los ejércitos, which has been translated into more than
twenty languages, that En el lejero made a modest reappearance in book-
stores and scholarship. The difference in popularity is probably at least partly
due to En el lejero’s more marked spectrality, by which I mean a more radical
formal experimentation with spectral realism’s main components: vision,
space, temporality, and an unresolved claim for justice. Rosero is aware of
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 41

this. In an interview, he says that the experience of writing En el lejero left

him so disturbed that he had to rewrite the story in a less disruptive and
disturbing manner. En el lejero, he says, is “un sueño terrible,” a horrifying
tale in which “la pesadilla se apoder[a] de todo” (Ungar 2010). In the same
conversation, however, the author points out that the novel is also one of
his most optimistic stories, because unlike what happens in Los ejércitos, in
the end “[al protagonista] le va bien [porque] al final el pueblo mismo le
devuelve a su nieta” (Ungar 2010). Because of this apparent contradiction,
En el lejero can perhaps be best described, using Avery Gordon’s words, as a
“harrowing but hopeful ghost story” (2008, 135). The phrase, which Gordon
uses when talking about Luisa Valenzuela’s Como en la guerra (1977), not
only aptly describes Valenzuela’s novel but also encapsulates the ethos of
spectrality.
In what follows, I delve into the contrast between disruptive and often
disturbing aesthetic practices and the desire to recognize and redress un-
acknowledged or unresolved wrongs, even if only symbolically. That is, I
explore the tensions among the harrowing, the hopeful, and the ghostly—
particularly as they relate to the representation of historical violence—that
are at the heart of spectral realism and that traverse both novels. The formal
and thematic emphasis on different forms of disappearance is key in this re-
gard. Instead of focusing on the display and spectacle of war, En el lejero and
Los ejércitos insist on the disappearances, absences, and silences that violence
produces and wishes to make definitive.
Furthermore, because the disappearance of people as a historical phe-
nomenon problematizes what Jacques Derrida (2006) has called the “onto-
pology of presence,” the novels are cases in point of how the Derridean
notion of hauntology can be a productive way of encouraging more active
engagements with the past in the name of a more just future. If ontopology
prioritizes historicizing practices that advance “stable and presentable”
notions of “the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general” (Der-
rida 2006, 103), hauntology brings back the silenced claims and violent acts
of absenting through which such history came to be. Hauntology desta-
bilizes narratives about the past in order to transform the present and the
future (Derrida 2006, 63); it produces haunted histories capable, perhaps,
of “protecting the dead from the dangers of the present” (Gordon 2008, 65).
More specifically, hauntology allows one to think about the treatment of
vision, time, and space in En el lejero and Los ejércitos as more than a move-
ment toward invisibility, unintelligibility, or sensationalism. Like all the cul-
tural producers referenced in this volume, Rosero finds in spectrality a useful
repertoire of formal tools to address historical violence, advancing a pro-
42  Haunting without Ghosts

found re-­view of the ways that the conflict has commonly been framed and
narrated, and hence experienced by readers. In both novels such re-­vision
is literal: disappearance is not only their thematic preoccupation; it per-
vades narrative space. A profound distrust of visibility and elucidation and a
de(re)construction of the way in which violence and vision itself are seen are
key components of En el lejero and Los ejércitos. This results in the literary
upending of the spatiotemporal coordinates of modernity, which, in turn,
helps illuminate some of the unacknowledged and repressed forms of vio-
lence that underpin the contemporary social order. The main way in which
they do so is by dismantling what is perhaps the most defining element of
classic realism: the preponderance of vision and its relation to knowledge
and power. Instead, they turn to “una vista sin perspectiva” (Rosero 2003,
73) and insist on learning to see through, not in spite of, “la rara luz de la
niebla” (72). The first scenes of both novels are illustrative.

Reenvisioning Vision

To explain what he calls “the epistemological project of realism,” Peter

Brooks (1993, 96) often uses the premise of Alain-­René Lesage’s Le diable
boiteux (1707). The novel tells the story of a benevolent devil that takes a
young man to the highest tower of Madrid and proceeds to remove the roof-
tops of all the houses in order to show him what is going on inside (Brooks
2005, 3). This desire to expose aspects of reality—particularly commonplace,
even private, reality—that remain hidden from view is one of the main im-
pulses of realist fiction. The image is therefore useful for understanding the
link between realism as a mode of representation and vision as an epistemic
and ontological mode of inquiry. Perhaps more than other modes of litera-
ture, realism is predicated upon vision, “almost in the sense of [an] X-­ray
glance” (Brooks 1995, 134). It relies on the constant zooming in and out
of an omniscient narrative voice into the lives and minds of societies and
individuals as the main way to portray and comprehend the world. This epi-
stemic and literary device explains the preponderance of scenes structured
around vision. The inaugural tableau of Leopoldo Alas’s La regenta (1884)
and the ending of Balzac’s Père Goriot are paradigmatic in this sense.
La regenta’s opening sequence almost perfectly mirrors the scene de-
scribed by Brooks. The novel starts with Fermín De Pas, the young and am-
bitious priest of Vetusta (a Spanish word meaning “antiquated” or “extremely
old”), standing at the top of the town’s highest point—and most notorious
phallic symbol—the bell tower. While Vetusta enjoys its siesta, De Pas en-
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 43

gages in his preferred pastime, observing the world from the altitude using
a small spyglass he keeps in his pocket: “El Magistral . . . paseaba lenta-
mente sus miradas por la ciudad escudriñando sus rincones, levantando con
la imaginación los techos, aplicando su espíritu a aquella inspección minu-
ciosa, como el naturalista estudia con poderoso microscopio las pequeñeces
de los cuerpos” (Alas 2016, 56). De Pas’s inspection is not only meticulous
and thorough, moving slowly “de tejado en tejado, de ventana en ventana,
de jardín en jardín” (60), it is as systematic and calculated as it is eager and
gluttonous: “Vetusta era su pasión y su presa. Mientras los demás le tenían
por sabio teólogo, filósofo y jurisconsulto, él estimaba sobre todas su ciencia
de Vetusta. La conocía palmo a palmo, por dentro y por fuera, por el alma
y por el cuerpo, había escudriñado los rincones de las conciencias y los rin-
cones de las casas. Lo que sentía en presencia de la heroica ciudad era gula;
hacía su anatomía, no como el fisiólogo que sólo quiere estudiar, sino como
el gastrónomo que busca los bocados apetitosos; no aplicaba el escalpelo sino
el trinchante” (56). These two quotations vividly show the intertwinement
of vision and possession at the heart of realism, highlighting how methodi-
cal observation hopes to lead to knowledge and, eventually, to control and
mastery. They also underscore the prevalent role that desire has in realist fic-
tion and the overlap between ambition and lust. De Pas’s small retractable
telescope functions as an obvious stand-­in for the phallus and speaks of the
castration anxiety that permeates the novel. As a priest, De Pas is expected
to repress his sexual desire, which he channels toward the political, psycho-
logical, and moral dominion of Vetusta and its inhabitants, especially Ana
Ozores, the woman who gives the novel its title.
From the beginning, the novel underscores De Pas’s voyeuristic desire
and the repressed and frustrated nature of his sexual attraction to Ana. In
that sense, it is significant that even while holding his powerful spyglass,
De Pas is feminized—castrated—by the narrative. The first thing the reader
learns of him is that “se le conoc[e] en el menear de los manteos” (48); that
is, that he can be recognized from afar by the elegant and intentional way in
which he moves his cassock as he walks. Unlike the English word “cassock,”
which is distinctly masculine, “manteo” denotes both the priest’s attire and
a garment “que llevaban las mujeres, de la cintura abajo, ajustada y solapada
por delante” (Diccionario de la lengua española). Readers are also told that
his skin is so pale and his cheeks are so rosy that some people in the town
joke that he wears makeup (Alas 2016, 48); and his first detailed description
starts by stressing that “sus pies parecían los de una dama” (53) and points
out that his right hand is “blanca, fina, de muy afilados dedos, no menos cui-
dada que si fuera la de aristocrática señora” (54). The passage also describes
44  Haunting without Ghosts

his fine shoes and delicate socks. The narrative gaze continues up De Pas’s
legs—partly visible because, unlike other men, he wears a cassock instead of
pants—but when it is about to reach his pelvic area, it veers toward De Pas’s
pocket as he takes out the spyglass and slowly extends it, to the surprise and
confusion of an altar boy, who initially mistakes it for a rifle (54). The shift
in focus from De Pas’s groin to the display of his spyglass is highly symbolic,
underscoring the relationship between, and ultimate displacement of, con-
quest by physical possession to dominion through vision and knowledge in
realism. In this context, sexuality is ancillary to larger goals of political, eco-
nomic, and social dominance and serves as a cautionary tale about the tragic
consequences of refusing, or failing, to properly align these two passions.
Such a failure, in the world of realism, amounts to social ostracism and even
death, the latter being preferable to the former.
Père Goriot’s final scene is also exemplary in this regard. As is well known,
the novel closes with Rastignac staring down at Paris from Père-­Lachaise
Cemetery after attending the lonely and depressing funeral of old Goriot.
The scene shows that Rastignac has completed his sentimental education
and is now ready to take on the Parisian society that once snubbed him. Be-
cause the cemetery is located on a hill, Rastignac, like De Pas, is physically
and visually above the city, which is no longer a confusing entanglement
of streets and sociopolitical and sexual liaisons but a “swarming beehive”
(Balzac 2018, 217) filled with sweet promises and possibilities. His physical
position is a powerful metaphor of his future socioeconomic standing. He
has learned to see Paris for what it is, and that knowledge will soon translate
into power. His desire finally matches his skills. Furthermore, the relations
among vision, desire, and possession, as well as the sexual underpinnings of
such desire, are clear throughout the passage: like De Pas, Rastignac looks
at the city with a mixture of greed and lust; and if he was once unable to
“penetrate” Paris, he is now ready “to suck out” its honey (217).3 De Pas and
Rastignac embody realism’s “penetrating observer” (Brooks 1993, 84). They
deploy “a gaze both fascinated [with] and hostile” (89–90) toward women
and society in general, fusing sociopolitical and economic ambition with
desire for sexual dominance. They are, indeed, “desiring machines” (Brooks
2005) whose most overwhelming impetus is “a phallic drive for possession
and perhaps [an] even more primitive oral need to devour” (28).
At first glance, the opening of Los ejércitos seems to adhere to this tradi-
tion. The scene is entirely organized around vision. As he does every morn-
ing, Ismael has climbed up a ladder to pick oranges from a tree that stands
at the fence separating his house from that of the neighbors. But more than
collecting fruit, Ismael’s intent is to see his beautiful and young neighbor
Geraldina sunbathing naked next to the pool while her husband, El Brasi-
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 45

lero, plays the guitar. In a scene filled with Edenic reminiscences, the old
teacher reaches for the (forbidden) fruits as he visually dominates the en-
vironment. The first words of the book, “Y era así” (Rosero 2007, 11), re-
inforce the biblical undertones and take the reader to a place where the
clarity that suffuses the scene is as visual as it is epistemic. But we soon learn
that the godlike voice in charge of describing the world “as it was” is actually
the voice of Ismael Pasos, an old man with declining eyesight and increas-
ingly confused memories. Shortly thereafter we also learn not to trust the
old teacher’s ability to comprehend (and therefore accurately narrate) the
environment around him. Despite continuing with a detailed description of
everything he sees, Ismael mentions several times that he has trouble com-
municating with the people he’s describing, which emphasizes a dissonance
between the main character—and only narrator—and the world he is sup-
posed to portray clearly for the reader.
The fracture in understanding and communication is what causes the
text—and Ismael—to insist on vision. Ismael does not want to speak or lis-
ten; he only wishes to see. And what does he look at? Mainly, two “things”:
women and the gazes of others. Ismael looks at “la esbelta Geraldina” (Ro-
sero 2007, 11) lying naked next to her pool and at Gracielita—a twelve-­
year-­old orphan whom Geraldina and El Brasilero have taken in to help
with household chores—“meciendo sin saberlo su trasero” as she washes
the dishes (12). Ismael also sees Geraldina’s son, Eusebito, who is the same
age as Gracielita, hiding under a table trying to catch a glimpse of the girl’s
“tierno calzón blanco” (12), and he notices that El Brasilero is looking at
him while he looks at Geraldina. Finally, he sees Otilia, his wife, atten-
tively and disapprovingly watching this intricate web of gazes and frustrated
desire. Moreover, according to Otilia, looking, and looking at women, spe-
cifically, is Ismael’s preferred pastime. When it becomes clear that what the
old teacher is hoping to see is not the oranges of his trees, Otilia scolds
him for “[estar] encaramado como un enfermo espiándolos” (26), and adds,
“Desde que te conozco . . . nunca has parado de espiar a las mujeres . . . eras
y eres solamente un cándido mirón inofensivo” (24). Later, she insists, “Así
eres, dormir, mirar, dormir” (57). In spite of her words, Otilia knows that
Ismael’s scopophilia is neither innocent nor harmless. That same night, she
tells Ismael that his voyeurism is both shameful and dangerous and reminds
him that it has already come close to costing him his life: “Acuérdate de
cuando vivíamos en ese edificio rojo, en Bogotá. Espiabas a la vecina del
otro edificio, de noche y de día, hasta que su esposo se enteró, acuérdate. Te
disparó desde la otra habitación” (25); to which Ismael, refusing to engage,
simply replies, “Creo que voy a dormir” (25), and closes his eyes.
If De Pas and Rastignac show that the realist project is largely about
46  Haunting without Ghosts

learning to see in order to gain access—that is, to penetrate—and to

dominate, Rosero’s spectral realism troubles this stance through Ismael’s
fraught engagement with vision, particularly through two main aspects that
(1) underscore the often unmarked gendered dynamics of desire and vision
that permeate these narratives, and (2) explicitly relate this predatory mode
of looking at people, resources, and entire societies to sexual and histori-
cal violence. If the classical realism of Clarín and Balzac presents vision as
a neutral tool for gaining knowledge of the social world, Rosero’s spectral
realism shows the gaze to be highly gendered and closely linked to histories
of sexual and historical violence, thus highlighting, in a more Foucauldian
manner, how vision, as a form of knowledge, is also a form of domination.
Unlike what happens with Rastignac or De Pas, Ismael is not em-
powered, either sexually or socially, by vision. On the contrary, he is pro-
gressively unable to map, to narrate, and even to see, much less to con-
trol, the world around him; and both he and the reader come to experience
this mode of seeing as increasingly, and perhaps even inherently, violent.
This is partly achieved through some of the mechanisms identified by Kaja
Silverman in “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look,
and Image.” Silverman argues that Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work inverts
the “usual scopic paradigm” by “turning . . . the look back upon itself ” (1989,
60) and making “the male desiring look synonymous with loss of control”
(62), which is also the case in Los ejércitos. Despite his obsession with look-
ing, Ismael is unable to translate vision into control, much less dominance.
Ismael’s scopic insistence does not empower him; it reinforces his incapacity
to possess and to impact what he is seeing. He does not bear the gaze of the
conquistador (neither in its military nor sexual connotation), but rather the
sly, infirm, and impotent look of a “viejo verde,” or perverted old man. His
look is imbued with desire, but it is a desire that knows itself inappropriate
and powerless, and out of control. In the novel, this lack of control has sev-
eral layers. The old teacher is not master of what he sees: he cannot possess
Geraldina or any other of the women he stalks, he has no means to stop the
destruction and violence he witnesses at the hands of the unnamed armies
that besiege his home and town, and he doesn’t even master his desire to see.
That is to say, Ismael can neither control his own scopophilia nor control the
world around him through vision. But Ismael is no ordinary Peeping Tom.
His relationship with vision is not portrayed as a man’s flawed sexuality, a
symptom of his dubious moral character, or an individual pathology. Rather,
it is a metaphor of larger societal dynamics that are explicitly connected to
the worst forms of violence in the Colombian armed conflict.
Part of why one is aware of this layered relationship between vision and
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 47

power is that the gaze is traced back to its source: it is exhibited and em-
bodied, which highlights its subjectivity and multiplicity—subjectivity in
that it belongs to an individual instead of to an abstract, disembodied, and
omniscient narrative voice, and multiplicity in that even though we only
see the world through Ismael’s eyes, we are made aware that there are mul-
tiple gazes crossing paths, sometimes violently, with each other. As Silver-
man argues about Fassbinder, Rosero also “focuses attention upon the look
rather than its object, bring[ing] the look emphatically within spectacle”
(1989, 60). Both elements are clearly portrayed in the first scene of the novel.
Ismael is no young and handsome Rastignac ready to take on Paris. He is an
old man precariously perched on top of a rickety ladder, and everyone (El
Brasilero, Geraldina, and Otilia) witnesses his desperate and dangerous at-
tempts to see the young neighbor’s naked body as he reaches for the oranges.
The reader is also made aware of the contortions Eusebito has to undertake
in order to surreptitiously catch a glimpse of Gracielita’s underwear. Ismael
“lo contemplaba contemplándola” as the boy hides under a table while she
washes the dishes “hundida en la inocencia profunda” (Rosero 2007, 12). The
boy and the elderly man experience a temporal dissonance with respect to
their object of desire. Either too old or too young, they are unable to assuage
their lust; their gluttony remains unsatiated. As mentioned before, Otilia,
who describes herself as “una espía del espía” (26), watches these intertwin-
ing looks and repressed desires with her ever-­vigilant gaze. Her words bring
to the fore the ethics of vision. She questions Ismael’s prerogative to sexu-
alize and objectify women through vision and reminds him of the violence
that this mode of looking may result in. As the novel progresses, the violent
implications of this relationship between desire and an objectifying gaze will
become evident and are explicitly related to the Colombian armed conflict.

“Mírame si te atreves”: From Visual

Pleasure to the Pathos of Vision

As the title of the novel suggests, death in Los ejércitos is not a drive re-
lated to desire, or a metaphor. The relationship between death and pleasure
here is not the petite mort of orgasm or consensual, self-­inflicted, pleasure-­
enhancing pain. Throughout the novel, violence refers to the brutal armed
conflict the country endured in the years previous to, and during, its writ-
ing. The case of scopophilia is no different. Los ejércitos historicizes predatory
visualizing practices and sexuality, tying them to threats and serious bodily
harm. All moments of intense sexual desire in the novel are connected to
48  Haunting without Ghosts

historical violence in one way or another, and almost all sexually charged
stories follow the same pattern: they combine a scene in which desire is
mobilized visually with an act of vicious violence. For example, Eusebito’s
lustful spying of Gracielita is what brings war to the story. The novel does
not follow the boy’s gaze to Gracielita’s body. Instead, it takes the reader
to San José’s violent history. By watching Eusebito watch Gracielita, the
reader learns that the girl is “tempranamente huérfana” (Rosero 2007, 12)
because both of her parents were killed “cuando ocurrió el último ataque a
nuestro pueblo de no se sabe todavía qué ejército—si los paramilitares, si la
guerrilla: un cilindro de dinamita estalló en mitad de la iglesia . . . con medio
pueblo dentro” (12). The attack, which seems to reference one of Colombia’s
most infamous war crimes, the massacre of Bojayá,4 is what justifies Gra-
cielita’s presence in Eusebito’s visual plane and house, since his parents took
her in on the recommendation of the town’s priest in order to provide a new
home for the girl.
Ismael and Otilia’s story is also marked by murder. After Otilia scolds
him for looking at Geraldina, the reader learns that they met forty years
ago at the bus station. Otilia was sitting on a bench waiting for the bus and
got up as Ismael approached. The novel describes in detail Otilia’s face and
body as seen by a young and mesmerized Ismael. Then “ocurrió algo que dis-
trajo mi atención de su belleza montuna, inusitada” (Rosero 2007, 21). That
“something” is the murder of an old man who is eating an ice cream next
to him, at the hands of a boy of about twelve years of age. Fearing for his
life, Ismael runs to hide in the bathroom, where he surprises Otilia “justo
en el momento en que se sentaba, el vestido arremangado a la cintura, los
dos muslos tan pálidos como desnudos estrechándose con terror” (22–23).
Ismael’s reaction is also telling: “Le dije un ‘perdón’ angustioso y legítimo y
cerré de inmediato la puerta con la velocidad justa, meditada, para mirarla
otra vez” (23). The scene is paradigmatic of Rosero’s approach to represen-
tations of violence in that it combines sexual desire and grotesque violence
in moments of blinding clarity. The entire scene revolves around moments
of intense visibility. The passage starts with Ismael’s detailed visual inspec-
tion of Otilia. This lustful dissection is only interrupted by the gleaming
clothes of “el hombre ya viejo, bastante gordo” (21), who will soon be mur-
dered. The man is entirely dressed in white, and the radiance produced by
his attire under the relentless midday sun forces Ismael to look at him: “El
color blanco pudo más que mi amor a primera vista: demasiado blanco” (21).
Immediately thereafter, the man is shot in the head. This surreal, dreamlike
scene is followed by Ismael’s unintentional discovery of Otilia in the bath-
room and his very intentional look at her uncovered genitals. Even though
Ismael says that “el asesinato y el incidente del baño quedaron relegados”
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 49

(23), the connection between violence and sexual prying remains engraved
in his, and the reader’s, mind: “Yo seguía repitiéndolos, asociándolos . . . en
mi memoria: primero la muerte, después la desnudez” (24).
Gracielita’s background and Otilia and Ismael’s love story grant new light
to the initial, seemingly Edenic scene. Despite the biblical reminiscences,
it becomes apparent that what the novel is presenting is not an idealized
paradise where those who have partaken of the forbidden fruit are about to
fall from grace. On the contrary, it portrays a historically dense set of inter-
related stories filled with tension, resentment, class and gender hierarchies,
and tragedy. Historical violence has already scarred the lives of many of
the characters, and it will continue to do so: El Brasilero and Eusebito will
be kidnapped and murdered, Otilia will soon disappear, Geraldina will be
assassinated and raped, and Ismael will be left on his own, wandering in a
ghost town. From visual fascination and sexual enthrallment to brutal vio-
lence, these scenes enact the correlation between the penetrating gaze of
the realist project and the sexual and historical violence that haunts both
Ismael and the novel.
This relationship between vision and sexual and historical violence be-
comes more complex as the novel advances. Violence escalates with the ar-
rival in San José of an invisible yet highly effective army. Ismael describes
the soldiers as ghostly figures “anegados en la niebla” (smothered in the fog)
(Rosero 2007, 85). But the violence they unleash is all too real and is di-
rected exclusively at the civilian population, as no military combat is shown
in the novel. Furthermore, the intensification of violence, particularly the
disappearance of Otilia, coincides with the novel’s turn toward visual and
narrative obscurity. When she vanishes, Ismael and the novel seem to lose
their grounding. Visual, temporal, and spatial clarity fade with her. As the
armies attack the town, seeking to control it, the act of seeing turns into an
increasingly difficult, painful, and frustrating task. Ismael’s initial fantasy of
being able to watch and enjoy himself from a position of control collapses
with the walls and houses of war-­ridden San José. The once-­rare references
to fog, smog, blurriness, and chaos intensify, and the old schoolmaster starts
emphasizing his inability to see and to recognize things, people, and places.
A direct consequence of the inability to see and to recognize is that both
Ismael and the reader lose the ability to navigate the space. From the ini-
tial “Y era así” (11), we move to sentences such as “No puedo reconocer el
pueblo” (189) or “¿Estoy frente a la puerta de mi casa?, es mi casa, creo . . .
acabo de entrar, sólo para comprobar que no es mi casa” (199), which remind
the reader that in wartime even the simplest movements are fraught with
danger, bewilderment, and anguish.
But the novel does not descend into unintelligibility, madness, or com-
50  Haunting without Ghosts

plete darkness. Although Ismael’s eyes are “flotando en las sombras” (Rosero
2007, 138), brief yet intense moments of clarity cut through the shadows,
leaving a powerful and often disturbing mark. The novel oscillates between
a growing sense of visual and narrative uncertainty and flashes of sharp optic
and narrative precision. But these instances do not assuage Ismael’s or the
reader’s anxiety—they heighten it. In Los ejércitos, all moments of intense
visual clarity are also instances of extreme violence: the murder of the old
man in the bus station; the image of a cockroach coming out of what we rec-
ognize, with disgust and dread, as the severed head of Oye, the town’s em-
panada vendor, floating in the frying pan where he used to make his pastries
(200); and Geraldina’s gruesome fate. The novel plays off of Ismael’s and the
reader’s scopophilia: it is as if not only Geraldina’s body but the narrative
as a whole have challenged us from the start to look if we dare, “mírame si
te atreves” (18). Los ejércitos stimulates and frustrates our desire to see, con-
fronts us with the violence embedded in many sexually charged visual fan-
tasies, and eventually cripples that desire through vision itself: after we see,
we wish we had not seen. In this way, the novel suggests that the same lurid
drives that underlie the male sexual gaze underlie historical violence.
Geraldina’s fate is perhaps the most disturbing and explicit case, but it
is not the only one. If Balzac’s characters are “desiring machines [with] a
phallic drive for possession and perhaps an even more primitive oral need to
devour” (Brooks 2005, 28), Ismael’s scopophilic desire, like the reader’s, is
not only frustrated but also challenged and eventually halted by exhibiting
the violence that underlies it. The novel does not allow the reader to dismiss
Ismael’s objectification of younger women—even girls, like Gracielita—as
natural or harmless. As violence intensifies, Ismael’s lust is increasingly and
more clearly out of place, making the violence of such a way of looking at
women and girls more patent. For example, when Ismael finds Cristina,
the young daughter of one of his murdered neighbors, terrified and crying,
hiding under the bed in his daughter’s old room, he says, “Con todo y lo
desventurado de las circunstancias yo mismo a mí mismo me deploro, abo-
minándome, al reparar, voluntaria o involuntariamente en el vestido reco-
gido, los muslos de pájaro pálido, la selvática oscuridad en la entrepierna, a
la escasa luz de la vela, su rostro mojado en lágrimas: ‘¿Y mi mamá?,’ vuelve
a preguntar espantada. Tiene, abrazado, el viejo oso de peluche que fue de
mi hija. Es una niña, podría ser mi nieta” (Rosero 2007, 107). The age and
vulnerability of the girl, clinging to a teddy bear in his daughter’s room,
brings into focus how reprehensible Ismael’s sexualizing gaze is. Further-
more, the novel literalizes the violence of sexual objectification by showing
how this predatory gaze can dehumanize others by turning them into inani-
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 51

mate objects through rape and murder. Geraldina’s story vividly embodies
such a dynamic.
From the beginning of the novel, Ismael not only intrudes into Geral-
dina’s private sphere to see her naked but also fantasizes about the supposed
pleasure she derives from being looked at and objectified, and he goes so far
as to imagine her eagerly desiring to be chased, attacked, raped, and killed:
“Toda ella es el más íntimo deseo porque yo la mire, la admire, al igual que
la miran, la admiran los demás, los mucho más jóvenes, los niños—sí, se
grita ella, y yo la escucho, desea que la miren, la admiren, la persigan, la
atrapen, la vuelquen, la muerdan y la laman, la maten, la revivan y la maten
por generaciones” (Rosero 2007, 34). As imagined by Ismael, and perhaps
by some readers, sexual violence and even femicide are seen as both arousing
and intimately, albeit furtively, desired by women.
The novel confronts Ismael with the gruesome consequences of this
eroticization of gender violence by gradually intensifying the level of threat
and harassment Geraldina faces and ultimately having the events function
as a horrific foreshadowing of her final destiny, which, the reader eventu-
ally learns, has been in the making since the very beginning but becomes
increasingly apparent as violence escalates. For example, when Geraldina
goes to Ismael’s house seeking comfort the night before she has to tell her
husband’s kidnappers that she does not have the money for the ransom,
Ismael puts his hand on her knee, and after a few minutes he says to himself:
“Mientras llora veo mi mano en su rodilla, sin mirarla realmente—eso des-
cubro, en un segundo—, pero de pronto la veo, mi mano sigue en la rodilla
de Geraldina, que llora y no ve o no quiere ver mi mano en su rodilla, o la
está viendo ahora, Ismael, a tu ruindad sólo le importa su rodilla, nunca las
lágrimas por el marido desaparecido” (Rosero 2007, 173). Ismael sees him-
self putting his hand on her knee and then sees her, immersed in grief and
anxiety, ignore the hand for the sake of comfort. The baseness of this act
does not escape Ismael, Geraldina, or the reader, and is further underscored
because, in the same scene, Geraldina complains about the violence of the
sexualizing, objectifying gaze with which the kidnappers look at her—that
same eager look that Ismael has directed at her so many times: “Sentía en
toda mi carne sus miradas, profesor, como si quisieran comerme viva” (172).
This is particularly disturbing because, as we know, the soldiers will later
enact this fantasy through her murder and rape. Instead of offering comfort,
Ismael insists on sexualizing women, and he only lets Geraldina go after she
hears Eusebito yelling her name on the other side of the now-­torn-­down
wall from where the old teacher himself, and perhaps the reader as well, fan-
tasized about devouring Geraldina.
52  Haunting without Ghosts

This scene precedes one of the novel’s most disturbing moments: Geral-
dina’s murder and the gruesome rape of her corpse by the soldiers, which
materializes sexual objectification. Through this sequence, we see how see-
ing can be violent, risking turning others into objects through two main
modes of exerting control: sexualization and murder. A cadaver, especially
one that has endured a violent death, is the crudest expression of a human
turned object. Geraldina’s fate vividly literalizes the violence of both of these
modes of objectification. At the end of the novel, she is turned into “muñeca
manipulada, inanimada” (202) for the sexual gratification of soldiers that
impatiently stand in line waiting for their turn to defile her cadaver. At this
point, Ismael knows he is no better than them, and he recriminates himself:
“¿Por qué no los acompañas, Ismael? . . . ¿No era eso con lo que soñabas?”
He continues, “Estos hombres deben esperar su turno, Ismael, ¿Esperas tú
también el turno?, eso me acabo de preguntar, ante el cadáver, mientras se
oye su conmoción de muñeca manipulada, inanimada” (202).5 And, after
intensely looking at the way in which they look at her, he concludes, “Son
cada uno un islote, un perfil babeante: me pregunto si no es mi propio perfil,
peor que si me mirara al espejo” (203). The scene functions as a mirror re-
flecting Ismael’s, and perhaps also the reader’s, complicity in Geraldina’s de-
humanization and desecration by returning the gaze and showing not a vile
monster committing this heinous crime, but Ismael’s own “slavering pro-
file.” By exposing the brutal consequences of the objectification of women
and the sexualization of male control over female bodies, Geraldina’s rape
acts as a Gorgon that, when looked at directly, paralyzes scopophilia, turns
it into stone.
Los ejércitos underscores the virulent and self-­serving nature of our voy-
eurism, including our role as readers or spectators. After reading Los ejércitos,
like old Ismael we, too, shamefully recognize ourselves in the faces of the
young soldiers eager to see and enjoy Geraldina’s exposed body. Los ejércitos
enacts a crisis in the representation of violence. Despite the brutality against
the body portrayed, the eye is what suffers the greatest violence: “Mis ojos
sufriendo” (Rosero 2007, 18), says Ismael, summarizing the pathos of vision
in the novel. In Los ejércitos we suffer both for what we cannot see and for
what we do see. One could even say that Ismael sees what he does not want
to see, while what he wishes to make visible remains elusive. He contem-
plates Geraldina’s naked and abused body, but he is unable to see Otilia’s old
and beloved figure; he finds Oye’s severed head floating in the oil where he
used to cook his empanadas, but he cannot make his way back to his own
house. This frustration pains both Ismael and the reader. The grim images
that appear as flashes of clarity in a world otherwise increasingly opaque,
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 53

hazy, and unrecognizable signal a crisis in looking and encourage the reader
to think more critically about vision, particularly when it comes to the rep-
resentation of vulnerable bodies and violent events. This relation between
visual exposure, vulnerability, and violence, as well as the possibility of find-
ing alternative ways of relating to people and space, is also at the heart of
En el lejero.

“La mirada sin perspectiva de la niebla”:

Spectral Landscapes in En el lejero

En el lejero tells the story of Jeremías Andrade, an old man going from town
to town in the hopes of finding Rosaura, his orphaned granddaughter. This
information is kept from the reader for almost half of the novel, however,
because in En el lejero information is not only scarce but also fragmented and
arrives belatedly. The novel begins in medias res, and no explanation is pro-
vided as to who Jeremías is, where he is, or why he is there. We only know
that he is old, sick, tired, and broke; that all he has is “una sola pregunta que
abarcaba todas las preguntas” (Rosero 2003, 34); and that the mysterious
town he is in is “el último sitio que . . . queda” (49). The reader knows, then,
that the nameless village is the end of a journey, but only halfway through
the text (page 58 out of 116) is the reader finally made aware of the purpose
of Jeremías’s and the novel’s quest. Only then does one learn that he is look-
ing for his granddaughter, Rosaura, that she has been missing for four years,
that her parents were killed by an army that remains unidentified, that he
has been wandering from town to town for over a year looking for her with
little more than an old photograph of the child in his pocket, and that this
town offers his last hope of finding “la respuesta por fin, al fin el fin de su
búsqueda” (72–73).
As is the case with Los ejércitos, the novel’s initial sequence is organized
around vision and points to the text’s larger concern with visibility and vio-
lence, specifically when it comes to the representation of those who have
disappeared and the ones who continue to look for them. But the (gen-
dered) directionality of the gaze that opens Los ejércitos and is at the core
of the realist project is inverted here. Rather than being the bearer-­of-­the-­
look, Jeremías is positioned as to-­be-­looked-­at-­ness (Mulvey 1975, 9). But
this mode of looking is not naturalized or sexualized, and it is experienced as
disconcerting and menacing. Rather than being a spy, Jeremías is spied upon
by the (female) owner of the hostel where he is staying, who watches him
even as he sleeps, and he is haunted by the disconcerting gaze of “[un] Cristo
54  Haunting without Ghosts

pálido y sangriento, con un ojo desvanecido por la humedad” (Rosero 2003,

11). This change in perspective is reflected in the narrative. Unlike Ismael,
Jeremías is not the narrator. His (male) prerogative to see, to describe, and
to dominate his surroundings is revoked both in the structure of the novel
and in its diegesis. From the beginning, he struggles to see, to discern, and
to comprehend both the space he is in and what is happening around him.
The bewilderment he feels is transferred to the reader, who is made to focus
intensely on how Jeremías reacts to his precarious situation and bizarre envi-
ronment, with almost no clarification as to whether one is seeing the product
of the confused mind of an ailing old man or the horrific consequences of
more than fifty years of war. Together, these narrative perplexities make En
el lejero an abstruse and at times baffling novel.
Even though there is a disembodied third-­person narrative voice, Jere-
mías’s inability to make sense of the space and the situations he faces is
unsettling for the reader because the perspective remains hyperfocused on
Jeremías and is intensely subjective: there is little or no distance between
what the old man sees, knows, and feels, and the reader’s own perception.
Hence, as a reader, one must negotiate the challenges of distinguishing be-
tween Ismael’s nightmares and actual plot advancements, understanding
what is happening, and anticipating what will—or even could—transpire
next. Very little contextual information is given. The reader knows prac-
tically nothing about the backstories, motives, destinies, or even names of
the other characters; no clarifications are provided; and there is no narra-
tive closure, because the ending of the novel remains open (which is also the
case in Los ejércitos). At the novel’s end, many questions remain unanswered:
Was the young man kicking around a carnival doll in the deserted soccer
field or the severed head of an old woman (2003, 17–18)? Why is the town
covered in mice cadavers? What will happen to the rest of the acostados, or
kidnapped people, who are still in El Guardadero? Will the situation of the
town change now that Bonifacio is dead? Will Jeremías finally be able to
hold Rosaura in his arms? We do not know. The uncertainty that fear and
violence produces is embedded in the narrative fabric. The narrator does
not dive into the inner secrets of the town or any other character in order to
explain what Jeremías does not know. There is no knowledge gap between
him and the reader, so the reader shares his confusion and strongly connects
affectively with him, identifying with his fear and vulnerability while also
attesting to his strength and determination. The narrative ambiguity is re-
inforced by the constant presence of darkness, fog, and other visual impedi-
ments that upend spatial perception, making both the town and the novel
deeply unsettling and spectral.
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 55

Spectral Towns, Smooth Spaces

Bordering the Cordillera de Los Andes and caught between a volcano and
an abyss, the town at which Jeremías arrives represents not only the end of
his journey but also the physical impossibility of going any farther. The title
of the book reinforces this sense of remoteness, isolation, and estrangement.
“Lejero” comes from the Spanish word “lejos,” meaning “far away.” En el
lejero could therefore be loosely translated as “In Faraway Land.” Jeremías
arrives at dusk, and the twilight makes it difficult to recognize his surround-
ings, while the cold and the fog, as well as the attitude of the locals, make
him feel unwelcome and frightened. The town seems decimated, filled with
ruins and abandoned objects, and is inhabited by mysterious shadows, un-
traceable murmurs, and inhospitable characters. The dwellers are “empaña-
das siluetas . . . de rostros enrojecidos y gestos espeluznados” (Rosero 2003,
22). Even the layout of the town and the architecture of the houses seem
menacing. The village is described as “un pueblo mudo . . . de calles gredo-
sas y empinadas, negocios sellados, perros famélicos torciendo las esqui-
nas, casas desteñidas” (16); and as “una fila de casas al filo del abismo, . . .
[un] pueblo cruzado por calles que subían y bajaban como cuchillas . . . [un]
pueblo hecho a base de puntas de triángulo” (21–22). In this town, even
walking is not simple or harmless: the streets are covered with “cadáveres de
ratón diseminados como a propósito, secos y ennegrecidos” (14). The sound
produced by the bones of the animals cracking under the pressure of the
many feet that stamp them as people make their way through the town un-
nerves and disgusts Jeremías, making the simple act of walking one haunted
by trepidation and unburied cadavers.
Furthermore, the constant presence of mist, rain, darkness, and cold
blurs or impedes vision; heightens other senses, such as auditory percep-
tion; and confounds the space and the narrative, making both the town and
the novel a shifting landscape where objects, houses, streets, animals, and
people capriciously disappear and reappear, only to vanish once again with-
out a trace or the certainty of a return:6 “Detrás de una ventana abierta dos
caras de niños aparecieron y desaparecieron, aparecieron y desaparecieron
otra vez y rieron con fuerza y desaparecieron—con todo y risa—, tragados
por la niebla” (23–24). Descriptions such as this, which make extensive use
of the language of dis/reappearance, abound in the novel.7 This formal and
thematic insistence extends Rosaura’s disappearance to the narrative plane,
spectralizing both the novel and violence. In En el lejero and Los ejércitos,
disappearance acts as the novels’ main narrative force and as one of their
most important constitutive elements by causing the novels to advance while
56  Haunting without Ghosts

also impeding them from doing so, suspending them in the hazy, nonlinear
space and time of the specter as part of the protagonists’ quest for answers
and justice.
In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery
Gordon explains that the disappearance of people is particularly related to
spectrality because of its disruptive force: “The power of disappearance to
instill tremendous fear and to control, to destroy the life of a people and a
society, rests not principally on the cognitive message the state delivers—
You will obey or die—but on the way it utters it. Disappearance imposes
itself on us where we live. . . . The power of disappearance is the power to
control everyday reality, to make the unreal real. . . . The power of disappear-
ance is the power . . . to be vanished as the very condition of your existence”
(2008, 131). The profound disruption of everyday life and the impossibility
of simply “moving on” that disappearance produces causes both novels to
linger in what can no longer be seen, but nonetheless is, somehow and some-
where. That is to say, they summon the specter and create haunted histories,
complicating narratives that count on the violent absenting of historically
marginalized bodies—those of women, ethno-­racial minorities, and rural
peoples, among others—from specific resource-­rich or strategic territories
in order to consolidate and legitimize the power of sociopolitical elites.
Jacques Derrida’s hauntology is relevant in this regard and can be helpful
when unpacking the implications of this way of representing historical vio-
lence, particularly as it relates to disappearance. In Specters of Marx, Derrida
explains that a “specter” is that which cannot be accounted for in a given
framework of thought because it has been conceptually and physically van-
ished or dismissed as a historical dead end. Specters are all those who are
pushed away or eliminated in the name of civilization, progress, develop-
ment, stability, and law and order, among other violence-­justifying euphe-
misms. Derrida identifies an urgent need to move from an “ontopology”
(2006, 102–103)—that is, an ethos that prioritizes some lives over others
and protects the unequal distribution of resources—to a “hauntology,” a
framework that seeks to transform normative narratives by channeling the
disruptive force of the specter. Hence, it is significant that both novels re-
volve around the search for a person who has gone missing in the midst of
armed conflict. By extending the destabilization that disappearance causes
to the narrative style, Rosero advances alternative configurations of spatio-
temporal coordinates that embrace the uncertainty produced by the specter
as a productive element in the aesthetic representation of historical violence.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call this spatial configuration “smooth
spaces.”
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari explain that there are two
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 57

kinds of sites: striated spaces and smooth spaces. Striated spaces rely on
the scopic regime because they are “defined by the requirements of long-­
distance vision: constancy of orientation . . . [and] a central perspective”
(1987, 494). This conceptualization of the scopic regime and its relation to
space closely relates to Brooks’s scopophilic impulse in that they both under-
stand perspectivist vision as a device of control. Smooth spaces, on the other
hand, move away from vision and instead rely on what Deleuze and Guattari
call haptic perception, a way of seeing that destabilizes spatial understand-
ing because it relies on close vision. In this mode of seeing, “the eye itself has
a haptic, nonoptical function: no line separates earth from sky, which are of
the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective
nor limit nor outline or form nor center” (494). Striated spaces are part of
the ontopology of presence, while smooth spaces point toward hauntology.
In En el lejero and Los ejércitos, the space is smooth. The strategies that
both characters and readers would traditionally use to map and striate the
terrain are rendered obsolete. Instability, disorientation, and opaqueness are
the coordinates of these spectral topographies of disappearance. The sub-
strate upon which stability itself depends vanishes into thin air and turns
into darkness, water, fog instead of land, and cadavers (Rosero 2003, 14).
Despite the fear and disorientation that all the characters feel, however,
they slowly learn to entrust themselves to the pace and the ambiguity of the
fog, and they are finally able to find hope, solidarity, strength, and courage.
By so doing, these narratives invite us to follow Jeremías’s lead and to learn
to embrace “esa rara luz de la niebla” and “esa vista sin perspectiva” (72, 73)
that define smooth spaces. The perspectivist vision of striated space is thus
replaced by a haptic mode of perception that includes what is not yet, or is
no longer, visible. In this sense, the admonition the hostel mistress gives
Jeremías encapsulates the reworking of vision in En el lejero, Los ejércitos,
and spectral realism more broadly, if the context of its enunciation is taken
into account. In the midst of Jeremías’s despair to see Rosaura again, the
old woman suddenly appears and says, “Yo se lo advertí perfectamente, le
dije: ‘va a ver, va a ver’ ” (Rosero 2003, 61). Yet immediately afterward she
vanishes into the night. That is, after giving Jeremías the soothing promise
of vision—or rather one particular vision, that of Rosaura—she disappears,
immersing him in the dark once again. This contrast between the visible
and that which can no longer or not yet be seen lies at the core of the visual
experience advanced by Rosero and spectral realism. Vision turns into an
unstable and unreliable mode of perception that needs constant readjust-
ment and is haunted by questions about what it cannot see or can only barely
intuit.
As mentioned previously, En el lejero and Los ejércitos sustain a constant
58  Haunting without Ghosts

tension between wanting to see and the impossibility or horror of doing

so. Disappearance, the main narrative force in both novels, is mobilized in
visual terms: the protagonists desperately want to see the beloved faces of
their disappeared family members. In spite of Ismael’s intense scopophilia,
the most powerful drive in Los ejércitos is the desire to see not the sexual-
ized features of a young woman but Otilia’s aged body and face. In a similar
way, Rosaura’s vanishing is what sends both Jeremías and the reader to that
“búsqueda sin horizontes” (Rosero 2003, 45) at the core of the novel’s plot.
This tension also formally shapes the novels. The protagonists and readers
may wish to see, but the novels insist on veiling both visually and narra-
tively: En el lejero and Los ejércitos demonstrate a constant struggle to see for
both protagonists and readers, who must not only constantly work for vision
but also learn to see differently. Another fragment from En el lejero offers an
illuminating interpretive key, as it aptly captures the ethos of vision in both
novels and for spectral realism as a whole: “No se veía a nadie, no se podía
ver. Y sin embargo, no dejaba de indagar en busca de otras presencias” (Ro-
sero 2003, 30). Like Jeremías and Ismael, the reader, too, must keep looking
for those presences that were forced to vanish in the lejeros of Colombia and
understand that their disappearance—that is, their inability to physically
inhabit the “here” and “now” of the nation—is precisely what signals the
urgency of their spectral plight.

The Disjointed Time of the Specter

No era posible adivinar qué horas eran.

Evelio Rosero, Los ejércitos

Not only is the physical world hard to discern in these novels, but the chro-
nology of events is also shifting and unclear. Fog and darkness confound
night and day in En el lejero (Rosero 2003, 29), and Jeremías’s disorientation
makes it impossible to know how much time has passed since he arrived
at the town. Instead of being distributed in an orderly progression of min-
utes, hours, or even days, narrative development is capricious and unpre-
dictable, marked by the sudden appearance, vanishing, and reappearance
of characters that eventually take Jeremías to Rosaura. Temporal disarray
is also a key feature in Los ejércitos and is directly related to Otilia’s vanish-
ing. From the beginning of the novel, the reader knows there is a tempo-
ral gap between Ismael and Otilia. The couple seems to inhabit different
times: Otilia is grounded in the present, while Ismael is suspended in the
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 59

time of his frustrated scopophilia: “¿Dónde he existido todos estos años?

Yo mismo me respondo: en el muro asomado” (Rosero 2007, 42). Fixated
on his desire, Ismael has failed to see the traces of violence in the scene he
is watching, the signs that violence will soon return with enhanced viru-
lence, and his own complicity in this dynamic. He also fails to see Otilia,
next to him, watching him watch everyone but her. But the desire to see
Otilia will soon become Ismael’s and the novel’s main quest; her disap-
pearance literalizes the couple’s until-­then-­metaphorical asynchronicity,
upending narrative time. When Otilia vanishes, what had until then been
a relatively stable narrative chronology is unhinged. After that, sentences
such as “Aquí puede empezar a atardecer, a anochecer o amanecer sin que
yo sepa” (193) and “¿Es que ya no me acuerdo del tiempo?” (193) become
increasingly common; and in chapter 17, all the sections start with a day
of the week followed by a question mark. By the end of the novel, one has
given up on establishing a timeline and must agree with Ismael that “no era
posible adivinar qué horas eran” (200).
This temporal disruption is one of the main characteristics of spec-
trality. As Alberto Ribas-­Casasayas and Amanda Petersen (2016, 13) ex-
plain, “Specters produce disjointed times.” The appearance of the specter
punctures linear time, questioning its unidirectionality and stalling it, caus-
ing it to go back in order to reckon with what it has left unacknowledged
or pushed aside in its becoming. Thus, the specter’s temporal disruption is
not a descent into madness or an immersion into an individual perspective
that has lost sight of, and interest in, other people and the violent situation
confronting it. Instead, it points toward unresolved debts of justice and to
the violence that produced them. Along with the challenges in visibility,
the disjointed temporality of the specter turns violence into an atmosphere,
an ever-­present, yet often intangible, threat that does not subside, causing
emotional and physical exhaustion and a profound sense of disorientation
and uncertainty for both protagonists and readers. Throughout En el lejero,
Jeremías experiences an unrelenting sense of dread, yet he can almost never
trace it back to a concrete menace; nor can the reader. Violence turns into
an atmospheric phenomenon that seems to engulf the town, altering per-
ception, confounding space, disrupting temporal measures, and reshaping
social norms and human interactions. Violence appears to emanate from the
volcano and the abyss, from the houses shaped like knives, from spectral fig-
ures and voices that follow and startle Jeremías, and from the weather itself.
Cold, darkness, and fog impede vision and bring historical violence back
through descriptions that echo some of the most gruesome and infamous
events of the armed conflict.
60  Haunting without Ghosts

Rosero insists that all the anecdotes in Los ejércitos, including the explo-
sion in the church that killed Gracielita’s parents, were taken from news-
papers and testimonies of victims and survivors ( Jiménez 2007). In En el
lejero, this history is more subtle and is embedded in the narrative fabric, not
necessarily the plot. Few acts of violence are depicted clearly, but the cold
numbs (Rosero 2003, 112) and pierces bodies (16), while the fog fragments
them and makes them disappear. Passages such as “Apareció la cara del ten-
dero, el cuello, el pecho, las piernas, los zapatos. . . . Y [ Jeremías] percibió,
al tiempo, los primeros pedazos de niebla diseminándose, fragmentando los
rostros que se asomaban, velando las manos, escabulléndose en el aliento,
partiendo los cuerpos en dos” (112–113) and “La mujer de medio cuerpo
presente” (38) bring back memories of mutilation and dismemberment for
readers accustomed to daily accounts of this type of violence in the context
of the armed conflict, which, for the most part, remains unresolved and un-
acknowledged even today.
The case of the young man possibly kicking the head of an old woman in a
dark and deserted soccer field (Rosero 2003, 17),8 and that of the mysterious
voice that whispers in Jeremías’s ear, “Allí tajaron a uno, allí donde usted está
arrodillado, fue allí donde se dio cuenta que se empezaba a morir,” only to
disappear into the night (18), are examples of more explicit references that,
as is the case with many of the narratives about violence in the country, re-
main opaque and are often dismissed as biased, vengeful, or misinformed
testimonies—or as the product of the deranged senses and minds of trauma-
tized people. Regardless of their documentary evidence, these events haunt
the nation and the narrative, disrupting its linear chronology by capriciously
bringing repressed stories and silenced voices into the present and inscrib-
ing Jeremías’s personal journey onto a larger history of unacknowledged vio-
lence. This keeps both Jeremías and the reader on edge, reinforcing the de-
stabilizing effect of violence by making it increasingly difficult to separate
friend from foe, reality from hallucination or nightmare, the familiar from
the unknown, and the living from the dead.

From Odysseus’s Scar to the “Conocido-­Desconocido”

With its fog-­ridden streets and its shadowlike characters that appear and
disappear much to Jeremías’s and the reader’s confusion, the town in En el
lejero is ghostly from the start. In contrast, Los ejércitos shows how disappear-
ance not only turns those who vanish into specters but also “spectralizes” the
world of the victims’ loved ones. Otilia is not the only one suspended in what
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 61

Laura Restrepo calls a “nebulosa condición intermedia” (2003, 4) between

life and death. Once Otilia vanishes, San José, its dwellers, and Ismael him-
self follow suit. San José is described as “una muerte viva” (Rosero 2007,
123); Eusebito turns into “un niño empujado por fuerza a la vejez” (121) and
“un muerto en vida” (150) after his kidnapping; and, on numerous occasions,
people seem unable to tell whether Ismael is dead or alive,9 with women
pointing to him on the streets, “aterradas, como si comentaran entre ellas la
presencia de un fantasma” (194). By the end of the novel, Ismael—as well as
the reader—starts wondering whether he is actually alive: “¿No me mata-
ron mientras dormía?” (201). Furthermore, both novels emphasize how vio-
lence makes the familiar unheimlich, or uncanny, not only by blurring the
boundaries between the dead and the living but also by turning what is most
intimate and well known into something unrecognizably strange. Ismael
complains, “No puedo reconocer el pueblo, ahora, es otro pueblo, parecido,
pero otro, rebosante de artificios, de estupefacciones, un pueblo sin cabeza
ni corazón” (189), and later on he insists, “Desconozco esta calle, estos rin-
cones, las cosas” (194). The town has become so foreign that Ismael cannot
even make his way back to his own home (199). Both novels use the expres-
sion “conocido-­desconocido” (Rosero 2003, 113; 2007, 139) to describe the
profound sense of estrangement that violence produces.
An episode in Los ejércitos is particularly revelatory. Late at night, Ismael
receives a visit from a neighbor, whom he is unable to recognize despite his
distinctive features and many scars: “Me despierta un vecino que aunque sé
que conozco, no reconozco. . . . Muestra la cabeza rapada, sudorosa, la cicatriz
en la frente, las diminutas orejas, la nuca ampollada. Debo saber quién pero
no me acuerdo, ¿es posible? Distingo, en la penumbra, que tiene un ojo des-
viado” (Rosero 2007, 137). Only when the man leaves does Ismael remem-
ber: “Sólo cuando se va el desconocido yo me acuerdo: es Oye” (140). The
scene echoes Erich Auerbach’s (2003) formulation in the chapter “Odys-
seus’ Scar,” giving it a spectral turn. Auerbach’s interpretation of the famous
passage in book 19 of the Odyssey ties materiality and presence to identity,
lineage, legitimate power, and “utmost [narrative] fullness” (2003, 6). The
mark left by a boar on the hero’s ankle causes Euryclea to properly identify
him and recognize him as Ithaca’s legitimate sovereign, and it is the para-
digmatic example of a mode of realist writing concerned with “represent-
[ing] phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their
parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations . . . and
[where there is never] a form left fragmentary or half-­illuminated, never a
lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths” (6–7).
Nothing could be further removed from En el lejero, Los ejércitos, and
62  Haunting without Ghosts

spectral realism more broadly. Unlike Odysseus’s marks, Oye’s do not re-
sult in a process of identification or a recognition that leads to prestige and
power (through further violence, as Odysseus has to kill his challengers in
order to regain the throne and Penelope). The noble military hero is replaced
by the dispossessed civilian victim; and the latter is not recognized through
presence but via his absenting. Thus, if for Auerbach, Odysseus’s scar cap-
tures “the basic impulse of Homeric style” (2003, 6), and of a broader type of
realist project (23), Oye’s appearance as the “conocido-­desconocido” char-
acterizes Rosero’s and spectral realism’s stance on the relation between rep-
resentation and historical violence: presence is not enough. True recognition
(of oneself and of the other) has to include and account for absence, espe-
cially in contexts in which wars produce not archetypical (i.e., masculine,
military) heroes but scores of victims.
Spectral realism focuses on how violence impacts the lives of ordinary
people and highlights the efforts of survivors and family members not to
allow forced absence to go unacknowledged, to be dismissed by justice and
efforts of (symbolic and material) restitution, or to disappear from memory
and history. To do so, both novels emphasize the uneven power dynamics
and powerful interests at play and the vulnerability and exposure faced by
those who insist on this dangerous and often thankless task. In En el lejero
and Los ejércitos, this exposure is literalized through visualization practices.
As mentioned earlier, the novels upend the scopophilic preeminence of the
realist model, problematizing and inverting vision. They enact a crisis in
the way violent acts and vulnerable bodies are seen, by constantly impeding
and obstructing vision and by redirecting attention toward the impact that
such gazes have on those who are seen. Rather than being inscribed in the
narrative as empowered bearers of the gaze, the protagonists are shown as
fragile subjects besieged by multiple, often unidentifiable, sets of eyes that
command their fate.
But visual exposure is only part of the equation. Ismael and Jeremías are
“exposed” in multiple senses: (1) they are targets of an intense visual scrutiny
they find disconcerting and hostile; (2) they are at the mercy of the ele-
ments and of other people, since war has expelled them from their homes
and launched them into an uncertain and perilous quest; and (3) they are
narratively exposed—that is, exposed to the reader, who sees their frail-
ties and obsessions, which in Ismael’s case include voyeurism, violent sexual
fantasies, and a pedophilic fascination with girls. These three components
are interwoven throughout both novels, further undermining visual plea-
sure and dominance. For example, Jeremías’s double exposure to a visual
siege and the elements forms a kind of synesthetic relationship between
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 63

vision and the cold. The looks that Jeremías is subjected to not only cause
uneasiness and fright but also freeze his body and heart: “Despertó a media
noche padeciendo la sensación, física, de una lenta lluvia helada derivando
por sus ojos hasta el corazón; eran los ojos de la dueña, creyó, posados en sus
párpados” (Rosero 2003, 53). Cold emanates from the volcano and the mist
(55) and from mysterious looks that beset Jeremías “regándolo de frío a viva
fuerza” (61). If warmth is associated with the home (in Spanish, “hogar” is
both “home” and “hearth”)—that is, with belonging and affection—the cold
experienced by Jeremías as emanating from the many gazes and presences
that haunt him,10 and from the space itself, heightens the sense of isolation,
precariousness, fear, vulnerability, and menace that permeates both novels
and is a forceful reminder of the profound destabilization that war produces.
This sensation is intensified because, as noted earlier, in En el lejero and
Los ejércitos seeing and being seen are associated with impotence, lack of
control, dread, and violence. Ismael’s voyeurism is exposed as violent and
predatory. As the novel advances, he increasingly loses control of the ability
to see and becomes instead a visual and military target for the soldiers that
besiege San José, corralling, taunting, and murdering the villagers. En el
lejero is also structured around the experience of a visual assault. From the
beginning, Jeremías is the target of excessive and apparently undue atten-
tion. He is constantly observed without a clear motive, and many of these
gazes cannot be matched to a particular character, which confounds both
Jeremías and the reader. As the novel progresses, the looks that scrutinize
and corral him continue to multiply, making him feel exposed and vulner-
able. In En el lejero, eyes are everywhere. Jeremías experiences the visual
siege as coming from the town itself, a plural gaze that follows his every
move and directs his path without the need of physical force: “Era como si
lo empujaran, sin empujarlo, como a un becerro, pensó, al matadero” (Ro-
sero 2003, 69). Like everything else in the novel, however, this mode of
looking oscillates between hypervisibility and invisibility. The town, Jere-
mías tells us, “mira sin mirar”: “En un rincón de la plaza . . . se hallaba la
ciega, como si lo mirara. . . . Al otro lado de la calle entrevió extrañamente
al carretero. . . . Se dedicaba, como la mujer del hospital, asomada a la ven-
tana . . . a mirarlo sin mirar, como la enana, sentada detrás de una marmita
que humeaba, . . . mirándolo sin mirar, como el pueblo entero” (64). The
tension between being overly exposed while remaining invisible and “igno-
ra[do] para siempre” (68)—to the point that Jeremías feels the need to talk
to the villagers in order to convince them (and himself ) “que él era de carne
y hueso como ellos” (37)—does not subside as the novel nears its end. Even
when Jeremías finally gets to see his granddaughter, the text wavers between
64  Haunting without Ghosts

excitement, fear, and utter indifference, making this long-­awaited moment

highly anticlimactic:

Difícilmente alcanzó a distinguir otra vez el perfil de su nieta. Se cubría los

ojos con las manos. Seguía llorando. Oyó su voz empañada—un quejido
aterrado—, ya casi no pudo entenderla:
—Que vengas acá—decía. Ya me quitaron las cadenas.
Tampoco eso pareció importarle a nadie. (115)

From Invisibility to Overexposure: The Case of Los ejércitos

The lethal consequences of refusing to acknowledge the violence that plays

out in front of one’s own eyes is also showcased in Los ejércitos, mainly
through its critique of the way in which mass media frames and exposes
the armed conflict for audiences removed from it and the refusal of the
government to see it and acknowledge it. As the brutalities worsen in San
José, a young, red-­haired, female journalist from Bogotá arrives in town
in an army helicopter “destinado a evacuar los soldados malheridos” (Ro-
sero 2007, 125). She is assigned two soldiers for her personal protection
during her brief visit, a privilege provided to nobody else in the town or
the novel but which she is granted because she is General Palacios’s niece.
Ismael points out the hypocrisy of this nepotism and questions the way in
which she turns the town’s most painful events into tabloid fodder. With
her shirt covered in sweat, she is visibly and openly uncomfortable in the
town, shows no empathy, and is vocal about the greatest privilege she has
relative to the people she interviews: the possibility of flying back to a place
she can safely call home. Instead of engaging in self-­reflection, she publicly
says to her cameraman, “Gracias a Dios mañana nos vamos” (126). Violence
is little more than a career-­advancement opportunity for the journalist, who
exploits the situation in San José for personal gain. She roams San José’s
deserted streets with her team and bodyguards in the hopes of capturing
images and quotes to better sell her story in a market saturated with violent
news. She has no interest in understanding the situation or talking with the
locals; she only wants to talk about them. The case of Chepe, the owner of
the local tienda, is illustrative. When his pregnant wife is kidnapped, the
journalist takes advantage of his sorrow and desperation to inquire about
the baby’s planned name, and she goes on to produce a sensationalist head-
line: “Angélica, secuestrada antes de nacer” (125). Because of this, Ismael
refuses to share with her his own story. If she is unwilling to listen, he will
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 65

not speak; he will not tell a story that he knows will not be heard, only com-
mercialized: “No quiero ni puedo hablar: doy un paso atrás, con un dedo me
señalo la boca, una, dos, tres veces. . . . He decidido que soy mudo” (135).
In Los ejércitos, the presence of journalists does not raise awareness about,
promote a deeper understanding of, or mobilize empathy for San José’s
situation. Following the critique of predatory visualizing techniques in the
rest of the novel, the brief presence of cameras and news anchors in the town
makes San José suddenly and fleetingly appear in the national imaginary as
a site of violence that remains physically, symbolically, and affectively re-
moved from the daily lives of those watching in the cities, only to disappear
soon after, submerged in a sea of names that bear the trace of violence but
not the bonds of solidarity. Furthermore, by going from invisibility to over-
exposure, the images and snippets of information presented for national
consumption might further imperil the locals by exposing them as pos-
sible informants or collaborators, leaving them at the mercy of the invisible
armies that surround them, and then move on to the next, more spectacular
story, such as the kidnapping of a dog in Bogotá (Rosero 2007, 160), which
gets the follow-­up coverage denied to San José.
The media’s brief, utilitarian attention does not even prompt an official
response. Like the journalists, the National Army eventually abandons the
town, leaving the civilian population defenseless, as the national govern-
ment refuses to see, acknowledge, or address, much less redress, the vio-
lence taking place. With stupefaction and dread Ismael and the other vil-
lagers learn that “la única declaración de las autoridades es que todo está
bajo control . . . el presidente afirma que aquí no pasa nada, ni aquí ni en
el país hay guerra: según él Otilia no ha deseaparaceido, y Mauricio Rey,
el médico Orduz, Sultana y Fanny la portera y tantos otros de este pueblo
murieron de viejos” (161). This paragraph strongly echoes what is perhaps
the most (in)famous official denial of state violence in Colombian litera-
ture—the refusal to acknowledge the massacre of the workers of the United
Fruit Company in Cien años de soledad: “Seguro que fue un sueño. . . . En
Macondo no ha pasado nada, ni está pasando ni pasará nunca. Esto es un
pueblo feliz” (García Márquez 2000, 426). The similarity, readily recogniz-
able to the many Colombian readers well acquainted with García Márquez’s
work, places Los ejércitos within a tradition that denounces military violence
against historically marginalized peoples and disavows its erasure from offi-
cial history through reiterated denials and discursive repression. Further-
more, by foregrounding the deadly consequences of refusing to acknowledge
the situations of violence that play out in front of one’s own eyes, the novels
enact the experience of many survivors of violence, who oscillate between
66  Haunting without Ghosts

the hypervisibility of their story and the indifference of those watching it.
The dissonance between authorized discourses of truth and the lived ex-
periences of the characters makes the sense of self and the perception of
reality in Los ejércitos hazier, and is instrumental in undermining narratives
that attempt to bring back the violence and dispossession embedded, but re-
pressed, in official narratives of military success and of a pacified and pros-
perous country.
To summarize, En el lejero and Los ejércitos insert forced absence into pro-
cesses of sociopolitical and aesthetic recognition and representation, and
they emphasize the violent, objectifying, and dehumanizing impact that
scopophilia may have when looking at, and exposing, subjects marked by
intersecting vectors of vulnerability such as gender, race, and age, among
others, in contexts of ongoing conflict. By so doing, they warn us about the
perils of both a predatory gaze preoccupied only with its own pleasure and
power and an apathetic gaze that, like the town in En el lejero (and like the
viewers of the news in the cities), “mira sin mirar.” Within this grim land-
scape, however, Rosero opens up spaces for solidarity. Despite the fear and
anxiety it produces, the collective gaze of the town does not lead Jeremías to
the slaughterhouse he fears. Instead, it takes him to El Guardadero, where,
against all odds, Rosaura awaits.

Spectral Dwellings: Finding Colombia’s “Guardaderos”

El Guardadero first appears halfway through the novel, when Jeremías

finally manages to ask explicitly about Rosaura by passing a picture of the
girl around in the hopes that someone will recognize her and lead him to her
whereabouts. Unlike Ismael, who is wandering in his hometown, Jeremías’s
path is determined “de pregunta en pregunta” (Rosero 2003, 104). Jeremías
grips Rosaura’s photograph “como una explicación de sí mismo” (59), fol-
lowing the pilgrimage of thousands of people worldwide who continue to
look for their vanished loved ones with little more than an old, worn-­out
picture: “Decir que buscaba a su nieta, mostrar la foto . . . decir y repetir
siempre lo mismo, en otros lugares y otros caminos” (59). Alone, frail, and
poor, Jeremías has to rely on others for support. The success of his quest
depends on the bonds and communication he establishes along the way.
Strangers are his primary source of food and shelter, and also his main com-
pass as he goes from village to village following vague rumors and hushed
murmurs with bits of information that he carefully pieces together. Initially,
this reliance on others is portrayed as fraught and probably doomed. The
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 67

town seems hostile, communication impossible. But when Jeremías shows

the picture of his granddaughter and asks for help, Rosaura emerges—with
the historical violence embedded in her kidnapping and a glimmer of soli-
darity and hope.
Only halfway through the novel does the reader finally learn that the
purpose of Jeremías’s journey is to find his granddaughter. As in Los ejércitos,
historical violence enters the narrative through a young girl orphaned by war
who is seen by the other characters. Eusebito’s lustful spying on Gracielita
and Rosaura’s photograph lead to accounts of violence grounded in history
and easily recognized by any reader familiar with the Colombian armed con-
flict. In both novels, a girl’s life story explicitly brings to the fore repressed
acts of violence that haunt the town and continue to determine the lives of
many of its villagers. As the blurry image of a Rosaura suspended in time
(she is now four years older than in the photograph) passes from hand to
hand, one finally starts to parse out Jeremías’s disquieting story. Eventu-
ally, the reader also learns that he had been taking care of his granddaugh-
ter because “a su hijo y su esposa los había matado la guerra” (Rosero 2003,
88), and that he is haunted by remorse because Rosaura vanished on her
way to buy a bouquet of roses they saw when getting their daily portion of
bread and panela. The roses were on top of sacks of rice and corn “como un
milagro,” and “hicieron arrojar a su nieta un grito de alegría” (88). Hoping
to cheer Rosaura up and to pamper her a bit after everything she had been
through, Jeremías pulled together his last coins and gave them to her. He
never saw her again. But Rosaura’s spectral reappearance not only brings
war to the story, it also brings hope. El Carretero is the first to look at the
girl’s picture, and in his voice Jeremías “oyó [la] esperanza por primera vez”
(59). Other villagers also reach out to take a glimpse of the photo and pass it
around, and what until then had felt like a hostile environment and a dead
end starts to resemble solidarity when, unexpectedly, they say they do recog-
nize the girl, tell Jeremías that she is in a place called “El Guardadero,” and
lead him there.
El Guardadero is the first of two mysterious and frightening rooms where
people seem to vanish. The names of both halls, El Guardadero and El Per-
dedero, are telling, as they point to reclusion and disappearance. “Guarda-
dero” comes from the Spanish word “guardar” (to put away), and “perde-
dero,” from “perder” (to lose). El Guardadero and El Perdedero are spaces
that hold people captive for ransom and where human lives are lost—the
dreadful and spectral dwelling places of those who do not officially count
as either living or dead. Situated in the back of the convent, El Guarda-
dero is “una sala sin fin” (Rosero 2003, 77), where spectral figures chained
68  Haunting without Ghosts

to metallic bed frames languish as they wait for an improbable and inhu-
mane negotiation that will take them back to the world of the living. In
this way, the brutal reality of kidnapping enters the novel with excruciat-
ing detail. Kidnapping was a constant throughout the armed conflict, but
it was particularly intense in the years immediately prior to and during the
writing of the novel. Between 1970 and 2010, nearly forty thousand people
were kidnapped in Colombia, most of them between 1996 and 2002 (Cen-
tro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2013, 9). Kidnappings reached their
height in 2000, with an average of more than ten per day (Pax Christi 2002,
27). In El Guardadero this brutal reality becomes at once more concrete
and intangible. On the one hand, cruel details of startling practicality are
given matter-­of-­factly: “Por cada uno de esos acostados se pide una plata.
Si nadie paga, allí seguirán. . . . Y si pagan rápido se cobra el doble a ver qué
pasa. A veces traen el doble, a veces no. Y si traen el doble muy rápido se pide
el triple, es simple sentido común” (Rosero 2003, 94). On the other hand,
once Jeremías reaches El Guardadero, the novel’s tendency toward darkness
and confusion intensifies to the point that it is extremely difficult to make
sense of the space or to ascertain what is happening. As is the case with Los
ejércitos, the closer the novel gets to addressing historical violence, the more
spectral the narrative becomes.
El Guardadero is described as “un horizonte insoslayable de seres desas-
trados,” a seemingly endless hall “repleto de gentes y más gentes encadena-
das, frías, oscuras, resignadas” (Rosero 2003, 89). It is a disorienting place
where “no alumbra un resto del amanecer” (96) and where the landscape
itself is replaced by human suffering: Jeremías walks by “montañas de cuer-
pos encadenados” (89), and when he looks up, trying to find comfort or
direction in the moon, the stars, or the sun, he is faced with “un cielo de
sangre” (89). As he makes his way through El Guardadero, Jeremías is con-
fronted with Colombia’s most brutal reality. The shock caused by this con-
frontation produces a strong sense of unreality. After seeing and walking by
hundreds of “cuerpos recostados, [con] los ojos absortos, idos” (90), Jere-
mías is no longer sure if he is actually experiencing those things or if he
is trapped in a nightmare. But both Jeremías and the reader soon realize
that the space he is in, and the gruesome reality it holds, represents “[la]
tremenda y concreta irrealidad” that sustains “la realidad misma” (90). El
Guardadero is the nation’s hellish underbelly: a spectral dwelling inhab-
ited by those violently vanished from the spatiotemporal coordinates that
(re)produce the nation’s history and chronology of progress, legitimize its
sociopolitical contract and the extractive and unequal economic practices
that support it, and then glorify such violence, justify it as necessary or in-
evitable, or declare it nonexistent.
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 69

The magnitude of this situation is reinforced through sound. Jeremías’s

presence in El Guardadero unleashes “una barahúnda de gritos,” “una bulla
de incendio,” and “un vértigo de gritos circulares” (Rosero 2003, 79). Upon
Jeremías’s arrival, the ghostly figures refuse to remain silent, and they break,
if not the chains that bind them, at least the gag that mutes their cries and
stories. This “insufrible tumulto de llamados” (80) disturbs and terrifies Jere-
mías and the reader, but it also makes it impossible to ignore the plight of
the acostados. El Guardadero unbridles the agony of scores of kidnapped and
disappeared people while highlighting the tenacity and courage of those
who continue to look for them, seeking to recuperate their stories. Despite
the fear the screams produce, the pain and suffering of the acostados are the
most salient sentiments of the passage, and the need to listen to their un-
attended claims becomes the most pressing issue for Jeremías and extends
to the broader historical context. Given Colombia’s situation at the time,
the reader can’t help but wonder about the thousands of people being “kept
away” (guardados) in Colombia’s many guardaderos, perdederos, and lejeros.
This connection between an individual quest for justice and broader
historical circumstances is at the core of what I have been calling spectral
realism. The specter does not merely, or even primarily, speak of a personal
tragedy. It marks forms of violence rooted in historical and structural in-
equalities that include colonial epistemologies that value certain (gendered
and racialized) lives over others, thus making violence against them viable
or invisible. This includes unacknowledged forms of violence performed in
the name of progress, from the expropriation of lands and the destruction
of habitats to the implantation of oppressive economic systems. Such vio-
lence is always unevenly distributed, primarily affecting women, indigenous
groups, Afro-­descendant and rural populations, and other marginalized
groups.
In this sense, it is significant that in both novels the personal search for
a loved one does not lead to melancholic self-­absorption and paralysis. In-
stead, it launches the two protagonists into a journey that unveils the col-
lective nature of their individual tragedy and the structural dynamics that
produce and perpetuate it. Individual grief turns into collective mourning,
and identification is mobilized not by distancing oneself from others but by
recognizing oneself in, and assuming responsibility for, the pain of others. If
Ismael shamefully sees himself in the soldiers defiling Geraldina’s cadaver,
Jeremías recognizes his own face not in Rosaura’s familiar features but in the
desperate faces of the acostados: “él mismo, mirándose a él” (Rosero 2003,
97). In both novels, self-­recognition is only possible through the acknowl-
edgement of the violence endured by others. The pain that Jeremías and
Rosaura experience is unique in its specificity but is also representative of a
70  Haunting without Ghosts

larger historical process as it repeats itself in the stories of countless others.

Though their experiences remain individual, their shared suffering speaks of
a collective history of dispossession and violence.
The endings of the two novels are also key in this regard. Both En el lejero
and Los ejércitos close with an opening. There is no closure at either the per-
sonal or sociohistorical level. Even in En el lejero, in which Jeremías does
find Rosaura, the novel does not subsume the ongoing violence of the larger
context into the glee of an individual reunion. Indeed, the conclusion of En
el lejero is literally a cliff-­hanger. When the novel ends, Jeremías is clinging
to the edge of a cliff while trying to hold on to Bonifacio, the town’s strong-
man and the person apparently in charge of the kidnapping business, who
eventually falls into the abyss. Thus, in the very last moment, Jeremías is sus-
pended between two spectral figures: Rosaura’s blurry presence at the top of
the hill and Bonifacio’s shadow fading into the void. He has accomplished
his goal: he found Rosaura, thanks to the improbable help of the town, and
she has been liberated without a ransom. He can finally see her and hear her
calling his name, ready to go home. Yet the yearned-­for embrace is denied
to the reader. Instead, the novel refocuses one’s attention on the vertigo of
the abyss, into which bodies continue to disappear. In the novel’s last in-
stant, Jeremías is not looking at Rosaura. His gaze is fixated on the void
into which Bonifacio will soon vanish and on the river at the bottom, where
so many others before and after him have faced, and will continue to face,
a similar destiny.
In this sense, it is interesting to compare Rosero’s novels to Laura Res-
trepo’s La multitud errante (2001), one of the best-­known novels about
forced displacement and disappearance in Colombia. Unlike in La multitud
errante, individual closure does not override collective trauma in En el lejero
or Los ejércitos. Restrepo’s novel ends with the consolidation of a new foun-
dational couple constituted by Ojos de Agua, a white, foreign woman, and
Siete por Tres, a Colombian man displaced by violence who is searching for
Matilde Lina, his adoptive mother. Despite the detailed and grim histori-
cal background of Restrepo’s novel, Ojos de Agua’s personal gratification,
in the form of romantic fulfillment, is the text’s chief focus. Siete por Tres’s
absent mother figure is construed in the novel as Ojos de Agua’s main rival,
and his unwillingness to abandon his quest for answers and justice is por-
trayed as the relationship’s main hindrance. The ghost, here, is a burden that
shackles Siete por Tres to a violent and unresolved historical past, to the
detriment of a bright future of individual satisfaction. Ojos de Agua ques-
tions Siete por Tres “por mirar hacia adelante con ojos atados a lo que han
dejado atrás” (Restrepo 2003, 6). This position is reinforced by the novel:
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 71

when Siete por Tres (finally) lets go of Matilde Lina’s haunting memory, the
romantic relationship is consummated and the novel ends. Instead of listen-
ing to the spectral demand for justice, Ojos de Agua exorcises the ghost to
create a present and a future undisturbed and unburdened by historical vio-
lence.11 Nothing could be further removed from Rosero’s novels and from
spectral realism more broadly. To fulfill the promise of a new beginning
through romantic love, Restrepo’s novel moves away from “el limbo donde
habitan los que no están ni vivos ni muertos” (Restrepo 2003, 4). Spectral
realism, by contrast, seeks to communicate with that limbo, and rather than
letting go of or appeasing the ghost, it summons its inhabitants in order to
create haunted pres­ents and futures.
The last pages of Los ejércitos are illustrative. After witnessing the ghastly
realization of his own desires in the collective rape of Geraldina’s body,
Ismael tries to walk away but is followed, and eventually surrounded, by
a group of soldiers who demand to know his name. In the context of both
the armed conflict and the novel, this is no ordinary command. Answering
to one’s name may mean ceasing to exist, either through disappearance or
murder in plain sight. The armies that roam around San José do not always
select their victims randomly: “Tienen una lista de nombres. A todo el que
descubren lo joden, sin más” (Rosero 2007, 190). Ismael’s name is on the
list. Because of this, the villagers urge him to abandon the town with them:
“Venga con nosotros, profesor. Lo mencionaron en la lista. Oímos su nom-
bre. Cuidado. Su nombre estaba allá” (192). But he does not leave, and when
questioned by the soldiers, he does not acknowledge their hailing. In the
novel’s last scene, Ismael does not turn around: “Avanzo por la calle tran-
quilamente, sin huir, sin volverme a mirar . . . alcanzo el pomo de mi puerta,
las manos no me tiemblan, los hombres me gritan que no entre . . . me ro-
dean, presiento por un segundo que incluso me temen. . . . ‘Su nombre,’ gri-
tan, ‘o lo acabamos’ ” (203). Diegetic time stops here. The novel leaves the
reader suspended between the soldiers’ orders and Ismael’s disobedience. Yet
his refusal to turn around is not cowardice, but an exercise of agency and re-
sistance. Through it, Ismael reinforces his commitment to inhabiting San
José in a way that acknowledges the many forced absences that now con-
stitute it. In the novel’s, and perhaps his own, last moment, Ismael finds a
way of symbolically aligning himself with the specter and conjuring a more
hospitable future. This act is achieved in two main ways: Ismael’s dismissal
of his name in favor of a rebellious anonymity and the novel’s final open-
ing to a grammatical temporality that appropriates and subverts the biblical
performative.
Caught between the soldiers and the door of his razed home, Ismael not
72  Haunting without Ghosts

only disobeys their hailing by not turning around, he also refuses to insert
himself into the violent law and order they represent by eschewing his name
and choosing one that symbolically identifies him with the specter. When
the soldiers insist, Ismael does not answer but thinks to himself, “Les diré
que me llamo Jesucristo, les diré que me llamo Simón Bolívar, les diré que
me llamo Nadie, les diré que no tengo nombre” (Rosero 2007, 203). Ismael’s
refusal is double: on the one hand, he rejects the soldiers’ authority by not
responding to their orders; on the other hand, by calling himself “Nobody”
instead of “Jesús” or “Bolívar,” two of Latin America’s main foundational
figures, Ismael aligns himself with the specter in that he becomes an onto-
logical impossibility, a presence marked by absence, a person with no per-
sonhood. As I unpack in detail in chapter 3, the name is foundational not
only for the law and the state (for the law of the state) but also for the
human itself. In The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains,
Thomas Laqueur observes that “naming marks the entry not into biological
but into human life” (2015, 367). For Laqueur, “becoming a person is get-
ting a name . . . that moment of naming has in many cases been the divide
between counting as a human being and not” (369). Furthermore, being
“a nobody” (“un Don Nadie”) means being a person considered of no value
due to the differential worth assigned to human life based on race, gender,
sexuality, place of origin, migratory status, and class, among other inter-
secting vectors of historical oppression. This gap results in the protection of
certain lives while the (physical, sexual, or symbolic) violence against others
is justified or condoned. By calling himself “Nobody,” Ismael stands in, and
up, for the thousands of “nobodies” who are victims of conflicts around the
world, those whose deaths and suffering have no (political, social, economic,
or symbolic) cost and serve an important function in preserving and deep-
ening the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities at the core of
the Colombian armed conflict and upon which many modern nations rely.
In this context, the explicit connection between the name and the vio-
lence that takes place in the passage is significant. Ismael is aware that giving
his name to the soldiers most likely means facing “la orden fatal” (Rosero
2007, 197), so he gives it up. But instead of adopting one of the two most
recognized names in the region ( Jesus or Bolívar), thus inserting himself
into a genealogy of revered martyrs and founding fathers—who also, not co-
incidentally, are related to two of the most powerful and deadly institutions
in Latin America: the Catholic Church and the military—Ismael associates
himself with the dispossessed. Despite the lofty ideals that often accompany
the other two names, Ismael recognizes the historical violence that the ma-
nipulation and appropriation of those names has too often caused and con-
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 73

tinues to produce, and he distances himself from their legacy of unheeded

oppression and violence. By becoming “Nadie,” Ismael extends humanity
to those who are nameless. His decision to be Nadie raises questions about
those who have been forced to become nameless (in mass graves or through
forced disappearance) or those whose names will never be known. With this
gesture, Ismael aligns himself with the demand for justice of the specter and
its expansive temporality.
In its final moments, Los ejércitos breaks with the diegetic and histori-
cal present of the soldiers and enters the space and time of the specter. The
grammatical future of the last passage takes a prophetic tone that, like the
first scene, has strong biblical resonances. But the temporality conjured by
Ismael is one in which specters are summoned, not expelled—one that wel-
comes haunting as a possibility of bringing back repressed or obliterated his-
tories of violence and of forms of dwelling that extend hospitality to those
no-­longer-­not-­yet-­there (Derrida 2006). Ismael’s decision to stay in San
José reaffirms this stance. Contrary to what most of the locals do, Ismael
stays in a San José ravaged by war, choosing to inhabit the town not de-
spite but because of its spectralization. He acknowledges the vacancy left
by those who have disappeared and seeks to extend the limits of time and
space to include them in his present and future. In Ismael’s adoption of the
label Nadie, the fact that “nobody” is in town no longer means that the vil-
lage is empty. It is a haunted town that remains full of stories that need to
be recounted and accounted for: “Quedaré solo, supongo, pero de cualquier
manera haré de este pueblo mi casa, y pasearé por ti, pueblo, hasta que llegue
Otilia por mí. Comeré de lo que hayan dejado en sus cocinas, dormiré en
todas sus camas, reconoceré sus historias según sus vestigios, adivinando sus
vidas a través de las ropas que dejaron, mi tiempo será otro tiempo” (Rosero
2007, 194).
The contrasting endings of La multitud errante and Los ejércitos highlight
diverging visions about the role of the ghost in coming to terms with the
past, seeking justice and truth, and forging desirable futures. In this sense,
the words Avery Gordon uses when describing the fate of AZ, the protago-
nist of Luisa Valenzuela’s novel Como en la guerra, capture Siete por Tres’s
and Ismael’s opposing fates. Like AZ, Ismael “loses the woman but gains
the ghost” (Gordon 2008, 98), while Siete por Tres has to lose the ghost,
Matilde Lina, in order to gain the woman, Ojos de Agua, the young for-
eigner with whom he will form a new foundational couple, which problem-
atically reproduces white fantasies about brown people in need of saving by
a white person capable of transforming their violent past into a future of
personal (romantic) bliss. Individual fulfilment displaces the need for col-
74  Haunting without Ghosts

lective reparation, truth, and justice. In contrast, in both Valenzuela’s novel

and Los ejércitos, the ghost is what makes the protagonists look at things dif-
ferently and what allows them to see their connection with people, places,
and events that previously appeared unrelated, or were invisible, to them
(Gordon 2008, 98). Otilia’s specter leads Ismael to confront the violent his-
tory that he and most other inhabitants have repressed out of fear or indo-
lence. Her absent presence transforms San José into an uncanny space; and
it is through this defamiliarization that Ismael articulates his demand for
justice and his refusal to comply with the push forward that, in terms of
space and memory, is demanded of him. Confronted with the decision to
leave or to reside in a ghost town, Ismael chooses to remain and to resist for-
getting and despair by summoning Otilia’s beloved ghost along with those
of his many vanished or departed neighbors. This is the case for both En el
lejero and Los ejércitos. The novels refuse to placate the specter and instead
prioritize the urgency of accounting for the many unmourned “nobodies”
over narrative closure, individual reconciliation, or reader gratification.

Haunting Stories, Spectral Histories

Evelio Rosero describes the writing of his novels as an act of rebellion

against terror (Ungar 2010) and as a way to re-­create the “escalofrío total”
( Junieles 2007) that violence causes. This attempts to produce not a story
of violence but a break in its narratives; a space for reflection that starts by
critically examining the way we look at and talk about historical violence,
particularly when one of the main objectives of such violence has been to
impose silence and oblivion through forced disappearance. In spectrality,
Rosero finds a productive tool to do just that. As Rory O’Bryen explains,
the figure of the ghost is particularly useful for thinking about the persis-
tence of violence in Colombian cultural and historiographical production
because, like the specter, violence hovers “in an uncertain space as an in-
sistent object of memory that can neither be forgotten nor narrativized as
history” (2008, 23). Rosero immerses his readers and characters in those
“uncertain spaces” haunted by violence. By disrupting the scopic paradigm
and the temporal and spatial coordinates of historical and official discourses,
and by constantly alluding to situations that are misleading or remain un-
clear, En el lejero and Los ejércitos force the reader to confront the destabili-
zation and lack of clarity and closure that result from prolonged situations
of violence. Spectral realism allows Rosero to formally explore the profound
disruption that violence causes and how it alters one’s way of perceiving and
 Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes 75

relating to the world. Thus, reading the novels is a tense, bewildering, and
often frustrating experience. Both novels are suffused with violence; it is
everywhere, and yet, more often than not, it is also nowhere specific. It is an
environment, an atmosphere that destabilizes time and space and that both
readers and characters must learn to navigate in order to avoid getting lost
in it or becoming complicit with it. By spectralizing violence, Rosero allows
it to be more intensely felt, making it both a very real and concrete experi-
ence that is as individual as it is collective and an ultimately untraceable, and
perhaps even unnarratable, reality.
In this sense, these novels answer Kaja Silverman’s call at the end of The
Threshold of the Visible World. Throughout her book, Silverman advocates for
a change in ways of seeing and longs for “the possibility of a productive
vision, of an eye capable of seeing something other than what is given to be
seen” (1996, 227). Despite the extensive account she offers of the many dan-
gers of vision, she concludes with a call to cultural practitioners and schol-
ars to “help us to see differently” (227). Rosero seems to listen. More than
confronting the reader with some of the more dreadful aspects of Colom-
bia’s often gruesome reality, En el lejero and Los ejércitos question the way one
sees violence and encourage the reader to think more critically about vision
by moving away from scopophilia and resorting to haptic perception as an
effective means of marking the many irretrievable absences that constitute
recent Colombian history. Rosero’s spectral towns refute official statements
that strategically equate disappearance with nonexistence by clinging to the
old authoritarian mantra “No body, no crime” as an effective way of effacing
historical violence. Rosero takes us to the lejeros where the claim that “todo
está bajo control . . . aquí no pasa nada, ni aquí ni en el país hay guerra” (Ro-
sero 2007, 161) is evidenced as both ludicrous and profoundly violent. Ro-
sero challenges official narratives of military success and of a pacified and
prosperous country. In listening to the spectral voices that haunt Colombia,
the haptic mode of perception he offers avoids the erotization of violence
and resists the push to forgo loss in the name of the future.
As Judith Butler suggests, Rosero’s spectral landscapes of disappearance
encourage the forging of a shared sense of belonging that “takes place in
and through a common sense of loss (which does not mean that all these
losses are the same)” (Butler 2003, 468). Loss, here, is not a deadweight that
shackles a person or a nation in a melancholic attachment to a painful past.
It is a congregating force that incorporates the specter’s disruptive demand
for reparative justice into a vision for a more equitable present and future.
Hence, “loss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of commu-
nity, where community does not overcome the loss, where community can-
76  Haunting without Ghosts

not overcome the loss without losing the very sense of itself as community.
. . . Whatever is produced from this condition of loss will bear the trace of
loss” (468). In Rosero’s novels, as in spectral realism more broadly, loss is not
a burden or something that needs to be overcome. It is a productive force
that, through its haunting stories, encourages a re-­vision of the nation’s past
that produces spectral histories. That is to say, loss encourages historical and
fictional narratives that do not disregard, deny, or “fill in” the absences left
by violence, but instead mark them as painfully tangible and necessarily irre-
trievable at the same time, thus striving toward justice and reparation, even
if only symbolically.
CHAPTER 2

Beyond Vision: Haptic Perception

and Contested Spaces in the Films of
William Vega, Jorge Forero, and Felipe Guerrero

With whose blood were my eyes crafted?

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”

There’s a running joke in my household. Early in our relationship, my part-

ner was puzzled by my obsession with films “where nobody speaks and noth-
ing happens.” He pointed out that in many of these movies, the only thing
you can hear is the sound of crickets chirping in long, tension-­filled scenes
that do not seem to advance the plot in clear ways. We started using what we
termed a grillometro, or cricket meter, as a scale to help determine whether
my partner would be inclined to watch the film with me or would prefer to
take a nap; as the cricket level increased, so did his snoring. La sirga (2012),
directed by William Vega; Violencia (2015), by Jorge Forero; and Oscuro ani-
mal (2016), by Felipe Guerrero, all rank very high on the cricket meter. This,
of course, does not mean that “nothing happens.” A lot takes place, but not
within the received framework of the action-­driven, fast-­paced, and eroti-
cally charged plots many viewers are accustomed to when it comes to fic-
tional cinematic works about historical violence in Latin America. High
numbers on the grillometro do not mean that there are no stories being told;
it simply means that one has to see and listen differently.
To be sure, La sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro animal are hard to watch, not
because they show graphic or explicit images but because one could almost
say that they too often fail to “show” anything at all. Seeing, in these films,
is difficult: dark scenes abound, things commonly remain out of focus, and
visual impediments frequently interrupt vision. They are also slow and have
very little or no dialogue at all. They require patience because they prioritize
cathectic tension and historical density over action, blurriness and ambi-
guity over clarity, environmental sound over explicative dialogue, and ethi-

77
78  Haunting without Ghosts

cal reflection over moral judgment. That is, they turn to the constitutive
elements of spectral realism to explore alternative modes of representing
historical violence. By advancing a cinematic grammar that moves away
from the scopophilic (i.e., male) gaze of perspectivist vision and appealing
instead to a synesthetic and multisensory mode of perception that Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari associate with haptic vision, these films fore-
ground the unsettled and unacknowledged plea for justice of the specter and
create spaces where the (physical, symbolic, and sexual) violence that under-
lies the appropriation of rural lands that fuels the Colombian armed conflict
can be not so much seen as intensely felt. As Felipe Guerrero, the director
of Oscuro animal, explains, his films are not about “the representation of vio-
lence”; rather, they “talk about how we feel the conflict [and are about] the
representation of this feeling” (FilmforPeople 2016).
The shift from narrative and visual clarity to emotion and unresolved ten-
sion encourages the viewer to experience violence as much more than a series
of brutal acts often portrayed as exceptional, unavoidable, or even necessary.
Instead, violence is perceived as an ethereal yet unwavering presence that
haunts and unnerves those who inhabit war-­ridden contexts. Guerrero de-
scribes it as “[una] presencia latente . . . que no se ve, que se siente, y que es la
violencia en sí, y que aparece en los momentos más repentinos y que te da un
zarpazo” (International Film Festival Rotterdam 2016b). This notion of vio-
lence as a latent force ready to strike at any time recenters attention onto the
mental and emotional exhaustion produced by ongoing situations of conflict,
highlights the enduring and deeply destabilizing impact of violence, and
seeks to transfer it to viewers through haptic perception. As Jonathan Crary
notes, “Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one
who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a
system of conventions and limitations” (1999, 6). In what follows, I explore
the specific ways in which La sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro animal question and
expand the “conventions and limitations” through which historical violence
has been represented in Colombian cinema. To do so, I start with a discus-
sion of key differences between cinematic and literary realism, highlighting
Italian neorealism’s influential legacy for spectral realism. I then outline the
cinematographic landscape in Latin America and Colombia, with particu-
lar consideration of the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural elements that
explain the revival of filmmaking in the region. I underscore that a key com-
ponent of this resurgence is the development of cinemas interested in and
capable of portraying the daily lives of historically marginalized populations
as entry points to explore pressing situations of structural inequality and
violence through storytelling techniques that escape narrative conventions
 Beyond Vision 79

and take aesthetic risks. Throughout, I remain attentive to the particularities

of each film but also underscore communal elements that allow for a more
comprehensive understanding of how spectral realism helps create filmic
languages that advance discerning and ethical approaches to the represen-
tation of historical violence.

Spectral Realism’s Italian Ancestors

There are significant conceptual and theoretical differences between literary

and cinematic realism, primarily arising from their diverging chronologies
and trajectories. While classic literary realism originated in the late eigh-
teenth century and was consolidated toward the second half of the nine-
teenth century, the official history of cinema starts with the first projection
of moving pictures for a paying audience by the Lumière brothers in Decem-
ber 1895. This means that literary and filmic realism come from, are shaped
by, and interact with very different historical, social, political, economic,
and technological contexts.1 Furthermore, as is the case for photography,
film’s assumed unparalleled indexical relation to reality has often saddled it
with the expectation that it represents reality objectively—especially in its
initial phase and during its more militant stages in the sixties and seven-
ties—tying the existence of the medium itself to a realist mandate for the
most part absent in the case of literature.2 This particular relation between
film and reality is at the heart of André Bazin’s highly influential theory on
cinematic realism,3 which for him is best exemplified by Italian neorealism.
As is well known (and rightfully contested), Bazin frames the history of
Western pictorial arts primarily as a quest to capture reality as faithfully as
possible. This notion led him to ascertain that “photography is clearly the
most important event in the history of plastic arts” (Bazin 2005a, 16) be-
cause it delivered them from the “resemblance complex” (13) at the core
of their “convulsive catalepsy” (15). Contrary to what this evolutionary ap-
proach may suggest, however, the essence of film for Bazin is not to be
found solely, or even mainly, in its relationship to the present and the living.
Rather, it lies in film’s unique potential with regard to temporality, and in
its ultimate connection to death. Like photography for Barthes, cinema for
Bazin is inherently a spectral medium because of its capacity to make the en-
counter between the dead and the living possible by preserving traces of the
living after their inevitable death. Bazin calls this the “mummy complex” of
film (2005a, 9). But, unlike photography, film also has the ability, somewhat
contradictorily, to arrest time in movement. Film is able to bring the dead
80  Haunting without Ghosts

back, not as frozen mementos but by capturing their having been in time.
This characteristic makes film’s relationship to temporality unique, allowing
it to both register and disrupt the unidirectional passage of time and cre-
ating ample opportunities of presenting the viewer with disjointed, highly
subjective, elongated, or accelerated temporalities. Moreover, this relation
between alternative modes of capturing and representing time and concerns
about how connections with the past shape contemporary understandings of
reality, particularly when this reality is defined by multiple and intersecting
levels of violence, is at the heart of cinematic and spectral realism and for
André Bazin is best accomplished in Italian neorealism.
Spectral realism is a cinematic heir of Italian neorealism as understood
by Bazin. Spectral realism shares many similarities with Italian neorealism,
and the former deepens and expands some of the latter’s main concerns and
techniques. Like spectral realism, cinematic neorealism is born out of the
ruins of a country devastated by war. It is an effort to move away from grand
narratives and to explore the intimate destruction that violence causes in
the lives of those left out of the historical record, inscribing their stories and
pain onto the past, present, and, more significantly, the future of the nation.
They also share other characteristics: they rarely rely on professional actors,
they inhabit marginalized or ravaged spaces, scripted dialogue is scarce, and
traditional plot denouement markers are diluted in favor of the elongation
of a seemingly empty, as opposed to narrative, temporality.
Beyond these relatively superficial commonalities, there are deeper, more
significant ones. In his well-­known analysis of Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di
biciclette (1949) Bazin engages in a close reading of the film to extract what
he sees as some of the main characteristics of cinematic realism, many of
which are also central to spectral realism—most notably, the contradic-
tion between a seemingly banal, everyday story and a powerful sociohis-
torical critique that is developed through the elongation of narrative time
and ambiguity. As later would be the case with spectral realism, neorealist
films were often accused of being films “without ‘action’ . . . destined to be
. . . commercial failure[s]” (Bazin 2005b, 59). As Bazin notes, what these cri-
tiques fail to see is that the key to a film like Ladri di biciclette is that it is in-
dissociable from a concrete “political and social history, in a given place at a
given time” (59)—in this case, the dire economic situation of postwar Italian
society. Without this context, the film is indeed little more than “an utterly
banal misadventure” (50). But this essential sociohistorical background is
neither addressed in the film nor mentioned explicitly. This omission makes
films such as De Sica’s Ladri and Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1948) particu-
larly apt examples of realism because, for Bazin, ambiguity (as opposed to
 Beyond Vision 81

the overt moralism or political Manicheism common in many films and cri-
tiques of his time) is what defines the human experience with reality. There-
fore, a key trait of (neo)realism is that its films are full of ellipses, or “great
holes” (Bazin 2005b, 35). As is the case for spectral realism, what remains
unsaid does not constitute a new act of silencing and erasure. Instead, the
“great holes” created through intentional narrative ellipses return the ambi-
guity of nonprofilmic reality to cinema, seeking a more active engagement
on the part of the spectator. As Bazin explains in a much-­quoted passage,
“The technique of Rossellini undoubtedly maintains an intelligible succes-
sion of events, but these do not mesh like a chain with the sprockets of a
wheel. The mind has to leap from one event to the other as one leaps from
stone to stone in crossing a river. It may happen that one’s foot hesitates be-
tween two rocks, or that one misses one’s footing and slips. The mind like-
wise. Actually it is not the essence of a stone to allow people to cross rivers
without wetting their feet” (Bazin 2005b, 35).
Meaning—either sociohistorical, political, or individual—is not a reve-
lation but an ongoing, shifting, and sometimes equivocal process. In other
words, in real life meaning has to be discerned through an active engage-
ment with events that often appear or are initially experienced as superfluous
and that only in retrospect achieve a fuller, if still complex and somewhat
ambiguous, meaning. So, too, in neorealist films meaning is not univocal,
and it is not given to the audience in the form of a revelation. Instead of
being pre- and overdetermined through montage and script, it derives in
great part from the attention and the will of the spectator; “it is our intelli-
gence that discerns and shapes it” (Bazin 2005b, 51). As noted, a key con-
cern of spectral realism is the encouragement of active engagement on the
part of the reader or spectator through the deployment of a series of formal
techniques related to ambiguity and historical density.
The last aspect of Bazin’s take on neorealism that is relevant for spectral
realism is the concern with how these films could—and in fact had already
started to—exploit misery. In spite of his praise of the technical and the-
matic choices of neorealism, Bazin warns that if not done sensibly, neoreal-
ist films are at risk of turning into spectacles of poverty and desperation:
“superdocumentaries” or “romanticized reportages” (Bazin 2005b, 47) that
rely on “proletariat exoticism” (50) and indulge in the portrayal of the mis-
fortunes of “the wretched [and in a] systematic search for squalid detail”
(51). In spite of this danger, the quest to account for the devastating conse-
quences of World War II in the daily lives of marginalized people defines
many of these films and leads Bazin to identify “an ethic of violence” (40)
at the core of neorealism’s position with regard to the “relation between art
82  Haunting without Ghosts

and reality” (40). This concern about the relation between ethics and aes-
thetics when it comes to the representation of historical violence and the
realities of the most disenfranchised members of society has been central
for Latin American cultural producers and critics, continues to haunt the
region’s cinematic production, and takes center stage in Colombia’s recent
film and spectral realism more broadly. As was the case for Italian neoreal-
ism, this is related to major economic, technological, political, and cultural
shifts that had been taking place in Latin America for decades but that in-
tensified during the 1990s.

The Rural Turn: Colombian Cinema in Context

In Estudio de producción y mercados del cine lationamericano en la primera década

del siglo XXI, Octavio Getino (2012) details how the neoliberal reforms im-
plemented across the region in the 1990s were devastating for millions of
people who saw their livelihoods disappear or become increasingly precari-
ous, including cultural producers, particularly filmmakers. Throughout the
decade, most state subsidies for cinematic production disappeared or were
significantly reduced, and many national institutes for the promotion and
dissemination of local cinema were defunded entirely. This caused the re-
gional production of films to drop from 230 movies in the 1980s to barely
100 in the 1990s. Toward the end of the decade, however, a series of politi-
cal, social, and cultural changes managed to carve out spaces for the revival
of local cinematographic endeavors, successfully augmenting the quantity
and quality of films produced in the region through a variety of initiatives,
laws, and incentives. Even though these processes varied greatly in scope
and reach from country to country, and important local differences should
not be ignored,4 Getino identifies five main elements that led to this boost
in production, technical sophistication, and complexity of Latin American
film.
The first and most ample cause was the sociopolitical and economic
change many countries underwent during the last years of the twentieth
century and the first decade of the twenty-­first. The failure of the aggres-
sive neoliberal reforms implemented across the region during the 1980s and
1990s caused a shift toward left-­leaning governments that ran on platforms
of socioeconomic inclusion, promised a more equal distribution of resources
and opportunities, and opposed what they perceived as US-­led imperialism.5
This phenomenon, known as the “pink tide” because it was considered a
new but “diluted” version of the “red scare,” was particularly strong in coun-
 Beyond Vision 83

tries such as Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and

Venezuela. Regardless of the major differences between them, these gov-
ernments saw in film (and in cultural production more broadly) a powerful
ally in countering symbolic and ideological colonialism and repositioning
themselves in the global imaginary.
In addition to this sociopolitical change, Getino identifies four further
elements that contributed to the flourishing of film in Latin America: the in-
creased access to audiovisual technologies and the resulting heightened visi-
bility of historically marginalized populations, including Afro-­descendants,
indigenous peoples, women, and LGBTQ individuals; the regional efforts
of economic and cultural integration through international programs and
agreements that incentivized coproductions, created a network of festivals
and awards, and expanded and opened markets for the distribution of films;6
the professionalization of the trade thanks to the growing number and high
quality of film schools throughout the region;7 and the passing of “film laws”
during the first decade of the twenty-­first century. The latter sought to in-
centivize national filmmaking through hybrid legal frameworks that tried to
balance the need for economic efficiency while still promoting cultural di-
versity and local talent through a combination of tax cuts and quotas,8 sub-
sidies, and grants and scholarships, among other mechanisms. Though im-
perfect, these laws were the first of their kind in countries such as Colombia
(2003), Chile (2004), Venezuela (2005), Ecuador (2006), Panama (2007),
Uruguay (2008), Nicaragua (2010), and the Dominican Republic (2010)
(Getino 2012). Together, these five changes decentralized cinematographic
production in the region,9 creating what Liliana Castañeda calls a “polycen-
tric landscape of film production” (2009, 28), and considerably increased
filmic output in less than a decade. In 2000, there were 110 films made in
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Peru;
that number rose to 280 in 2010 (Getino 2012, 24).10
This trend can be seen in Colombia as well. The country’s cinemato-
graphic production spiked from five films in 2003 (before the passing of the
Ley de Cine) to forty-­four in 2017 (Proimágenes Colombia 2007). Before
2003, making a film in the country had been a titanic feat.11 Lack of funding
and distribution channels as well as challenges in the postproduction stage
made production in the country irregular and uneven in both quantity and
quality. Two major pieces of legislation started to change the tide: the Ley
de Cultura (no. 397 of 1997) and the Ley de Cine (no. 814 of 2003). The
Ley de Cultura created the Ministerio de Cultura and within it the División
de Cine and the Fondo para la Promoción Cinematográfica, which laid the
groundwork for the film law six years later.12 Part of the success of the law in
84  Haunting without Ghosts

Colombia was that instead of resisting the free-­market principles advanced

a decade earlier, it managed to harness them by including the discourse of
cultural and ethno-­racial pluralism inscribed in the country’s 1991 consti-
tution.13 This strategic deployment of diversity and nationalism justified,
and even called for, the introduction of some protectionist practices (Casta-
ñeda 2009). The Colombian model became a dual framework based on two
pillars: economic efficiency and cultural diversity. The former emphasized
foreign investment, private capital, coproductions, and transnational circu-
lation; the latter prioritized local production and representation of histori-
cally marginalized populations. It did so in part by changing the definition
of national cinema from “a public entertainment event” to “an expression
of national identity, collective memory and cultural heritage” (Castañeda
2009, 29) and by creating a series of incentives such as tax cuts and quotas
and a structure of consistent subsidies and awards, among other measures.
With its many limitations and ample room for improvement,14 this hybrid
nature of the Colombian film model—one attentive to both cultural and
economic factors—leveraged neoliberal and protectionist tools alike to gal-
vanize and redefine national cinema.15 Most notably, it created a viable and
more independent alternative to an industrial model that requires massive
private or state capital, allowing filmmakers to take more risks (since they
are less dependent on ticket sales) and encouraging storytelling practices
that recenter the voices and lives of those traditionally left out by official
discourses and mainstream narratives.
As mentioned, these characteristics are not unique to Colombia. The
transnational emphasis of the model, due in part to the need to achieve
financial equilibrium and sustainability and to gain access to broader exhi-
bition networks—including, but not exclusively, the festival circuit—as well
as the regional nature of many of the programs, awards, and accords, led to
a preponderance of coproductions that balance local histories and interests
with the needs and expectations of transnational audiences and financiers in
similar ways.16 Because of this duality, some critics speak of “glocal” instead
of “local” cinemas (Luna 2013) and are analyzing the region’s filmic produc-
tion through the contested category of “global auteur cinema.”17 Regardless
of the merits of this analytical framework, the term “glocal” is helpful in
evincing certain tensions at the core of the production of many of these films
and in highlighting thematic and technical commonalities. Thematically
speaking, many of these films share an interest in liminal populations and
spaces and seek to explore the emotional and psychological toll, as well as
the familial and individual impact, of macroeconomic imperatives, foreign-­
policy initiatives (like the war on drugs), and geopolitical dynamics. María
Helena Rueda (2019) thus describes such filmmaking as a cinema of loss and
 Beyond Vision 85

mourning that tends to revolve around personal narratives marked by differ-

ent forms of violence that result from armed conflicts, neoliberal reforms,
or unequal gender and racial systems, among other structural causes. Pedro
Adrián Zuluaga echoes this perspective, defining it as “un cine desencan-
tado y no reconciliado” (2015, 159) that focuses on “formas de vida amena-
zadas,” be they human, natural, economic, or cultural (160).
These characteristics trace the genealogy of these films to well-­known
regional antecedents like the militant cinematographies of the 1960s and
1970s. But unlike previous iterations of socially conscious, historically in-
formed, and politically engaged cinemas, these new films are not aligned
with concrete political platforms, economic models, or social movements;
and although locally grounded, they remain sufficiently ambiguous and
open-­ended as to allow for a broad range of interpretations and cathectic
responses, all of which make them more suitable for circulation in a global
market. This combination, however, of the highly localized and intimate na-
ture of the films’ stories and the transnational character of their production
and circulation raises the question of whether this new wave of filmmakers
is actually carving out spaces to critically examine the region’s complex
and often violent reality through the films’ visual grammar and aesthetic
choices, or if they are simply complying with what Rueda calls “demandas
de tinte colonialista” (2019, 104) that reinforce cultural and racial stereo-
types, thereby justifying the region’s disadvantageous geopolitical position-
ing and socioeconomic ailments.18
This concern, of course, is not new. As noted in the introduction, a pre-
occupation with the ethical implications of aesthetic practices and cultural
production that deal with the violence endured by historically marginalized
populations has haunted Latin American filmmakers for years; indeed, it is
at the core of Colombian art, literature, and film and traverses this book.
Seminal texts of the New Latin American Cinema, such as Glauber Rocha’s
“The Aesthetics of Hunger” (1965), Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imper-
fect Cinema” (1969), and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s “Towards
a Third Cinema” (1969), grappled with the issue decades earlier. In Colom-
bia, the filmmakers Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina even coined the term
“pornomiseria” to denounce the commodification of poverty, which I argue
can be extended to violence and other instances of human suffering. In a text
written for the premiere of their mockumentary Agarrando pueblo (1977) in
Paris, they write:

La miseria se convirtió en tema impactante y por lo tanto en mercancía.

Fácilmente vendible, especialmente en el exterior, donde la miseria es la
contrapartida de la opulencia de los consumidores. Si la miseria le había ser-
86  Haunting without Ghosts

vido al cine independiente como elemento de denuncia y análisis el afán mer-

cantilista la convirtió en válvula de escape del sistema mismo que la generó.
Este afán de lucro no permitía un método que descubriera nuevas premisas
para el análisis de la pobreza, sino que, por el contrario, creó esquemas dema-
gógicos hasta convertirse en un género que podríamos llamar cine miserabi-
lista o porno-­miseria. . . . [L]a miseria se estaba presentando como un espec-
táculo más donde el espectador podía lavar su mala conciencia, conmoverse y
tranquilizarse. (Ospina and Mayolo, n.d.)

The three films I analyze in this chapter respond to this ethical anxiety
through spectral realism. That is, they draw on a critical turn toward reality
through hybrid forms of documentary filmmaking and fiction while deploy-
ing a series of visualizing techniques associated with haptic perception—
particularly as it relates to vision, space, temporality, and sound—that make
capitalizing on misery and violence difficult. That these films were being
made in Colombia as its brutal armed conflict was reaching an official end
heightens the sense of urgency of this critical turn toward reality. It also
translates into renewed interest in the rural spaces and marginalized people
that endured the brunt of war and whose symbolic and socioeconomic re-
incorporation into the national project is at the heart of the country’s reck-
oning with its recent violent past, as well as its hope of forging a more equi-
table and peaceful future. Finally, I show how, through the haptic reworking
of vision, sound, and space, La sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro animal trump the
commodification and eroticization/exoticization of violence that preoccu-
pies critics and cultural practitioners alike, bring to the fore the violence that
lies beneath projects of (re)appropriation and transformation of rural lands,
and carve out spaces for ethical discernment that are vital as the country
seeks to rebuild and redefine itself.
An important way these films perform this effort is by moving away
from the emphasis on urban margins that predominated during the 1990s,19
prioritizing rural spaces instead. This emphasis on nonurban spaces is part
of what María Ospina (2017, 248) calls “the rural turn in contemporary
Colombian cinema.” In a book chapter of the same name, Ospina explains
that during the first decades of the twenty-­first century, a new generation
of filmmakers shifted its focus toward rural regions and “smooth” spaces
like the jungle, not as a nostalgic return to a lost paradise but as a focal
point for unraveling the complex sociopolitical, economic, and ideological
issues that constitute the root causes of the armed conflict and as a means
to explore its devastating impact in the lives of those most affected by it. La
sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro animal should be contextualized as part of a broad
 Beyond Vision 87

and diverse cinematographic production that includes, among others, El

vuelco del cangrejo (2009), by Oscar Ruiz Navia; Los viajes del viento (2009)
and El abrazo de la serpiente (2015), by Ciro Guerra; Los colores de la mon-
taña (2010), by Carlos César Arbeláez; El páramo (2011), by Jaime Osorio
Marquez; La Playa DC (2012), by Juan Andrés Arango; Chocó (2014), by
Jhonny Hendrix Hinestroza; Alias María (2015), by José Luis Rugeles; La
tierra y la sombra (2015), by César Augusto Acevedo; and Siembra (2016),
by Ángela Osorio Rojas and Santiago Lozano Álvarez. Given the struc-
tural nature of the conflicts they represent, these films often engage with
the city, either explicitly or implicitly, while remaining predominantly rural.
But these two spaces are not presented as opposites in the civilization / bar-
barism dyad that has so influenced hegemonic discourses and perspectives
on nonurban space and peoples in Latin America. The countryside here is
neither the barbaric counterpart to the civilized city nor the repository of
traditional values, abundant natural beauty, and harmonious relations with
oneself, others, and the environment—a space where the urban dweller can
find solace from his or her alienated existence. Instead, both sites appear
deeply interrelated through complexes of unequitable economic policies,
sociopolitical systems, and racialized and gendered dynamics. Thus, neither
the countryside nor the city is idealized. In these films, survival in both sites
is threatened not only by the armed conflict but also by the structural causes
that produced and continue to fuel it: disputes over land tenure, the tension
between subsistence economies and collective labor and extractive or agro-­
industrial projects, unemployment and the precarization of labor, gender
and sexual violence, and lack of education, among others.
The characteristics outlined here add a layer of complexity to these films
because, while heavily invested in local histories and context, they also leave
ample room for global audiences to identify with the human plight and the
structural conditions of dispossession depicted, as well as with their stories
of perseverance and survival. Due to this combination of highly localized
accounts and wide international appeal, and because of the cross-­border
flow of capital and labor involved in their production and dissemination,
María Luna speaks of “[un] cruce de lo rural-­transnacional ” (2013, 70). For
Luna, this intersection challenges the national focus and modes of produc-
tion traditionally associated with rural cinema and invites broader questions
about how to engage with, and perhaps help dismantle, the hegemonic dis-
courses that efface, condone, or justify violence against historically exploited
territories and peoples.20 Furthermore, María Ospina recognizes “specific
audiovisual languages” through which these filmmakers “seek to destabilize
the hegemonic gaze that has been projected onto rural spaces . . . [and to]
88  Haunting without Ghosts

intervene in the urgent debate about the destiny of rural lands, the uses and
abuses of nature, and the place of rural peoples at the dawn of the century”
(2017, 263), which is at the center of the process of reimagining the future
of the nation. The main trait Ospina identifies is that the interest in “un-
covering the political and historical density of rural spaces” often results in
hybrid forms of fiction and documentary filmmaking (254). For example,
the screenplay is commonly the result of previous work conducted in the
communities, the script is informed by testimonial narratives and factual
evidence about the events narrated, and there is a consistent presence of
nonprofessional actors, many of whom collaborate on the development of
the story. These films also adopt technical tools associated with documen-
tary filmmaking, such as the use of direct sound and an unsteady camera,
and show a preference for emotionally charged close-­ups and special atten-
tion to the daily routines and practices of nonurban peoples.21
An in-­depth look at La sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro animal allows one
to examine the possibilities and limitations of these new filmic topogra-
phies. Shot entirely on location, La sirga tells the story of Alicia, a young
woman who arrives at La Cocha, a remote town in the south of the country
whose name comes from Colombia’s highest and second-­largest lake, which
is located nearby. She is looking for Óscar, her uncle and last known relative,
who runs a ramshackle hostel at the shore of the lake. An unnamed army
has burned down her hometown and killed all of her family members, and
she is searching for a sense of warmth and belonging in the cold and deso-
late landscape of La Cocha.
Rather than focusing on the emotional and physical journey of a single
protagonist, Violencia and Oscuro animal are triptychs. The films paint a tab-
leau of the war in Colombia through a tripartite structure of diegetically
unrelated vignettes. The subtitle of Violencia could be “A Day in the Colom-
bian Armed Conflict.” From dawn to dusk, each section of the movie invites
viewers to share the space and routine of an unnamed man and to witness his
involvement, either as victim or as perpetrator, with the three main groups
of the armed conflict: the guerrillas, the military, and the paramilitary. The
first story follows the painful routine of a man who has been kidnapped and
is being held captive in the jungle by an unidentified guerrilla group; the sec-
ond traces the journey of a young man in Bogotá as he is looking for a job
and falls prey to the bloody and corrupt scheme orchestrated by the National
Army known as the falsos positivos; The third takes the viewer through the
day of a paramilitary commander in charge of a training and torture camp
in a small town.
Oscuro animal balances the androcentric perspective of Violencia by focus-
 Beyond Vision 89

ing on the forced displacement of three women, who remain unnamed, as

they seek to flee the violent situations that threaten them. Like Alicia of
La sirga, the first woman has lost her family and must look for a new home
after the violent incursion of a paramilitary group turned her village into a
ghost town. The second story is about a young Afro-­Colombian woman who
is forced to cook for and is sexually abused by a group of soldiers. She runs
away after killing one of her rapists, and the film follows her journey from
the jungle to Bogotá. The third and final vignette tells the story of a woman
trying to escape the paramilitary organization she has been recruited into
against her will and start a new life as a civilian, also in the city. The stories
develop slowly and intermittently, and as in Violencia they present diverse
yet complementary perspectives of the armed conflict. But despite the dif-
ferences among the characters, they are all particularly vulnerable to sexual,
physical, and economic violence due to the intersecting categories of oppres-
sion they share: they are young, poor, nonwhite, and live in remote areas
abandoned by the state and devastated by war.
Historical density not only informs the scripts, but is also embedded in
the production process and the aesthetic choices of the filmmakers. Felipe
Guerrero spent nearly ten years developing the screenplay of Oscuro animal.
The project started in the late 1990s, when Guerrero was working with com-
munities that had been forcefully displaced by the armed conflict, particu-
larly women. He complemented this experience with reports from Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch, individual testimonies, and news
reports he had collected for years. But the main question for him was the
relation between this violent reality and its artistic representation; it was a
quest to figure out how best to “elaborar eso en un lenguaje cinematográfico
. . . cómo se escribe eso con imágenes y sonidos, con el cine” (Laura 2016).
This question haunted Jorge Forero as well. Though also heavily informed by
factual data and testimonial narratives, his film uses a combination of non-
professional and professional actors to animate the disturbing everydayness
of violence elided in reports and news articles but vividly presented in the
testimonial narratives of survivors and perpetrators.
La sirga perhaps best exemplifies how this concern about the ethical im-
plications of aesthetic representation impacts the production process. The
film is the result of William Vega’s long-­standing interest in the region and
years of work with the community of La Cocha. In an interview, Vega is
emphatic that the film was born out of this relationship and not the other
way around. The director is wary of extractive approaches to filmmaking,
particularly when, as is the case with all three films, there is a considerable
imbalance of power between the cinematographers and the communities
90  Haunting without Ghosts

being filmed or represented. He prioritizes a gradual process of building

respectful relationships with the people and the space.22 It took Vega more
than four years to develop such bonds. He immersed himself in the daily
life of La Cocha and spent years listening to the stories of those who in-
habited the remote area. Professional actors and crew members also arrived
at La Cocha weeks prior to filming. They stayed in the houses of locals and
shared their meals, routines, and tasks. The film is the product of this col-
laborative relationship. Locals participated in the development of the script
and the characters, some chose to play their own parts, and others became
part of the production team (Palencia 2012). Vega and his team adjusted
to the pace, the sounds, and the light of La Cocha and worked to tell a
story with its inhabitants, not merely about them. Another key aspect of the
filming process is the respect for the cultural and environmental aspects of
the space. La Cocha is a fragile ecosystem and a sacred space for local in-
digenous communities. Through their involvement with the community, the
crew requested and received authorization from the indigenous council to
film in the area and sought to make their presence as unobtrusive as possible
(Palencia 2012).23
In different ways, Vega, Forero, and Guerrero establish a correlation among
aesthetic choices, cinematographic processes, and ethical concerns about
the future of rural lands and peoples in Colombia. Their films do not en-
able escapist fantasies to pristine lands and ahistorical communities or en-
dorse a facile (re)incorporation of these territories to the national imaginary,
mainly through extractivist projects based on the perceived value of their
land and resources for national elites and international economic conglom-
erates. Instead, they highlight the complex and often violent nature of inter-
ventions in rural communities and territories by armed groups, state agents,
agro-­industrial and tourism entrepreneurs, and film crews alike. This criti-
cal approach to filmmaking produces a mode of cinematic storytelling that
avoids both the objectifying and exoticizing perspective of the ethnographic
gaze—denounced by Ospina and Mayolo—and the exploitative and fetish-
izing lens of commercial cinema through a series of thematic and formal
choices associated with haptic perception and spectral realism: an oblique
gaze, as visual as it is conceptual, that leads to plot lacunae, open endings,
and multiple ambiguous scenes that are left unexplained; an emphasis on
smooth spaces that highlights the ideological, economic, and sociopolitical
tensions that underlie processes of striation and appropriation of rural lands
and other areas rich in natural or mineral resources; a deceleration and elon-
gation of narrative time that produces a pensive and cathectic temporality;
and, finally, what Miguel Hernández, the sound designer of La sirga, calls
 Beyond Vision 91

“that other sonority” (Navas 2012)—that is, a type of sound management

that makes little or no use of dialogue and relies almost entirely on envi-
ronmental sounds and subtle contextual cues (e.g., the news coming from
radio or TV programs in the background) to advance and create emotional
engagement with the story and its protagonists. Before unpacking these dif-
ferent elements, it is worth going back to some theoretical considerations.

Spectral Realism, Haptic Perception, and Smooth Spaces

Spectral realism challenges the spatiotemporal coordinates of modernity

and the nation’s official narratives by presenting alternative modes of see-
ing and perceiving and of inhabiting time and space. One way it does so
is through visualizing techniques that abandon the triangulation of sight,
knowledge, and control of the scopophilic gaze that is at the heart of clas-
sic realism and of many works that deal with historical violence in and be-
yond Latin America. If “to know, in realism, is to see, and to represent is to
describe” (Brooks 1993, 88), the spectral gaze more closely relates to what
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 492) call haptic vision—that is, a synesthetic
mode of seeing where the eye has a tactile, “nonoptical function.” As noted
previously, they argue that in order to understand how space is conceived—
that is, how it is mapped, utilized, and inhabited—one must reflect on how
it is perceived. For Deleuze and Guattari, there are two main kinds of space,
striated and smooth, and each one relates to a particular mode of seeing.
Striated spaces are stable, productive surfaces “defined by the requirements
of long-­distance vision: constancy of orientation, [and the] constitution of
a central perspective” (494). Striated spaces prioritize and rely on a scopic
regime that conflates the desire to see with the desire to know and to possess
in order to produce meaning and value. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “one
of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it
reigns” (385). For a nation, it is essential to (re)produce a space that is mea-
surable, has defined boundaries, can be perceived clearly—in maps, aerial
photographs, and so forth—and has well-­defined geographic and historical
landmarks that remain stable over the years. Cities, tourist sites, and devel-
opment enclaves like oil rigs and dams are striated spaces par excellence be-
cause they are legible versions of space that fit comfortably into, and reaffirm
and advance, the vision of the nation upheld by the ruling class.
Smooth spaces, on the other hand, rely on what Deleuze and Guattari
call haptic perception—that is, a synesthetic mode of seeing whereby the
eye has other, nonvisual capabilities. Sound, texture, and emotion are all key
92  Haunting without Ghosts

parts of haptic perception. This way of seeing presents an alternative to the

unidirectional, objectifying, and predatory nature of perspectivist vision by
incorporating elements that cannot be fully contained by the visual impera-
tive of the scopic regime, which informs and sustains official narratives that
downplay, justify, or outright efface violence, including gender violence, in
the name of nation building, progress, and even peace. To see, here, is not to
fully comprehend, to seize, or to control. Haptic perception marks a disso-
nance between sight and mastery; it suggests more than what it explains; it
digresses and wanders around; it is emotionally charged and points toward
the unresolved. These traits impact the experience and perception of space.
While the scopic regime seeks to striate space in order to control and profit
from it, haptic perception encourages a holistic and reflective way of re-
lating to the environment, one that is attuned and adjusts to its rhythms and
specificity. It also imbues space with historical density, eliciting questions
about the contradictions and tensions brewing beneath discourses of natu-
ral beauty, exuberance, or the productive potential of the landscape. Haptic
perception often produces (smooth) spaces that are discomforting because
they cannot be entirely contained, either by measurement systems and car-
tographic abstractions or by patriotic and extractivist narratives of nation
building, progress, and development. The ocean, the desert, the jungle, Ro-
sero’s spectral towns, and the moorland where La sirga takes place are all
cases in point.
Haptic perception is spectral in that through the realignment of the
senses it performs and the multisensory experience it offers, it creates re-
flective and emotionally charged spaces where the symbolic, physical, and
sexual violence that too often underlies processes of appropriation and stria-
tion of nonurban lands can be intensely felt. This approach foregrounds the
specter’s unmet demands for justice and elicits questions about the ethics
of vision—about the (visual, symbolic, and discursive) mechanisms through
which visibility is constructed and the consequences it has for concrete
peoples. This haptic, spectral mode of perception is central to La sirga, Vio-
lencia, and Oscuro animal. In the following sections, I illustrate how these
elements function in each film by pointing out their commonalities while
highlighting their specificities and most salient individual aspects. Formally,
this means that even though each section will primarily focus on one film,
my perspective remains comparative, and hence I will continue to reference
all three works throughout the chapter. By so doing, I show that despite the
differences among the films, their stories echo and complement each other,
and they share a repertoire of techniques that upends the narrative conven-
tions that naturalize the spatiotemporal coordinates of modernity, which
 Beyond Vision 93

Figure 2.1. William Vega, La sirga, 2012. Alicia walks through the frailejones and
the mist.

often obscure or profit from the violence underlying processes of striation of

rural lands carried out by state agents, international conglomerates, socio-
economic elites, or cultural practitioners.

Beyond Vision: Contested Spaces in La sirga

Seeing, in La sirga, is not an easy task. As noted, the film was shot entirely
on location in the area of La Cocha, Colombia’s highest lake, and one of
the country’s most stunning and inaccessible sites because of the moun-
tainous geography and the violent history of the area. At nine thousand
feet, topography and climate present demanding filming conditions. Visual
impediments like fog, darkness, and rain are constant throughout the film.
Long sequences abound in which one only hears the rustling wind and can
barely distinguish the blurry contours of the frailejones. Shots too open or
too closed to ascertain what is happening are a key part of the film’s invest-
ment in haptic perception and of its position on the relation between ethics
and aesthetics.
As Vega has explained in several interviews, the unrelenting fog and
opaqueness serve as symbols of the meaning of the film itself: “The fog
doesn’t let us see beyond certain limits, and this provokes an inevitable sus-
pense. I think that is what the film is about; human incapacity to see it all.
We all have a very partial vision and reading of what’s around us. That’s
why the information in La Sirga, like in life itself, often remains behind
94  Haunting without Ghosts

the mist, out of the frame, or is limited to sounds” (Comingore 2013). San-
tiago Lozano, Vega’s assistant director, reinforces this notion, adding that
the film seeks to create a more holistic sensory experience. For Lozano, La
sirga is not a film that can merely be watched. It has to be taken in with a
multiplicity of senses and experienced as an atmosphere; it has to be ab-
sorbed through the pores: “Esos espacios donde no te muestran las cosas
literalmente, donde no hay una narración evidente, son los que te pueden
dejar entrar en una atmósfera. Es una película totalmente atmosférica. . . .
No es una cosa que le entra a uno ni por los ojos ni por los oídos, sino por
los poros” (Navas 2012). Besides effectively explaining the reasoning behind
La sirga’s aesthetic choices, these remarks aptly capture the ethos of haptic
perception by pointing out three of its main characteristics: (1) its distrust of
vision as the main way of understanding and relating to ourselves, to others,
and to space; (2) its investment in alternative modes of perception that seek
to incorporate that which cannot be seen but is nonetheless intensely felt;
and (3) the discomfort and disorientation produced by the frustration of the
scopophilic drive and of its underlying impulse to master and control. In
contrast, Vega, as well as Forero and Guerrero, invites the viewer to engage
with what remains out of focus, to confront the limits of one’s vision, and to
critically examine the disappearances and reappearances that constitute the
visual and symbolic fields in a given moment and space.
As I explain more fully later on, Violencia and Oscuro animal actualize
these visual dynamics primarily through (1) constant dark and ambiguous
scenes, as well as shots that prioritize the emotional toll of violence over the
depiction of the violent acts themselves; and (2) a reliance on environmental
cues (particularly sound) to advance and make sense of the ambiguous and
open-­ended plot. In La sirga, this disruption of perspectivist vision trans-
lates into a visual and symbolic configuration of space at odds with the hege-
monic narratives about rural space in Colombia. La Cocha is not presented
as a pristine and ahistorical land ripe with possibilities for the urban traveler
or the savvy entrepreneur, nor as a barbaric space inhabited by irrational and
violent people devoid of the ability and skill to understand and transform
their own reality. Instead, the visual treatment of La Cocha reminds view-
ers of the precariousness of human life and of the violence that lies beneath
projects of appropriation and transformation of rural lands, which is of great
importance when taking into account that La sirga shares its release year
with the official beginning of the peace process with FARC in 2012.
The first and last sequences of the film are illustrative. The film begins
and ends with Alicia seeking shelter and belonging in the midst of a loom-
ing sense of threat. The movie opens with a still shot of what could be a dead
body on a spire or a scarecrow. Identification is difficult because the image
 Beyond Vision 95

is blurry and dark. The black silhouette stands out against the mist, and the
mountains are barely discernible in the background. The shot lingers for al-
most twenty seconds. The only movement is the motion of the grass swayed
by gusts of air, and the only sound is the howling of the wind. The next scene
shows the shore of a lake. A patch of grass, or an unknown creature, starts
moving against the current until it disappears from the frame. Even if one
does not yet know its name, the presence of El Morro (a local folktale that
sees the dark omen of soon-­to-­come tragedies in the rare phenomenon of
patches of land detaching from shore and moving against the current)24 in-
creases one’s confusion and enhances the ominous tone by making it harder
to make sense of the space and to distinguish between inanimate objects
and cadavers, living creatures and plants. Then a young woman appears. She
struggles to walk amid frailejones. We can barely see her. The landscape and
the trees dwarf her, and the mist blurs her from sight. We hear the wind.
We see her rubber boots trudging along the wet mud and grass. Slowly, her
breathing replaces the sound of the wind, and she falls face-­first into the
earth. Then a boat appears. The person steering is covered from head to toe.
We do not see his face. He does not speak. The camera now moves to a top-­
down view, so we see her lying in a fetal position in the boat’s hull. The boat
makes its way across the water. Through the prism of the hull, we see it ap-
proaching a humble house at the shore. The boat stops, and Mirichis, the
boatman, runs to the front door, knocks, and ends the six-­minute absence of
words by asking for Óscar, who we will soon find out is the girl’s uncle. The
minutes that follow remain dark and tense, but some context is provided.
In a sequence punctuated by the restless howl of the wind, we learn that
Alicia’s family was murdered when an unidentified army burned down her
hometown. She is now alone and needs shelter. The uncle provides it for her,
reluctantly, warning her that the situation is not much better in La Cocha.
La sirga ends as it began: a body hangs on a spire, the tall grass sways
in front of it. The mist barely lets us distinguish the silhouette in the back-
ground, but its spectral contour dominates the shot. Óscar, Alicia’s uncle,
sees it from his boat. His lips are tight; his face is tense. He sighs. He does
not say a word. He looks ahead and keeps going. We then see Alicia leaving
the house and once again heading toward an unknown destiny. In a shot that
strongly resembles the first sequence, the final scene shows Alicia making
her way in an environment that seems unhospitable, impassive, and men-
acing. Visual cues, such as the disproportion between her size and the im-
posing mountains that surround her, the dense clouds gathering in the
background, and the gusts of cold air, speak to the uncertain nature of her
journey.
The first and final shots of the film function as mirrors that set and re-
96  Haunting without Ghosts

Figure 2.2. William Vega, La sirga, 2012. Collage of impaled bodies at the
beginning and end of the film.

inforce the tone and frame the film as an ongoing journey of recommence-
ment and survival plagued by uncertainty and truncated by violence.
Furthermore, the impaled bodies that bookend the film, the harsh envi-
ronmental conditions, and the inability to see with clarity establish a strong
correspondence among vision, space, and violence. Alicia’s story as well as
Mirichis’s gruesome death remind the audience of the unresolved tensions
that haunt the country and imbue the film with a sense of impending dread.
Both the plot and the visual elements point to the violent conflicts that roil
beneath the calm of the icy waters of La Cocha and in other rural lands in
 Beyond Vision 97

Colombia. As the story develops, the landscape acquires layers of density.

Though majestic, La Cocha is not construed as a place for the transient en-
joyment of the tourist or the extractive economy of the foreign or urban in-
vestor. It remains ominous, untamed, and menacing throughout. By the end
of the film, rural lands are perceived as deeply ingrained in the causes and
dynamics of the armed conflict, making Alicia’s ongoing journey seem, if
not doomed, certainly fraught.
La sirga shows that at the core of the violence in Colombia, there is an in-
tense struggle for the symbolic appropriation and economic exploitation of
rural lands and peoples. Disputes about land control and tenure and tensions
between different economic models continue to result in the deaths of thou-
sands of civilians, particularly in remote areas like La Cocha. In La sirga,
these tensions are represented by the different ways in which father and son
conceive their relation with others and with the space they inhabit. Óscar
believes in communal, small-­scale, and environmentally conscious projects
like the trout farm started by the cooperative he is part of. But Freddy, who
is involved with a paramilitary group, warns him that this line of thinking
can jeopardize not only his livelihood but also his life. In a tense exchange
between father and son, Freddy tries to convince Óscar that he should claim
ownership, reap the financial benefits of a commercial idea he devised with
two other friends, and abandon the cooperative: “Esa idea es suya, de Don
Alfredo, de Don Franco y de nadie más. Si eso resultara la plata tendría que
ser para ustedes tres y no para esa gente, con ellos metidos ahí eso no fun-
ciona.” Óscar holds his ground and replies, “Para que funcione se requiere de
tiempo y de la misma cooperativa.” Freddy pushes back and issues a veiled
threat: “Aquí nada funciona, y menos con la genta esa y con el cuento de
que todo es para todos. Eso no se sabe en qué termina esa gente.” Óscar
catches the menacing tone in his words and confronts him: “¿En qué?” To
which Freddy simply replies, “Eso no va a funcionar.” The scene ends with
Óscar abruptly leaving the dining table and uttering a frustrated “Hasta
mañana” (Vega 2012). As María Ospina explains, “Alternative economies
based on collective production pose an explicit contrast to [and become an
obstacle for] neoliberal market dynamics that are central to the histories of
war and displacement in contemporary Colombia” (2017, 255). Óscar’s de-
fense of and involvement with the cooperative puts him at risk by ideologi-
cally aligning him with the leftist guerrillas, thus making him a target in
the expansion of paramilitary groups in the region. La Sirga, his other main
project, also fails due to violence.
La Sirga is the name of the rustic hostel that Alicia is helping Óscar re-
build and remodel so that it will be suitable for the tourists that aggressive
98  Haunting without Ghosts

national campaigns promise and yet never produce. As the title of the film
in English suggests, “sirga” can be translated as “towrope.” The word is an
obvious reference to navigation and fishing, which provide the basis for the
collective subsistence economies threatened by violence in the area. Like
all towropes, the term connotes the ability to pull safely to shore and to
connect vessels so that they can collectively navigate. In the film, La Sirga
becomes the symbol of Alicia’s failed quest to rebuild her home and of her
desire to ground herself and connect with others. These desires, we know,
are truncated. Despite Alicia’s fierce determination, her project of fixing
La Sirga fails. Even though she spends the day patching the tin roof with
plastic in order to protect the interior from the hammering rain and fortify-
ing with rusty nails the fragile walls made of planks, the wind and the con-
stant storms ruin her work during the night, so she must recommence her
futile task at dawn. Alicia is more Sisyphus than Penelope. Her efforts and
patience bear no fruit, because the situation worsens as time passes. After
hovering in the background like the stormy clouds that often dominate the
visual field, violence strikes, slashing her budding affective relations—with
both people and space—and uprooting her once again: Mirichis, the mes-
senger who comes bearing the promise of love and new beginnings, is mur-
dered, and Alicia is forced to leave La Cocha in search of a new home. Thus,
while La Sirga embodies the unfulfilled promise of sustainable collective
projects and tourism as viable sources of prosperity and peace for peasants
in Colombia, La sirga foregrounds how the clash between competing visions
of the nation—as actualized in the internal conflict—impacts the landscape
and the daily lives of those who inhabit it. The film highlights that the con-
solidation of tourist enclaves in the most visible parts of the country did not
translate into monetary benefits or safety for most rural communities and in
many cases aggravated the situation.
As María Ospina (2017) notes, the interweaving of tourism with na-
tion rebuilding and economic prosperity has strong resonances for Colom-
bian audiences because it echoes president Álvaro Uribe’s flagship tourism
promotion program, “Vive Colombia, viaja por ella” (2003–2010). Uribe’s
administration (2002–2010) invested considerable political and financial
capital in portraying the image of a pacified nation that was now “open
for business.” Tourism played a key role in this process, as it was the main
strategy to successfully reintroduce the country to its own citizens and to
showcase it for foreign travelers and investors. As Diana Ojeda (2013) ar-
gues, the discursive and material production of tourist sites became central
to the conjuring of a pacified country during the Uribe years. In this context,
tourism served a double, and somewhat tautological, purpose: it helped con-
 Beyond Vision 99

solidate security in the territory by mobilizing large numbers of people to

sites previously considered too dangerous and unwelcoming; and it was, in
itself, proof that the country was indeed safer. In other words, traveling both
helped bring safety to certain areas and at the same time proved that those
areas were now secure. Hence, tourism became much more than a trendy
form of leisure. As Ojeda explains, “traveling itself became a civil duty”
(2013, 768), because it was heralded as a way to participate in “the effective
‘retaking’ [of the country] from the triple menace—insurgency, terrorism
and drugs—that guerrilla forces represented” (769). Visiting tourist sites
was experienced as a symbolic reconquering of the nation that boosted con-
fidence and stimulated financial and affective investment in the country.
As Ojeda also points out, however, the domestic travel promoted by “Vive
Colombia” was enabled and sustained through intensive militarization.
Through the deployment of the military state apparatus, a new cartogra-
phy was drawn: “The coupled processes of securitisation and touristification
resulted in . . . an archipelago of tourist trenches connected by militarised
routes” (Ojeda 2013, 772). The conflation of tourism with the state mili-
tary apparatus was obvious during the trips themselves but disappeared in
all related audio-­visual materials. When traveling by road from one tourist
enclave to another during the Uribe years, the presence of armored vehicles,
heavily armed soldiers, and military airplanes circling the sky could not be
missed. But none of this was shown or mentioned. The images that adver-
tised Colombia as “un paraíso donde las fronteras entre la realidad y la magia
desaparecen” (NicoandCo44 2007) carefully avoided any reference to the
security apparatus required to make such a paradise accessible to the urban
and foreign crowds that could now visit it, and they silenced the socioeco-
nomic and political tensions brewing under the idyllic facade. Furthermore,
the pressure to “secure” the territory in order to guarantee its readiness for
investment and enjoyment “was carried out at the expense of the security of
labour, social activists and the poor” (Ojeda 2013, 766) and created an un-
even cartography of prosperity and peace.
La sirga underscores the dynamics obscured by tourist-­driven narratives.
On the one hand, the murder of Mirichis, as told by the mist-­filled visual
grammar of the film, shows that the “securitisation and touristification”
(Ojeda 2013, 772) of the nation did not stop the violence; it just made it
harder to see. In remote areas like La Cocha, violence did not go away. It
morphed into more targeted forms of warfare, such as surgical assassina-
tions, and came to be experienced as a looming, spectral presence ready to
strike with deadly force at any given time yet intangible for the most part.
On the other hand, La sirga’s attention to the seemingly trivial routines of
100  Haunting without Ghosts

the characters and to the repetitive and often menial tasks they perform
every day, as well as its interest in the precarious materiality of their daily
life, underscores the characters’ unsuccessful attempts to become a part of
the narrative of tourism and sustainable development propagated by the
government and highlights the frailty of their living and economic condi-
tions: no tourists arrive at La Sirga, and the trout cooperative into which
Óscar invests most of his time, money, and hopes never takes off, because
of a lack of resources and impending threats. After much work and affective
investment—on the part of the characters and the audience—both projects
are abandoned.
Thus, despite being filmed in one of Colombia’s most stunning land-
scapes, La sirga does not invite its viewers to sit back and enjoy the natu-
ral beauty of La Cocha. One of the few things that are clear from the first
sequence onward is that one cannot uncritically consume the marvels the
landscape has to offer, nor exploit them for one’s benefit. The extractive gaze
of both the tourist and the foreign entrepreneur is foreclosed. As portrayed
in the film, La Cocha is not suitable for development projects or touristic en-
claves because the space remains hostile and unpredictable; it cannot be stri-
ated. This is partly because Alicia’s story and fate turn visual and rural lands
into ominous sites where violence is always lurking and where the famil-
iar often turns into the deeply unsettling. As María Ospina (2017) argues,
through this recourse, La sirga manages to imbue the landscape with his-
torical density, bringing to the fore the complex relationship among nature,
violence, and economic and political interests, particularly as it relates to
hospitality and tourism. Furthermore, La sirga’s reworking of space through
haptic perception is important and carries political and ethical potential be-
yond the specificity of the Colombian conflict because, as the social scientist
and geographer Doreen Massey (2013) argues, “space is the dimension that
presents us with the question of the other . . . and the social and the most
fundamental question of the political which is how we are going to live with
each other.” La sirga embraces this ethical and political potential of space to
encourage a more critical and less predatory engagement with the places we
collectively inhabit at different levels (home, town, country, etc.).
The film’s visualization practices are key in this regard. La sirga moves
away from the scopic regime and explores instead an emotionally charged
and historically dense mode of perception more attuned to the instability and
uncertainty caused by violence. The visual strategies unhinge the viewer’s
sense of stability and certainty, preclude fantasies about the facile domina-
tion or exploitation of the terrain, and undermine reliance on an omniscient
and totalizing point of view: the camera rocking as much as the boats of
Mirichis and Óscar and shaking with Alicia’s heavy breathing and unsteady
 Beyond Vision 101

steps across the murky beaches; the houses seemingly floating in La Cocha,
not settled next to it; the tall patches of grass that make knowing whether
one is seeing the beach or the lake almost impossible; the constant pres-
ence of the fog and the rain; and the many shots in which a dim candle or a
bleak ray of light is not enough to illuminate the scene and clarify the plot.
This unsettling of the audience’s expectations, and the tension it produces,
is strengthened because Vega’s use of haptic perception is as visual as it is
conceptual. Vega does not offer a clear and complete picture, either visually
or thematically. The story line, like the visual field, is blurry, obscure, partial,
and incomplete. The scarcity of dialogue and information that can help pro-
vide context or narrative closure aggravates this sensation. Like the rays of
light cutting through the mist, information in La sirga is scarce and arrives
sporadically. Only through brief sentences and long silences does the viewer
catch a glimpse of the sociopolitical reality underlying the plot, as well as
the characters’ feelings, intentions, thoughts, and emotions. It is through
the blurry vision of the fog that the audience learns about and can relate to
Alicia’s fear and pain, her vulnerability and bravery.
Sound-­management techniques heighten this effect in all three films. La
sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro animal rely exclusively on environmental sound
and on scant, fragmented dialogues rife with ambiguity (and Oscuro ani-
mal not even so). As vision becomes increasingly obscured and unreliable,
sound plays a greater role. If the constant presence of visual impediments
creates an oblique mode of seeing, the use of sound invites the audience to
pay attention to what at the beginning may be perceived only as silence or
background noise. In this sense, the experience of Miguel Hernández, the
sound designer of La sirga, encapsulates one’s journey as a spectator as well:
“Mi primer día fue así como, esto es muy silencioso, qué voy a hacer si esto
es demasiado silencioso. Pero es como entrar y empezar a descubrir esa otra
sonoridad, esa otra sonoridad que no es evidente, que no es estridente, que
no es como la ciudad. . . . [Hacer esta sonoridad] requiere mucho más tra-
bajo que hacer una película de balazos. . . . Requiere mucho más tiempo de
estarl[a] buscando” (Navas 2012). This “otra sonoridad,” or other sonority,
is a fundamental part of the multisensorial and pensive mode of perception
that La sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro animal seek to create. The insistent pat-
tering of raindrops on the hostel’s tin roof and the constant howling of the
wind in La sirga, the sounds of the chains that bind the kidnapped man and
the bleating of the goat in Violencia, and the sounds of the jungle and the
lyrics of the song playing in the truck’s radio in Oscuro animal—all these
sonic elements are as important as the rare dialogue for the development of
the stories, often even more so.
The viewer is made restless and uncomfortable by the absence of an om-
102  Haunting without Ghosts

niscient, reliable narrative voice that provides the exegetic cues to decipher
the situation, explicate the details of the historical context, penetrate the
innermost secrets of the characters, and negotiate the space. But the ten-
sion resulting from these information gaps is key to the reflective mood that
not only La sirga but also Violencia and Oscuro animal create. In fact, there is
less dialogue and context in Violencia and Oscuro animal, which exacerbates
the spectator’s confusion and discomfort, demanding an even more active
engagement with the stories. This is important because, as mentioned in
the previous chapter, certainty is one of the first things to vanish in the fog
of war. When violence erupts, the ability to understand and foresee what is
going to happen next, as well as the capacity to distinguish between friend
and foe, are muddled or lost. This anxiety permeates all three films, defines
the experience of watching them, and redirects the viewer’s attention toward
that which cannot be fully seen, heard, or elucidated. This frustration is
highly productive and can be equated with what Jean-­Louis Comolli calls
the “structuring disillusion” that gives cinematic representation “the offen-
sive strength . . . [that] allows it to work against the completing, reassur-
ing, mystifying representations of ideology” (2015, 288). As Comolli puts
it, if “cinematic representation is to do something other than pile visible on
visible,” it has to, as La sirga and spectral realism do, “produce in our sight
the very blindness which is at the heart of the visible” (288). The haptic per-
ception Vega explores asks one to confront and reflect on the limits of and
the violence embedded in particular ways of seeing, especially as it relates to
rural lands and peoples in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. The
visual grammar of La sirga encourages an introspective mode of perception
that reflects on the consequences of war and the unfinished and laborious
nature of the struggle for survival and healing, all of which are of the utmost
importance for Violencia and Oscuro animal.

Triptych for a War: Radical Defamiliarization

and Haptic Hauntings in Violencia

As mentioned earlier, the subtitle of Jorge Forero’s Violencia (2015) could

be “A Day in the Colombian Armed Conflict.” The film paints a tableau
of the war in Colombia through three seemingly unrelated vignettes. The
characters are unexceptional, almost banal, and the stories appear trivial at
first. Each section of the movie follows the dawn-­to-­dusk routine of an un-
named man and his involvement, either as victim or as perpetrator, with the
three main factions of the armed conflict: the guerrillas, the military, and
the paramilitary. Through this device, Violencia takes its audience from the
 Beyond Vision 103

Figure 2.3. Jorge Forero, Violencia, 2015. First vignette. A kidnapped man eats with
a chain around his neck.

jungle to a small town in the countryside and then to Bogotá in order to ex-
plore the terrifyingly everyday nature of the infamous war crimes associated
with each armed group: mass kidnapping by the guerrillas, the system of
assassinations of poor urban young men by the military known as the falsos
positivos,25 and the torture training camps that the paramilitary forces spread
across the national territory. Diegetically unrelated, the segments are inter-
connected by formal elements, and together they present complementary
aspects of Colombia’s armed conflict as experienced in daily life.
Despite its title, the film does not show explicit or gruesome acts of
cruelty. Instead, Violencia focuses on the routines and even small acts of
politeness that allow one to endure a conflict: saying thank you and please,
tipping the woman who sells you the buckets in which the blood of your vic-
tim will be held, shaving and showering with a chain around your neck. This
tension between everyday actions such as personal grooming and the loom-
ing presence of violence persists throughout the movie but is most vividly
felt in the first segment. The vignette follows a man who has been kid-
napped by an unidentified, but presumably guerrilla, military group as he
goes about his day in the jungle. We see him sleeping, having breakfast,
doing the dishes, and washing his clothes, all of this with a heavy chain tied
around his neck. Even in the dark, the clinking of the chain does not let
the audience forget that the man is bound, his fate tied to the outcome of
the longest armed conflict in the hemisphere. The constant presence of the
chain marks the abnormality and the violence of these attempts at normalcy.
What is more violent here is the effort to normalize violence, the way it is
embedded in day-­to-­day practices.
The eroding effect of this sustained, low-­intensity, quotidian violence is
104  Haunting without Ghosts

Figure 2.4. Jorge Forero, Violencia, 2015. Second vignette. Silhouettes of soldiers
finalizing a falsos positivos transaction.

enhanced by the film’s treatment of the body. Instead of eroticizing or ex-

oticizing violence, the segment shows the degrading agony of kidnapping.
It allows the audience to see the gradual physical and emotional decompo-
sition that kidnapping produces: the man moves slowly and stretches his
aching neck and limbs; he trembles and suffers from diarrhea; sores and
rashes cover his skin; and, haunted by mosquitoes and nightmares, he can-
not rest even in his sleep. His routine culminates with his failed attempt at
listening to the voices of family members of kidnapped people sending mes-
sages to their loved ones on the radio, a common practice in Colombia. Cut
off from any bond of love and care, he cries himself to sleep. The harrowing
sound of the man sobbing in the dark stays with the viewer and serves as a
sobering reminder that violence is sustained not only by murder and rape
but also by the imposition of a routine amid the logics and dynamics of war.
For these reasons, the first segment of Violencia stands as a powerful meta-
phor for Colombia itself: everyday tasks like bathing, walking, sleeping,
or shaving are carried out as in any other place, but the visual and auditory
dominance of the chains, the looming presence of the blurry but ubiquitous
soldiers, and the desperate sobs of the man remind the viewer that such im-
posed normalcy is one of the most violent aspects of the conflict.
The haptic treatment of sound, vision, and time in the film reinforces this
tension between normalcy and violence. The film shuns the melodramatic
and spectacularized elements that tend to dominate narratives of historical
violence in and about Colombia. Instead, it resorts to a spectral mode of
representation whereby violence remains unseen but ever present. As a re-
sult, the normalcy of daily life becomes tainted, unheimlich, and the violence
 Beyond Vision 105

that lingers beneath it, often enabling it, can be intensely felt, if not always
pinned down. Thus, in Violencia, as in La sirga and Oscuro animal, what one
does not see is as important as, and perhaps even more so than, what one
does see. The film starts with over two minutes of almost complete darkness
and the environmental sounds of the jungle. Daylight slowly illuminates the
scene, but the film still abounds in dark sequences that challenge visual in-
terpretation; and no explanation is provided to clarify or mitigate the overall
sense of confusion. For the most part, both characters and viewers rely pri-
marily on environmental sound and subtle visual cues to make sense of the
situation. Even key moments of the film, like the murder of the two young
men in the second segment, are represented within this visual and narrative
ambiguity: the road is pitch black, and the only things we see during the
whole sequence are silhouettes of soldiers illuminated by the headlights of a
military vehicle. We hear the voices of the driver and a military commander
having an argument that most Colombian audiences would recognize as the
final stages of a falsos positivos transaction. Then we hear, without seeing,
how the young men are shot to death. The tires screech as the cars leave. The
screen goes back to black.
This prioritization of auditory cues over visual ones, and the exploration
of the emotional and ethical potential of sound, or what the sound designer
of La sirga calls “other sonority,” is present throughout the film but can be
best exemplified in the first vignette. The segment that opens the film starts
and ends with a dark screen where we see nothing, but the sound is crisp.
From the sounds of the jungle at sunrise to the sobbing of the man at night,
this vignette takes us on a twenty-­one-­minute journey during which nobody
speaks, and we are provided with few or no clues about the situation. That
nobody speaks, however, does not mean the segment is silent. Rather, it is
filled with aural elements: the myriad sounds of the jungle, the mosquitoes,
the humming of the man as he washes the dishes, the crunching of the leaves
and branches under his boots, the clinking of the chains, the roar of a heli-
copter flying by, the organic sounds of a man with a debilitated stomach
defecating in the dark, the fragmented voices on the radio, the jungle once
again, the sobbing. This technique of sound management, which is even
more pronounced in Oscuro animal, enhances the sense of isolation and de-
spair and transfers it to the viewers. Like the kidnapped man, Alicia in La
sirga, and the women in Oscuro animal, we too feel ignored and forsaken, cut
off from a rationale that explains the situation or provides a sense of purpose,
both intra- and extradiegetically.
La sirga, Oscuro animal, and particularly Violencia are riddled with the
“great holes” cited by Bazin as key to encouraging an active engagement
106  Haunting without Ghosts

from the audience in cinematic realism (2005a, 35). Plot lacunae, ellipses,
and subtle contextualization through environmental and sometimes elusive
details foreground the ambiguity and anxiety experienced by victims and
survivors during and in the aftermath of violence and remind viewers that
one of the worst consequences of war is hampering the ability to make sense
of the world, and hence to understand, process, and heal from individual
and collective trauma. As Bazin suggests, the spectators of these films are
likely to lose their footing, slip, and get their feet wet (2005a, 35) in their
own journey to reflect on the meaning and impact of historical violence. In
Violencia this is accomplished through several elements: there is no narrative
voice that contextualizes or clarifies the plot, and the dialogue is scarce and
not always helpful in understanding what is going on or preempting what
will happen next. The few cues that the film does provide are subtle and
probably imperceptible for the foreign or uninformed eye and ear: excerpts
from the radio show Las voces del secuestro, Transmilenio’s red buses and other
landmarks of Bogotá, a blurry black bracelet with the letters “AUC.” Being
unable to easily identify spatial and sociohistorical cues creates a sense of
disorientation and even impatience for viewers, who find themselves fol-
lowing characters around in remote jungles or foreign cities without a clear
sense of where they or the plot are going. Furthermore, the sensation does
not necessarily ameliorate as time goes by. The plot, which is indeterminate,
remains unresolved throughout. If little or no context is provided at the be-
ginning, there are also no explanations that help the unacquainted viewer
make sense of the violence witnessed on screen. This work is left to the audi-
ence, not as a challenge but as an ethical responsibility.
The camerawork reinforces and aggravates the feelings of disorientation
and exasperation. If the man looks tired, pained, disoriented, and lost, so
does the camera. It is unsteady, and its seemingly random attention to de-
tail—whether the repeated close-­ups of the man’s face, the focus on the
chain or on particular branches of trees—impedes the constitution of a per-
spectivist vision that maps the space and provides a sense of physical or
symbolic mastery over it. The camera does not ground, accommodate, or
direct one’s vision. Instead, it looks and wanders around without affording
the spectator cues about what one is supposed to be paying attention to and
why. The trees, literally, do not allow one to see the forest.
But the film departs from settler narratives that mark the jungle as an “in-
fierno verde,” because it resists striation projects made in the name of prog-
ress and development and has the potential of turning the civilized man into
a “savage.” The chain around the man’s neck and the ghostly presence of the
soldiers reminds viewers of a long history of the jungle as a space that fuels
 Beyond Vision 107

and sustains such profitable ventures through environmental and human

exploitation.26 This lends historical density to the jungle—a space often as-
sumed to be in a stage prior to or untouched by the linear and progress-­
driven temporality of modernity—highlighting the violence through which
space is inscribed in national history and pointing to an ethical cartography
of the country, one that acknowledges complex and often subtle linkages
between seemingly unrelated events: despite taking place in different loca-
tions, all three segments are symbolically interconnected through visual ref-
erences to the jungle. Though physically removed from the rainforest where
the kidnapped man languishes, the second and third vignettes start by visu-
ally emphasizing a connection with it, and with each other, through the
leaf pattern of the curtains that adorn the rooms of both the young man
soon to be murdered and the paramilitary commander. From the real leaves
and trees of the jungle to the synthetic fabric of the curtains, the notion
of a shared space connects the stories that initially appear unrelated. If the
reality of the kidnapped man seems entirely removed from that of the young
man who inhabits the “concrete jungle,” the curtains first and his tragic
death later remind the audience that their fates are all interrelated and that
Colombia is a nation at war; the space they share unbeknownst to each
other unites them in the bloody history of the nation. Violencia does not let
its audience forget this. In one way or another, all the characters that appear
onscreen are connected to the violence hidden from view in the jungle or in
guarded torture camps. This shows that the three segments are indeed pro-
foundly related and asks unsettling questions about the role we all have in
the normalization of violence.
The first segment of Violencia foregrounds the impact of the imposed
normality of violence on the daily life of one man, partly through camera-
work that seeks to replicate the looming sense of threat that oppresses and
smothers him, even in situations of relative relief. For example, when the
soldiers briefly free the man of his chains so he can bathe in the river, the
sense of asphyxia worsens instead of waning. The camera focuses on closed
shots of the man barely able to keep his head above water, looking anx-
iously around while the soldiers watch his every move from the shore. Then
the man submerges in the water. As he goes under, so does the camera. For
about twenty seconds, all one sees is the murky waters of the river; then the
man resurfaces, gasping for air. This sequence is repeated four times, and in
each one the fear that he will not reemerge intensifies. Both on land and in
water, with or without chains, the man is besieged; his footsteps, routines,
and fate are tied to the uncertainty and unpredictability of war.
The sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, and lack of purpose is reinforced by
108  Haunting without Ghosts

the pace and temporal structure of the film, which rejects modernity’s push
toward resolution. As time goes by, there is no real sense that the story is
“going anywhere,” no sense of progress, or even direction. Like La sirga and
Oscuro animal, Violencia does not grant the viewer the comfort of closure. By
the end of the film, one is left with the idea that what one just saw will re-
peat itself, with small variants, over and over; it will recommence as soon as
the sun comes up. This can be exasperating for the viewer whose desire to see
the plot advance toward a conclusion is continually teased and frustrated.
The suspense that the film creates with its intense attention to the charac-
ters’ seemingly mundane routines contrasts with the open-­endedness of all
three stories. The irritation mounts because Violencia assumes the tempo-
rality of the quotidian, unabashedly dilating narrative time. By decelerat-
ing narrative time, the film eschews the urgencies of plot denouement and
focuses instead on the unabating, yet unresolved, tensions brewing under
the sense of normalcy in daily life. This insistence on a temporality that
challenges modernity’s push for speed and constant advancement is key for
spectral realism and can be traced to classic realism.
Norman Valencia (2019) argues that one of the main problems with con-
temporary cultural production about historical violence is that the link be-
tween the representational project and the critical reflection at the core of
classic realism has been replaced by a consumerist approach that priori-
tizes visual pleasure and instant gratification. Referencing Fredric Jameson,
Valencia explains that patience was and still is key when reading Balzac and
other nineteenth-­century realist authors, because explaining the socioeco-
nomic and political context was as important as, if not more important than,
the plot itself (Valencia 2019, 21–22). So much so that the trials and tribu-
lations of Eugène de Rastignac or Emma Bovary are primarily read as entry
points for exploring the moral bankruptcy, hypocrisy, and overall corruption
that propelled the bourgeoisie to power at a time of profound social, politi-
cal, and economic transformation. The time and textual space invested in
talking about clothing, jewelry, manners, and décor is not a detour from the
main story but a fundamental part of it and a key component of the probing
gaze that sustains the realist project.
Despite spectral realism’s distrust of vision and distaste for clarification,
it shares with its classic predecessor an interest in exploring temporality as a
tool of social and ethical critique and as a means to solicit a more active en-
gagement from the reader or viewer. Whereas realist writers such as Balzac
tested the limits of the reader’s patience with painstakingly detailed descrip-
tions and the often-­overbearing presence of the omniscient narrative voice,
Forero, Vega, and Guerrero rupture and elongate the fast-­paced temporality
 Beyond Vision 109

of modernity through different means but with a common goal: eliciting

critical reflection about the structural violence and ethical problems that
underlie their respective societies. This critical perspective on temporality is
also central to the discussion on cinematic realism. As Domin Choi (2013,
177) explains, “the question of realism” in cinema has revolved around the
prioritization of temporality over plot denouement. Using Gilles Deleuze’s
influential terms, Choi traces the conceptualization of modern forms of
realism in film to the development of the “time-­image” (as opposed to the
“movement-­image”; see Deleuze 2003a, 2003b) in Italian neorealism. Choi
states, “In Western cinema, the notion of the time-­image emerged with
Italian neorealism. The need for duration, in order to present real situations
and things without fragmenting them, has tended to identify the cinema of
the time-­image with realism” (2013, 176–177). As he notes, this is in great
part due to Bazin because, for the French critic, “when speaking about cine-
matic realism, what is at stake is a perceptual realism, not a narrative realism”
(Choi 2013, 178). What takes preeminence is the embracing of cinema’s
unique ability to capture the unfolding of “real time, in which things exist,
along with the duration of the action” (Bazin 2005a, 39). That is, in cine-
matic realism, particularly as conceptualized through Italian neorealism, the
primacy of the plot is replaced by a focus on temporality as the key profilmic
event.
Violencia, La sirga, and Oscuro animal are heirs to this tradition. In these
films, elongated temporality allows narrative time to be filled with the ex-
periences of those silenced in hegemonic narratives about nation (re)build-
ing and serves as a vehicle to counter the critical and ethical numbness pro-
duced by the fast pace and titillating images of many of the cultural products
that relate to historical violence in Colombia. Departing from classic real-
ism, and in line with spectral realism, these films use time (and sound), not
vision, as a way to emphasize the human toll of war without exploiting,
eroticizing, or glorifying suffering. Time, in these films, is purposefully and
painfully slow,27 because it gives space to pain, anxiety, and confusion. It is a
cathected temporality that encourages viewers to be aware of and to reflect
on the physical, psychological, and emotional pain that violence produces
without being distracted by the entanglements of the plot, rushed by the
velocity of action scenes, or seduced by Manichean teleologies that make
human suffering acceptable and even desirable. Furthermore, by focusing
on “dead time” instead of combat or narrative time, the films extend the
concept of violence to include routines and other everyday, supposedly non-
violent, instances of life. The decision for all three films not to focus on the
violent acts themselves, but instead to dwell on the tension-­filled and emo-
110  Haunting without Ghosts

tionally charged moments that come before, between, and after violence,
allows viewers to pay attention to the long process of rebuilding and healing
that follows heinous acts and to see it as part of the continuum of violence
that affects the lives of millions of people in and beyond Colombia.
This way of looking at and showing violence is further emphasized be-
cause, despite its title and the gruesome events referenced, Violencia does not
include explicit depictions of physical or sexual violence onscreen. Violence
in the film is part of a larger and more diffused atmosphere, created in part
by a strategic use of background references, sound, and nature that serve as
stand-­ins for depictions of direct violence. In the first two segments, armed
figures are not portrayed clearly. They are shadows in the background or sil-
houettes of boots against the lights of a car on a dark road; they are flashes
on a TV screen or fragmented voices on the radio. Like the army in Evelio
Rosero’s Los ejércitos, armed actors are blurry, looming presences that haunt
scenes but do not fully appear in them. As the movie advances, however, it
becomes increasingly clear that despite their spectral nature, or perhaps be-
cause of it, they are ever present; they are the ones deciding the fate of the
characters, the plot, and by extension the nation. Yet, visually, the most ex-
plicit images of violence in the film are neither directed toward nor inflicted
by humans. The sores and lacerations on the mangled body of the man in
the jungle are not the result of torture but of his prolonged captivity; the
jungle, not the guerrilla fighters, has inflicted those wounds. It is undeni-
able that kidnapping is a form of torture, but the film focuses on the gradual
decomposition of a body forced to remain in a hostile environment rather
than on the more explicit forms of verbal, sexual, or physical violence asso-
ciated with this crime.
The film’s approach to violence is more clearly exemplified in the third
vignette, which contains the only explicit killing in the film: that of a goat.
Unlike the murder of the two young men in the previous segment, this scene
takes place in broad daylight and is shown clearly to the viewers. The se-
quence its painstakingly long. It commences with the paramilitary com-
mander choosing the animal, includes its capture and the actual slicing of
its throat, and lingers on the agony of the animal as it slowly bleeds to death.
We are made to watch the animal’s dilated slaughter, becoming unwilling
witnesses as its desperate bleating is gradually replaced by the crisp sound
of the blood filling the bucket underneath. Later on, the sequence of events
is repeated, not with a goat, but with a woman. Forero uses the formal reso-
nances between the two sequences to convey the dehumanization of women
by the paramilitaries—and other military figures that will take center stage
in Oscuro animal—and the extreme violence to which the woman will be
 Beyond Vision 111

submitted without being shown onscreen. The repetition of the events lead-
ing up to the assassination, the mirroring of the language, the presence of
the same objects (the bucket, the machete, etc.), and especially the bleat-
ing of the goats in the farmyard are profoundly unsettling for the viewer,
who is now fully aware of what is going to happen. The strategic use of
nature, objects, and animals effectively communicates and decries the mul-
tiple forms of violence transpiring daily in Colombia as a result of the armed
conflict, without allowing viewers to derive pleasure from it or uncritically
consume it.
As mentioned, the use of sound plays a key role in this regard. The en-
vironment is rendered hostile in the incessant clinking of the chains and
the relentless buzzing of the mosquitoes, the overwhelming roar of sirens
and traffic jams in the city, the premonitory bleating of the goats, and the
sound of the blood stream filling the bucket to make morcilla. This aggres-
sive atmosphere foreshadows the more explicit and definitive forms of vio-
lence that take place in all three segments of the film. Thus, even the more
mundane tasks become increasingly ominous, haunted by a looming threat
that can be vividly felt but not pinpointed, allowing the film to pose ques-
tions and challenge assumptions about the ways violence is experienced,
exercised, and sustained in the context of prolonged conflict—and about
one’s own connections to it. How does the war shape daily life for millions
of Colombians apparently unrelated to each other? And how does it affect
one’s understanding of what violence and normalcy are?
The film ends with a mundane sequence: a man—the paramilitary com-
mander—and a woman are grabbing a beer and having something to eat
at a local restaurant; then they walk into the night to the sound of “Ella
ya me olvidó,” a romantic song from the 1970s in which the chorus repeats
the verse “Yo no puedo olvidarla” over and over. As people settle into their
nightly routines and start getting ready to commence the next day, the film
reaches its end. But the viewer can no longer return to normalcy. The words
of the song, “I cannot forget about her,” now take on a different, more ma-
cabre meaning, reminding the viewer of the tortured and murdered woman.
After watching all three segments, daily events and even popular cultural
references like cheesy love songs acquire a different meaning and become
eerie and ominous, unheimlich. Freud (1959b, 930) defines the latter term
as a “class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and
long familiar.” The uncanny is the radical defamiliarization of the familiar
provoked by the disruptive return of what has been repressed instead of duly
processed.28 Violencia performs this radical defamiliarizing of day-­to-­day life
in the midst of an internal armed conflict and turns one’s attention to the
112  Haunting without Ghosts

violence that has been repressed—left unacknowledged, unaccounted for,

and not sufficiently mourned.
There is nothing violent about the final sequence, but that is precisely
the most violent part. The film successfully shows how the most gruesome
acts of war are sustained by and embedded into the social fabric through
the trivialities of quotidian life. Violence, in Violencia, remains for the most
part vague and spectral, unseen but ever present. At the film’s end, all daily
events become tainted by the violence that we now know haunts them. The
film makes us wary of routine interactions like grabbing a beer, of com-
monplace objects like buckets, and of traditional dishes like blood sausage.
Forero’s film makes us reflect on the apparent nonviolence that violence im-
poses, and by so doing, Violencia encourages critical self-­reflection about our
own potential connections to the armed conflict. Like the films analyzed by
T. J. Demos in Return to the Postcolony, Violencia invites viewers “to consider
their own subtle complicity in this history, how we may have participated
through so many small acts in everyday life, moments of inattention, and
negligence of nonintervention within dominant narratives. These contribu-
tions form part of the larger system that allows violence to occur on an insti-
tutional and national level, even if we didn’t participate in the spectacular-
ized acts of brutality that are only the most visible symptoms of that larger
state of affairs” (Demos 2013, 43).
Violencia’s triptych of war explores the many ways in which violence im-
plicates us all. From the jungle, to Bogotá, to small towns and the country-
side, the film shows that we are all interconnected and are part of—and
sometimes even complicit with—the violent normalcy that war imposes.
Through the haptic reworking of sound and vision, and its elongation of
temporality, Violencia defamiliarizes Colombian daily life and solicits a more
critical and active positioning with regard to those aspects of our recent
history that have been repressed. It asks that we reengage with the voices
that are silenced in the jungle, the pleas of young men murdered for the
career advancement of military commanders and politicians, and the women
whose screams we never listened to. With its sober, unmelodramatic tone
and its mundane stories, Violencia reinserts historical density into the quo-
tidian, making it unheimlich: it makes us see objects, spaces, and interactions
differently and hear city, rural, and animal sounds with a heightened sense
of suspicion and dread. This defamiliarization makes us uncomfortable and
anxious, it haunts us, and like all hauntings, it seeks answers, or at the very
least, demands that questions be asked in the name of justice. Hence, if the
image of a man going about his day with a chain tied around his neck and
his fate determined by blurry but ever-­present armed figures is a powerful
 Beyond Vision 113

metaphor of Colombia’s daily life in the midst of its armed conflict, then the
final moments of the third vignette serve as a symbol of the film’s aesthetic
and ethical ethos: despite the banality of the situation, the sense of normalcy
is now disrupted, and as the screen fades to black and the audience starts
to disperse, the now-­eerie words of the song keep playing in the dark and
continue to do so in our heads, haunting us as we leave the theater. No, we
cannot forget about her.

Bodies at War: Gender Violence, the Male Gaze,

and Haptic Perception in Oscuro animal

Felipe Guerrero’s Oscuro animal (2016) has the tripartite structure of Violen-
cia and a story line similar to La sirga. The film focuses on the journeys of
women caught in the midst of war and seeking to escape it as an entry point
to explore two of the most brutal aspects of the armed conflict in Colom-
bia: gender-­based violence (which includes but is not limited to sexual vio-
lence)29 and forced displacement. The Internal Displacement Monitoring
Centre (2018) estimates that from 1985 to 2014 more than 10 percent of the
country’s population was forced out of its land and homes due to violence,
which at the time placed Colombia as the country with the second-­highest
percentage of internally displaced people, after Syria. In Colombia, this dy-
namic is heavily gendered. Official statistics show that forced displacement
is the war crime that most affects women, with Afro-­Colombian women
being the population most affected (Grupo de Análisis e Investigación 2012,
8); that the majority of the victims of forced displacement are women (10);
and that one out of ten Colombian women has been forcefully displaced
(11). Sexual violence was also pervasive during the conflict. A survey con-
ducted from 2010 to 2015 found that just during the five years of the study,
at least 875,437 women were victims of sexual violence, which amounts to
sixteen victims per hour (Violaciones y Otras Violencias 2017, 5). The survey
also found that, as is the case with forced displacement, Afro-­Colombian
women ages fifteen to twenty-­four were significantly more likely to be vic-
tims of sexual violence than their counterparts from other ethno-­racial
groups (17).30
Oscuro animal foregrounds the impact of these forms of violence through
the stories of three unnamed women making their way to Bogotá in an effort
to save and rebuild their lives. Like Alicia, the first woman flees her home
after a paramilitary group murders all of her family members and turns her
village into a ghost town.31 When the same organization ambushes the
114  Haunting without Ghosts

group she is traveling with and massacres several people, including the par-
ents of a girl, she decides to care for the girl, and they continue the journey
together. The second story is about a young Afro-­Colombian woman who
is forced to cook for and is sexually abused by an unidentified group of sol-
diers. She escapes after killing one of her rapists, and the film follows her as
she struggles to make her way to the city while dealing with severe abdomi-
nal pain and vaginal bleeding, probably as a result of her sexual abuse. The
third and final vignette traces the footsteps of a woman trying to defect from
the paramilitary organization she has been forcefully recruited into and to
escape, with the help of a young man, from the commander who rapes her.
The differences between each story present a comprehensive and complex
perspective of the experiences of women in the Colombian armed conflict,
while similarities in the social positioning of the protagonists highlight im-
portant patterns of vulnerability: they are young, poor, nonwhite, and live
in remote areas abandoned by the state and decimated by war. Regardless of
the characters’ specific involvement with the conflict, gender-­based violence
and forced displacement unites their lives and stories. The threat produced
by these intersecting factors is intensely felt throughout the film as a relent-
less and obscure force ever lurking in the shadows. This is the dark, spectral
animal that hunts and haunts the women and gives the movie its title. As
Guerrero says, “Este oscuro animal es en realidad . . . [una] presencia latente,
[una] presencia que no se ve, que se siente, y que es la violencia en sí, y que
aparece en los momentos más repentinos y que te da un zarpazo” (Interna-
tional Film Festival Rotterdam 2016b).
As the director also points out, however, Oscuro animal “is a film about
hope” (FilmforPeople 2016). Despite the challenges the women face, the
film highlights acts of female agency and solidarity that provide vital sup-
port in the direst circumstances, and it stresses the protagonists’ fortitude
and will to overcome such situations. From sharing an arepa to welcom-
ing someone into one’s life and home,32 Oscuro animal shows the gestures
through which individuals and communities seek to mend bonds shattered
by war while trying to heal and recommence their lives. Furthermore, even
though both Oscuro animal and La sirga are directed by men, they move away
from classic cinematic conventions about the representation of women, par-
ticularly in contexts of violence. They address gender and sexual violence
without sexualizing or normalizing it; they do not portray women as pas-
sive victims in need of saving by a (male) hero; and they do not eroticize
their suffering. On the contrary, the films show the ways in which women
endure, cope with, and seek to reconstruct their lives after severe trauma,
highlighting their agency, resilience, and will to survive. These films actual-
 Beyond Vision 115

ize these themes by leveraging haptic perception to create a cinematic gram-

mar that, as Felipe Guerrero says, challenges the way the armed conflict has
been seen and narrated,33 and destabilizes the male gaze that romanticizes,
eroticizes, or profits from female bodies and suffering, particularly those of
women of color.
At least since Laura Mulvey’s (1975) iconic essay “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” scholars and audiences have been aware of the sexual
division that drives scopophilic pleasure in film. This means not only that
most films follow the classic heteronormative narrative structure—active
male hero, passive female character providing support or motive for the pro-
tagonist—but also that the camera itself acts as a stand-­in for the male gaze,
constituting cinematic vision itself as masculine and turning women into
objects of contemplation for both characters and audiences; or, as Mulvey
aptly puts it, female characters primarily connote “to-­be-­looked-­at-­ness.”
Oscuro animal avoids that perspective, showing instead the devastating con-
sequences of such a way of looking at women, particularly in the context of
militarized masculinity. Women are the protagonists of the film and con-
stitute almost the entirety of the cast. But their stories do not conform to
patriarchal modes of storytelling, and even though sexual violence is a key
part of all of them, they do not sexualize the bodies of the women. On the
contrary, they expose the male gaze—that is, the gaze that sexualizes the
female body and assigns it the symbolic space of a passive object of contem-
plation—as inherently violent.
Both Oscuro animal and La sirga have several long, tense scenes of men
looking at women that often result in sexual violence. In La sirga, Alicia’s
uncle and cousin watch her through the flimsy walls of her room as she un-
dresses, and the audience sees her fear as she gets in to bed every night. The
lighting emphasizes the violence of this predatory way of looking at women.
The sequence starts with Alicia undressing as she gets ready for bed and
fearfully looks to the left side of the screen. The scene cuts to a shot of her
uncle breathing heavily as he watches her. Then the audience sees Alicia
putting her nightgown on and looking to the right side of the screen. This
time the scene cuts to a close shot of Freddy eagerly watching his young
cousin. The entire sequence is engulfed in darkness, but in two shots that
focus on the act of looking, a ray of light pierces through, illuminating not
the faces of the men but their lustful gaze. In one of the most memorable
scenes of Oscuro animal, a paramilitary commander literally turns the woman
into an object of contemplation before sexually assaulting her: he makes her
stay still, corrects her posture, and quietly stares at her as he lies naked in bed
while she is forced to hold her pose. In this key moment the camera quickly
Figure 2.5. William Vega, La sirga, 2012. Collage of three shots.
 Beyond Vision 117

Figure 2.6. Felipe Guerrero, Oscuro animal, 2016. Facial expression of survivor of
sexual violence and the armed conflict.

moves away from the body of the woman and focuses on her face instead:
her demeanor is hieratic and unexpressive as tears of humiliation and anger
fall down her cheeks. The audience is invited to identify with these feelings
instead of focusing on her nude body. The focus shifts from the erotics of
suffering to the emotional trauma endured by victims of sexual violence.
The focus on the violence of looking thwarts the scopophilic drive and
exposes the unbalanced, gendered dynamics of certain types of cinematic
and sexual pleasure that turn women into objects in both the symbolic realm
of filmmaking and the historical context of the Colombian war. The drive
toward voyeuristic and sexual control over the female body is exposed as vio-
lent for both the characters and spectators, and hence the fantasy of a trans-
parent male gaze is disrupted. Furthermore, because of the topics all three
of the films address, there are implicit resonances between the way the cam-
era objectifies and dissects the female body in the name of cinematic plea-
sure and the militarized violence that turns women into actual objects and
mangled body parts by raping, murdering, and dismembering them. Thus,
the audience can no longer assume the position of the voyeur uncritically.
But the attention the films pay to the devastating effects of war does not
lead to the glorification or eroticization of female suffering. For one thing,
the visual treatment does not eroticize violence. It shows the brutal reality
and vulnerability of bodies at war, particularly those of poor, rural, young
women. For another, the violence they endure is not shown as a necessary
sacrifice, as an excuse for their sexualization, or as a deviation from heroic
masculinity. Instead, sexual violence is portrayed as one of the most brutal,
but not the only, consequence of uneven power relations between men and
women that permeate society, not just war.
118  Haunting without Ghosts

The camerawork effectively conveys this message. It is intensely emo-

tional and deliberately disorienting and discomfiting. As previously men-
tioned, the films employ an abundance of close-­ups of the faces of the pro-
tagonists, but too often their emotions, though intense, remain inscrutable,
which provokes anxiety on the part of the viewer, who cannot “penetrate”
the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters. Instead, the viewer is in-
vited to experience a similar sense of disorientation, uncertainty, and frus-
tration. The women’s expressions are key in this regard. The numerous close-­
ups of their faces reveal an emotional intensity that is not melodramatic
and hence easily readable. On the contrary, their demeanor is tense but con-
tained, agonized but determined, confused but undeterred, wounded but
undefeated, which creates an important contrast with the overly emotional
and hypersexualized depictions of Latin American women—and black and
brown women more broadly—in film and popular culture.
Another aspect that Oscuro animal shares with La sirga and Violencia is
the ambiguous and open-­ended nature of the plot, reinforced by an intensi-
fication of haptic perception’s “other sonority.” Whereas the two films previ-
ously analyzed have conspicuously sparse dialogue, Oscuro animal has none:
the film relies entirely on environmental sound and music. For Guerrero
this “dispositivo sonoro radical” is no vacuous formalism, it is a “propuesta
política” (International Film Festival Rotterdam 2016a). He uses “the power
of mutism” and “verbal absences” (International Film Festival Rotterdam
2016b) to show that in war-­ridden contexts silence is not only, or even pri-
marily, a willful refusal to speak but an imposed condition for survival. Thus,
in Oscuro animal, silence is experienced not as a stubborn absence of dia-
logue but as a forceful act aimed at stripping somebody of his or her ability
to speak or be heard: it is seen as the result of (sexual, physical, and other
forms of racial and gender) violence. Hearing no dialogue for 107 minutes
also makes the audience more attuned to other sounds, granting heightened
importance to all sounds in the film. Faced with a complete lack of conversa-
tion or voice-­over explanation, the audience searches for meaning and con-
text in hushed moans, in the laughter of soldiers, in the roar of cars whizzing
past, in the paralyzing banging of gunshots, or in the indistinct rumble of
both the jungle and the city.
Like La sirga and Violencia, Oscuro animal makes the viewer work for
meaning. Its dismantling of perspectivist vision and of the scopophilic drive
encourages viewers to experience vision in a haptic, not simply optic, man-
ner that includes paying careful attention to background auditory and visual
cues. Two important examples are the music playing from the radio and
the images on the walls of Bogotá toward the end of the movie. The lyrics
 Beyond Vision 119

Figure 2.7. Felipe Guerrero, Oscuro animal, 2016. “Hasta aquí las sonrisas, país
de mierda.” Mural dedicated to Jaime Garzón.

of “Metralla”—a well-­known song by La Pestilencia, an iconic Colombian

hardcore punk band—that blare from the truck as the woman drives away
from the armed conflict give viewers some context that the lack of dialogue
denies them and provide an outlet for the emotions that other women are
unable or unwilling to express.34 The urban linguistic landscape also delivers
relevant information about the reach and scope of the war and, as is the case
in Violencia, shows the connection between the violence in the countryside
and the daily life in the city. Although the characters remain silent, the walls
of Bogotá speak volumes: they are covered with the photographs of hun-
dreds of desaparecidos, and the image that welcomes the protagonists, and
the audience, to the nation’s capital is the smiling face of Jaime Garzón,35
with the caption “Hasta aquí las sonrisas, país de mierda.” The blurry faces
of the disappeared and Garzón’s smile signal that Bogotá is no safe haven,
that the dark animal of violence lurks in the shadows.
The film’s move away from dialogue and toward a haptic sonority is highly
effective: it alters one’s expectations as a viewer, transforms and heightens
one’s senses, and, more importantly, reproduces the silencing of the victims,
particularly the female victims, in the armed conflict. It also encourages
reflection. As Guerrero says, “El sonido es el tiempo” (International Film
Festival Rotterdam 2016b). Oscuro animal ’s lack of dialogue elongates tem-
porality, giving the viewer time and space to reflect on and to experience
the complexity and intensity of the situations and emotions portrayed, thus
contributing to a more holistic, affective, and pensive representation of the
ongoing and unresolved consequences of war.
Even though Oscuro animal focuses on the brutal impact that patriarchal,
120  Haunting without Ghosts

militarized masculinity has on the bodies and the psychological well-­being

of women, the film highlights female strength, determination, and agency.
The film underscores their fortitude, their unwillingness to submit to the
degradation that is imposed upon them, and their determination to sur-
vive and to change their destiny. At the end, all the women manage to flee
the situation that initially bound them and seemed to determine their fate.
And even though their future is uncertain, their will and ability to face it
are not. Furthermore, elements of haptic perception in the film, such as the
radical sound treatment, the unresolved plot lacunae, and the slow pace, in-
duce discomfort and disorientation that truncate the facile consumption of
narratives of violence and incite ethical discernment. Most notably, Oscuro
animal creates an affectively charged, historically dense visual grammar that
is keen to the gendered and racialized aspects that traverse the film’s vari-
ous modes of seeing. This tacit language encourages critical engagement
with vision that marks the often-­unacknowledged and uneven power rela-
tions embedded not only in particular ways of seeing but in the production
of vision itself. As Donna Haraway explains, “Vision is always a question of
the power to see—and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing
practices.” Haraway continues, “With whose blood were my eyes crafted?”
(1988, 585). This question haunts spectral realism and is key for a society
grappling with its violent history and attempting to forge a future in which
the voices of those who have borne the brunt of the conflict, enduring par-
ticularly brutal forms of sexual and gender-­based violence, will no longer
be silenced.
To conclude, the haptic perception of spectral realism advanced by La
sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro animal underscores the unresolved claims for jus-
tice of the specter, inviting us, as Haraway posits, “to become answerable
for what we learn how to see” (1988, 583). The many visual impediments
and plot gaps redirect audience attention to what cannot be easily seen or
grasped, infuse the movies with historical density, and permeate the envi-
ronment with tension that remains unresolved. When the films end, many
questions remain unanswered. This ambiguity and open-­endedness mirror
the uncertainty faced by victims of the armed conflict and remind viewers
of the impossibility of closure that most survivors face. These features also
invite the audience to reflect on the politics and ethics of vision and to think
about the meaning of the difficulty of seeing and understanding for a nation
struggling to come to terms with its recent past and to imagine its future.
These are important moments of transition toward a more peaceful and
equitable society. It is vital to understand that invisibility and silence after
extended periods of warfare are frequently the result of physical or symbolic
 Beyond Vision 121

violence and therefore do not imply that there are no stories to be told, no
experiences to be salvaged. It often simply means that we are unwilling to
see and to listen and that too often we choose to remain oblivious to our own
complicity in the disappearance of those voices and lives. By foregrounding
the specter’s silenced and still unmet demands for justice through explo-
ration of the possibilities of haptic perception, La sirga, Violencia, and Oscuro
animal encourage a more deliberate, introspective, and thoughtful approach
to Colombia’s armed conflict, one that reflects on the consequences of war
and accounts for the layered, ambiguous, ongoing, and often unresolved
nature of stories of recommencement and survival.
CHAPTER 3

The Revenants: Deferred Burials and Suspended

Mourning in the Works of Juan Manuel Echavarría,
Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes

Tierra piden los muertos no agua ni escarnio.

Griselda Gambaro, Antígona furiosa

What remains to be said in response to an absence that cannot be undone?

Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence

How does one grieve the undead? How do individuals, communities, and
artists manage the crises produced not by the burden of burying and mourn-
ing the dead but by the impossibility of doing so? The systematic disap-
pearance of people was a widespread tactic used throughout the modern
Colombian armed conflict, from 1980 to 2016. All armed actors, including
the National Army, used this brutal practice as part of their military opera-
tions. But the crime peaked with the exponential growth of paramilitaries
in the 1990s (Haugaard and Nicholls 2010), and “disappearing” people con-
tinued to be one of these groups’ main strategies of war until their demobi-
lization through the Justice and Peace Law (2003–2006). Unlike the guer-
rillas, paramilitary groups, known as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia
(AUC), often operated with the tacit consent and sometimes even direct
collaboration of Colombian authorities, military forces, and economic and
political elites. Their leaders faced conflicting pressures: they had to main-
tain control over the territory, something they achieved through extremely
violent means, while creating and sustaining the image that violence had re-
ceded and Colombia was becoming a pacified country ready to be rediscov-
ered by local and international tourists and investors.1 Disappearances were
instrumental for this macabre and lucrative purpose. The AUC switched
from more spectacular forms of violence, such as the massacres, forced dis-
placements, and exhibition of tortured bodies that characterized the group’s

122
 The Revenants 123

earlier period, to more “discreet” forms of violence that included different

ways of effacing the evidence of their crimes by disappearing the bodies
of the victims. This effectively spectralized their power, making it invisible
but clearly perceptible to the communities under siege. It also magnified
the terror they caused among the rural civilian population while success-
fully consolidating the urban national imaginary that saw guerrilla orga-
nizations as more violent and menacing, and thus as the country’s main
enemy. After demobilization, many factions of the AUC that did not join
the process or failed to reincorporate themselves into civilian life continued
to operate through new smaller and less centralized criminal organizations
known as “Bacrims” (bandas criminales), many of which kept strong ties to
the country’s elites and continued to serve their purposes with the same
ghastly methods. The result, as noted in previous chapters, is that Colom-
bia has some of the highest numbers of desaparecidos in the world.2 As of
September 15, 2018, the Centro Nacional Memoria de Histórica (2018) re-
ported 80,472 conflict-­related missing persons, a number that far exceeds
the total combined number of desaparecidos during the military dictatorships
of Argentina and Chile.
In this chapter, I focus on works of art that explore the representational,
ethical, and affective challenges posed by systematic, prolonged, unacknowl-
edged, and repressed human absenting. These works, by Juan Manuel Echa-
varría (1947–­), Beatriz González (1938–­), and Erika Diettes (1978–), offer
themselves as spaces for the recognition, mourning, and symbolic reparation
of these irretrievable losses. Within the artists’ ample portfolios, I focus on
six works produced during the first decade and a half of this century, all of
which, unlike the novels and films previously analyzed, stem from specific
cases of forced disappearance and violent death in the country and in most
cases also involve a direct relationship between the artist and the family
members of the victims. Echavarría’s Réquiem NN (2013), González’s Auras
anónimas (2009), and Diettes’s Río abajo (2007–2008), A punta de sangre
(2009), Sudarios (2011), and Relicarios (2010) all tackle the aporia that the
representation of an irretrievable event entails and deal with the travails of
mourning in a land choked by violence and fear. Affect is a key part of these
artists’ projects. Their works are highly cathected spaces formed as com-
pensatory sites for mourning the missing and reconstituting human bonds
shattered by war, both between the dead and the living and among those
who have survived and lack other spaces in which to process their trauma.
This representation is important because, as Judith Butler (2006) de-
tails in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, the differential
allocation of grief has considerable sociopolitical implications. Whom we
124  Haunting without Ghosts

mourn and how are key parts of the narratives that create and consolidate
communities, not only separating friend from foe but also often defining the
limits of personhood and humanity. A prohibition against mourning im-
plies an act of dehumanization, either by classifying the dead as a threat or
a burden and therefore not worth grieving, or, even more problematically,
by leaving their absence entirely unmarked and unacknowledged—not even
recognizing that a human life has been lost—thus making such deaths not
ungrieved but ungrievable. Taking this anguish into account, this chapter is
about those who seek to mourn in contexts where that possibility has been
foreclosed by violence. It is about the brave civilians who challenge Creon’s
ban in Sophocles’s Antigone against burying and paying homage to the dead,
and about the creativity and commitment of artists who look for ways to
acknowledge the unresolved and irretrievable absences left by forced disap-
pearance, seeking to create spaces for their symbolic and collective mourn-
ing through art. In this chapter I investigate how art can become a spectral
site, a space propitious for uncanny encounters with ghostly revenants and
welcoming of their demand for justice.
These modes of representation are of particular relevance in the light of
the revisionist impulse at the core of forced disappearance and the crisis in
meaning that this particular form of violence seeks to achieve. The methodi-
cal use of forced disappearance not only seeks to kill and then obliterate any
traces of the killing but also to make the very act of killing unacknowledge-
able through any viable legal recourse. In this sense, forced disappearance
is traversed by a strong narrative impulse. Physical violence is not enough.
The act of killing must come with a profusion of narratives that deny the ex-
perience of the victims, contradict and refute the testimonies of their family
members, and constantly redirect discourse from their denunciations and
demands toward a grand narrative of higher values such as patriotism and
tradition or toward supposedly unquestionable desirable outcomes such as
development, progress, and economic growth. This creates a fracture be-
tween the narratives that relate the ordeal lived by the victims and their
loved ones and an official discourse that invalidates and negates such experi-
ences. Forced to live in a schizophrenic world where their experience is dis-
missed as a paranoid delusion—no body, no crime—the families of victims
face a crisis in meaning, identity, and reality itself. The works of art I exam-
ine here offer themselves as instances of what Fernando Rosenberg calls acts
of “obstinate memory” (2016, 110), vital in places like Colombia that have
only recently started to grapple with the magnitude of their human tragedy.
Despite their differences, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and
Erika Diettes do so through an oblique gaze that eschews the immediate
 The Revenants 125

and direct representation of violence and instead explores what Doris Sal-
cedo calls “the affective dimension of violence” (quoted in Malagón-­Kurka
2010, 195).
To this end, Echavarría, González, and Diettes draw on a long and rich
artistic tradition that engages with the country’s convoluted and bloody his-
tory, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century and the first
decades of the twenty-­first.3 During the mid-­1980s, artists such as Doris
Salcedo (1958–­) and Oscar Muñoz (1951–­) spearheaded significant changes
in the Colombian art scene. As the art critic María Margarita Malagón-­
Kurka notes, around that time artists started moving away from descrip-
tive and highly expressionistic representations of violence, common in the
works of earlier figures such as Alipio Jaramillo (1913–1999), Enrique Grau
(1920–2004), and Alejandro Obregón (1920–1992), and began exploring a
more evocative and “impure” visual language that incorporated nontradi-
tional materials like household objects, furniture, personal garments, and
bones and hair—both human and animal—as well as photography and
video. Often, these objects came directly from the places where massacres
or other acts of violence had occurred or were donated by the family mem-
bers of the victims, imbuing the works with a profound affective charge
and acting as traditional indexical referents. Because they point directly to
the victims and their experience of violence, these objects became uncanny
remnants that articulate the country’s violence without seeking to retell it
in agonizing detail.
Salcedo and Muñoz also distinguished themselves from the best-­known
works of literature and film at the time (such as Víctor Gaviria’s Rodrigo D:
No futuro and Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios) by avoiding the
direct and explicit display of human bodies impacted by violence and abjur-
ing the sensationalizing of lifestyles of the sicarios and narcos. Instead, they
developed a growing interest in more subtle ways to confront the country’s
unabated violence and address its representability. In this sense, the visual
arts paved the way for an aesthetic language concerned with representing
the brutal reality of the country while reflecting on the consequences of
the crude and constant influx of images of violence in the media, popular
culture, and the arts. As Malagón-­Kurka notes, Colombia had no official
censorship, so ordinary Colombians as well as cultural producers had the
opposite problem of their counterparts under authoritarian regimes like the
Chilean or Argentinean dictatorships. There was no dearth of images or in-
formation about violence; on the contrary, the news was inundated with
depictions and stories about atrocious events. Artists such as Salcedo and
Muñoz responded by articulating a visual language that prioritized affect
126  Haunting without Ghosts

over shock value, reflected on processes of individual and collective memory

formation and healing, and centered on the many ways violence impacts the
daily lives of the individuals most directly affected by it.
Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and Erika Diettes draw from
and build upon this legacy. They also bring a concrete concern for the indi-
vidual and collective consequences of the suspended and unacknowledged
processes of grief that forced disappearance implies and a keen interest in
the representational challenges it entails. They explore the impact these
vanishings have both on the country’s memory and future and on the work
of artists and other cultural practitioners; and in the process, they become
“gravedigger[s] of sorts” (Diéguez 2015, 39). Through different techniques,
and with different results, their interest in and preoccupation with the des-
aparecidos and their families have led them to create spaces that counter the
radical erasure that violence has hoped to achieve and, where it is possible, to
acknowledge, to mourn, and to symbolically repair the many lives and bonds
maimed by violence. Of course, this does not compensate, nor is it intended
to be a substitute, for the lack of legal recourse or material or psychological
support that the vast majority of victims of violence confront in Colombia.
But by opening spaces where the plight of the vanished is welcomed and
heard, Echavarría, González, and Diettes actualize the potential that art has
for creating instances of counter-­memory and provoking reflective processes
based on affect, some of which may even result in action. This is no minor
feat in a country besieged by imposed absence and silence. Even if, or per-
haps especially because, they cannot recuperate the stories and identities of
Colombia’s murdered and disappeared, Echavarría, González, and Diettes
refuse to remain silent. They insist on conjuring the specters and making
the murmur of their violent fates and claims audible, which is just what the
inhabitants of Puerto Berrío, a small town on the bank of the Magdalena
River that Echavarría frequented, have been doing for decades.

Making Audible in the Mouth That Cannot Speak:

Juan Manuel Echavarría’s Spectral Adoptions

Horror can take many forms, and the imagination of cruelty tends to be pro-
lific. In their quest to disappear the bodies of their victims, all armed actors,
but particularly the paramilitaries, resorted to a broad range of techniques.
They cut them with chain saws; buried them in mass, unmarked, and shal-
low graves; burned them in crematory ovens; or fed them to starving hogs
or caimans (Haugaard and Nicholls 2010). But perhaps the most common
 The Revenants 127

way to make people disappear, because of its low cost and effectiveness, was
to dispose of the corpses by throwing them into nearby rivers.4 Because of
this, “major river arteries such as the Cauca and Magdalena . . . have been
truly converted into moving cemeteries for unidentified bodies, which are
known in Colombia by the abbreviation NN [for the Latin nomen nescio, or
“I don’t know the name”]. These are letters of infamy, pain, and oblivion”
(Uribe Alarcón 2011, 37).
Puerto Berrío is a small town that sits on the bank of one such river,
the Magdalena. For years, its inhabitants watched unidentified corpses float
down its waters. But instead of letting the bodies drift along, as the inhabi-
tants of other villages did, the people of Puerto Berrío chose to rescue and
adopt them. The process works as follows: First, fishermen pull the bodies
out of the river and take them to the cemetery. The NNs are then placed
in small graves marked with the two letters. Once the bodies are in place,
local people choose a plot and adopt an NN by writing the word escogido/a,
or “chosen,” on the tombstone. A relationship of reciprocity between the
NN and the adopter follows. The adopter gives the NN a name (often com-
prising the first name of a family member also lost to the war and their own
last name), takes care of the grave, and prays for the individual’s soul. In ex-
change, the adopter hopes to receive favors from the NN. Nuri Bustamente,
an adopter of several NNs, explains:

Este pueblo, a pesar de que ha sido tan golpeado por tanta violencia, aquí
hay una costumbre muy arraigada de años atrás, donde muchas personas
tenemos fe con los difuntos y en especial con todos los NN. En el momento
en el que se encuentran en el río, son personas que no sabemos quiénes son ni
de dónde vienen, no conocemos su pasado. Pero . . . alguien viene, los adopta
y les da un nombre para que ellos sigan teniendo una identidad, que no que-
den sin esa identidad que tuvieron en vida. Muchas veces ellos colocan nom-
bres de sus mismos familiares, puede ser de un hermano, el papá o la mamá.
. . . Y aquí, pues, cómo dijéramos, hay mucha gente que quiere a los muertos.
(LuloFilmsLtda 2015)

From 2006 to 2012, Echavarría worked with the community of Puerto

Berrío, learning from and reflecting on what this unique relationship with
the NNs revealed about mourning, remembrance, and the rearticulation of
societal and familial bonds ruptured by violence. Réquiem NN is the result of
this endeavor and is part of a larger project of the same name (2006–2015)
that includes Réquiem NN Wall, a photographic exhibit of the tombstones
in the form of a mural, and Novenarios en espera (2012), a video installation
128  Haunting without Ghosts

in which Echavarría projects footage of the headstones collected over exten-

sive periods of time in extremely slow motion (Echavarría, n.d.). The grad-
ual incorporation of temporality through video animates the static pictures
shown in Réquiem NN Wall, allowing spectators to attest to the dynamic re-
lationship between the NNs and their adoptive families through the appear-
ance and disappearance of names, written expressions of gratitude or love,
flowers, and other decorations on the tombstones.
Réquiem NN further explores the complex nature of these spectral adop-
tions through the documentary form. The film, which is highly stylized and
carries Echavarría’s distinctive imprint, exploring the intersection of ab-
sence and violence, was shot by Echavarría and his crew over five visits to
Puerto Berrío after a photographic exhibition of his work in the small town’s
newly inaugurated cultural center in 2010 made Echavarría shift his atten-
tion from the graves to those who care for them. Instead of focusing exclu-
sively on the irretrievable stories of the NNs, he decided to explore the dy-
namic and intricate relationships between the NNs and their adopters. The
film premiered in October 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City. I focus on Réquiem NN instead of previous, more traditional photo-
graphic works, such as Silencios (2010–2015), or other freestanding video in-
stallations, such as Bocas de ceniza (2003–2004), because this carefully con-
cocted and beautifully executed film brings together the main themes and
concerns that have defined Echavarría’s artistic production for over a decade
and provides a stunning testimony of a community’s resilience and will to
mourn. Furthermore, Réquiem NN best condenses both the formal aspects
of the artist’s visual repertoire and the fundamental questions that haunt
him, which involve the relations among mourning, memory, and the poli-
tics and ethics of representation in the context of extreme violence. A careful
look at this film provides a window into the ethos, pathos, and techne of one
of Colombia’s most accomplished artists.
In Of What One Cannot Speak, Mieke Bal takes the sentence with which
Ludwig Wittgenstein closes his Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus and uses it as
a starting point in an analysis of the work of Doris Salcedo. Salcedo, Bal
argues, manages “to face and to answer Wittgenstein’s judgment that the
unspeakable must be kept silent by address[ing] head-­on the way in which
the disruption of the political destroys bodies” (Bal 2010b, 14). Faced with
the abrupt silencing that violence seeks to ensure, Salcedo strives to “make
audible in the mouth whereof one cannot speak” (28). This effort to make
“audible,” this murmuration in the very mouth that cannot speak, is a useful
approach to thinking about Echavarría’s work. As Bal explains, “The ‘can’
in Wittgenstein’s sentence is ambiguous. On the one hand, it refers to the
 The Revenants 129

speaker’s limitations. . . . ‘[C]an’ here is a feature of knowledge and under-

standing. But there is also a ‘cannot’ inflicted by others. . . . ‘[C]an’ is here a
feature of violence” (28). By visually and thematically focusing on the two
places where silence and oblivion were to be realized in the specific context
of Puerto Berrío, the river and the cemetery, Réquiem NN disavows the com-
mand to be silent that murder wishes to impose and forced disappearance
hopes to consolidate. If the bodies of the NNs were thrown into the river
and taken to unmarked graves to ensure their disappearance from a disputed
territory, thus preventing their reappearance in Colombia’s official history,
Réquiem NN ’s visual insistence on these spaces marks the individuals’ ab-
sence as an event and a loss that must be acknowledged and denounced from
its very beginning.
The film’s initial sequence follows the path of the dead. The dark waters
of the river shine with the golden light of the sunset while vultures wait
eagerly on the shore. Caught in a whirlpool, a tree trunk swirls slowly as it
spirals gently toward the remote ocean; its branches, reaching for the sky,
uncannily resemble severed human limbs. We hear the persistent flow of the
water; we feel the heat of the breezeless afternoon. Then there is the ceme-
tery. Its rusty doors open with a squeak as the camera takes us to a close-­up
of several small, square tombs marked only with two letters: NN. The first
ten minutes of the documentary are entirely devoted to the river and the
cemetery. It takes us back and forth between these two sites through slow-­
paced sequences that linger in the twists and twirls of the river, attest to the
daily chores of the gravedigger, and halt in front of the graves of the NNs.
Then we listen to the testimonies of those who directly deal with and care
for them. The manager of the cemetery explains that local fishermen, not the
authorities, brought most of the NNs to the graveyard. He says this is tell-
ing, for despite the width of the river, identifying an NN floating with the
current was relatively easy because of the ominous appearance of vultures.
Unlike most other debris, NNs typically had a vulture on top of them, or a
group of these birds could be seen circling intently in the sky above. But au-
thorities seemed incapable of or uninterested in recovering the bodies and
rarely took action. Thus, when fishermen saw or heard the birds, they would
leave the fish alone for a while and use their nets for a more somber purpose.
Sadly, this testimony is not new in Colombia’s history or cultural produc-
tion.5 As Rory O’Bryen (2013) explains, the Magdalena River has played
a key role in the history and the imaginary of the Colombian nation,6 and
since at least the mid-­twentieth century, it came to represent the country’s
brutal and seemingly endless violence in both historical and cultural dis-
course.7 Within this broad production, El río de las tumbas ( Julio Luzardo,
130  Haunting without Ghosts

1964), the first Colombian movie about violence—which also documents

the practice of throwing corpses into the river in order to disappear the evi-
dence of a violent death—stands as a productive contrast to the complex
intertwinement of ethics, politics, representation, and mourning as docu-
mented by Réquiem NN. El río de las tumbas begins with a body floating
down the current and chronicles the unwillingness of political, military, and
religious authorities to deal with it. In the film, the reappearance of the NN
is perceived as a troubling return for officials who have a strong investment
in presenting their area as nonviolent. Fearful of the political consequences
of raising the official statistics of violence in his municipio, the chief of police
decides to return the NN to the river and let the authorities of another town
deal with the aftermath of this unwelcome arrival. As he throws the corpse
back into the river, he utters one of the most famous phrases in Colombian
cinematic history: “Pal alcalde de otro pueblo” (for the mayor of another
town).
The materiality of the mangled body of the NN troubles official narra-
tives that claim that violence no longer occurs, not here. The presence of the
NN contradicts this rhetoric. It means that violence is, still, and demands
that something be done. The NN floating in the river embodies the unre-
coverable human loss that war causes, the desire to make such loss unknow-
able, and the powerful interests of those who benefit from such erasure. The
internal conflict, made undeniable by the corpse, is deferred, pushed away
to another time and place. By throwing the body back into the river, the
police and other local authorities refuse to acknowledge, to account for, or
to take responsibility for historical violence. They act on their wish to make
Colombia’s ongoing armed conflict go away. Their gesture is an attempt to
distance themselves from the legal, civic, and ethical duties that the dead,
particularly if they have died violently, impose upon the living. Instead of
listening to the violent story from the mouth that can no longer speak it, the
authorities cast the NN away, and the memory of the violence inflicted upon
the individual is silenced and repressed.
Echavarría’s film performs the opposite gesture. From its title, Réquiem
NN presents itself as an acknowledgment and an homage. It underscores
the need and the will to mourn, and to do so even in the absence of a name
and a story, to do so even, and perhaps especially, when faced with the wish
for silence that underlies all violent deaths, which finds its most brutal ex-
pression in the desire to efface the act of killing that the NN embodies. Ré-
quiem NN reminds one that “to silence is an active verb” and that the “worst
silencing is that which makes itself invisible” (Bal 2010b, 28). Furthermore,
the refusal of the people of Puerto Berrío to let the dead continue their path
 The Revenants 131

down the river brings to the forefront the violence at the core of any attempt
to make something, or someone, disappear. Réquiem NN tells the story of
and acts as a refusal to let the dead go unmourned. Through the stories of
those who adopt the NNs, Echavarría invites one to reflect on one’s own
bonds (or lack thereof ) with those who were forcefully banished from their
homes and from the official history of the nation. By so doing, the film itself
acts as a medium of resistance and counter-­memory and provides a symbolic
space for processing such deaths.
For the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío, this processing begins by recog-
nizing the profound effect the NNs have on their lives. If the perpetrators
hope to make the dead vanish into their watery grave, the villagers explain
that the (re)appearance of their material remains haunts their routines and
pesters them with ethical questions. A fisherman explains how he feels every
time he finds the mutilated corpse of an NN and brings it to the shore: “Uno
en ese momento pues siente esa tristeza de ver una persona que como puede
tener familia, o no. Entonces uno siente como una angustia, una nostal-
gia de ver esa extremidad ahí en ese momento” (LuloFilmsLtda 2015). A
wheelbarrow driver who used to take the bodies rescued from the river to
the morgue shares that after years of witnessing how the authorities piled up
the corpses in heaps without regard for the fact that they had been human
beings, he could barely eat anymore: “Yo para comer tenía que, mejor dicho,
la comida, el sanchito no me sabía sino a pura sangre” (LuloFilmsLtda
2015). These feelings of anguish, sadness, and even disgust lead some of the
villagers to highlight the importance of the simple yet vital task of acknowl-
edging the human essence of the mangled remains. They are adamant about
distinguishing the NNs from other organic debris and bestowing upon them
the scant reparation of a humane treatment in death. A woman who has
adopted two NNs explains, “Me daría como mucho pesar que botaran los
huesitos, ¿por qué? Si somos seres humanos, le vayan a tirar los huesitos allá
como si fueran los de un animal” (LuloFilmsLtda 2015). Like many others
in Puerto Berrío, the woman transforms her ethical anxiety into action by
adopting the NNs. This poignancy implies that in Réquiem NN, people are
haunted by the NNs, not traumatized by them. The difference, as under-
stood by Avery Gordon (2008, xvi), is that “haunting, unlike trauma, is dis-
tinctive for producing a something-­to-­be-­done.”
Haunted by the NNs, the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío turn the paralysis
of trauma into a willful act of mourning, remembrance, and symbolic res-
toration of humanity through their spectral adoptions. The willfulness of
this act is encapsulated in the first gesture the adopter makes, writing the
word escogido/a on the grave of the NN. The volition embedded in the word
132  Haunting without Ghosts

Figure 3.1. Juan Manuel Echavarría, Réquiem NN, 2013. Numerous tombs with the
inscription “escogido” or “escogida,” which marks the adoption of an NN.

bespeaks a profoundly humanizing welcome. The gesture here is twofold.

First, the humanness of the dead is recognized, and the loss their appearance
implies is acknowledged. In the corpse, the people of Puerto Berrío see the
son, the father, the long-­gone daughter whose arrival someone, somewhere,
still anxiously awaits. Second, faced with the impossibility of reestablishing
bonds between the NN and those who love and miss the person, people offer
their own. The NN ceases to have no name. As the gravedigger explains,
“La gente trata como de acogerlos, como de volverlos dentro de la familia”
(LuloFilmsLtda 2015). Recognizing the humanity of the NNs leads to the
transformation of the foundational social unit in our culture, the family, and
brings to the fore the salient role that, according to Gordon, affect plays
in the ethical and political potential of haunting. As she explains, “Being
haunted draws us affectively . . . into the structure of feeling of a reality we
come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recog-
nition” (2008, 8). The spectral adoption of the NNs implies the creation
of affective links that translate into a coresponsibility of care and extend
the bonds of the familial beyond the constrains of lineage, identity, and
presence, so that they can better account for those who have been violently
expelled from history. This creates dynamic relations of responsibility and
care between the dead and the living, while weaving new familial bonds
among the living themselves. In Réquiem NN, these alternative, affective,
and transformative relations are exemplified in the act of naming.
Naming is one of the most visible and meaningful aspects in the adop-
 The Revenants 133

tion of the NNs. To be an NN is by definition to have a name that cannot

be known or spoken. The two Ns mark not so much the absence of a name
as the impossibility of knowing it because of violence. In this sense, Jacques
Derrida’s (1992) reflections on the Holocaust are productive for thinking
about Réquiem NN. Of course, the scope of the violence in Colombia can-
not be equated to that of the Shoah, and there are other major differences
between the two; however, the NNs in Colombia also represent the desire
“to exterminate . . . not only human lives . . . but also . . . the possibility of
giving, inscribing, calling and recalling the name” (Derrida 1992, 60). In
Colombia, too, there was a “project of destruction of the name and of the
very memory of the name, of the name as memory” (60). This destruction is
not insignificant. Thomas Laqueur (2015, 367) observes that “naming marks
the entry not into biological but into human life.” For Laqueur, “becoming a
person is getting a name . . . [and] that moment of naming has in many cases
been the divide between counting as a human being and not. For almost two
thousand years, to take just one example, unbaptized children could not be
buried in what was taken to be the consecrated part of churchyards; hence
having a baptismal name meant having a body that required care” (369). Re-
moving the NNs from the river, interring them in the cemetery, and nam-
ing them speak to the need to care for them, signaling the recognition of
their defied humanity and providing symbolic restoration for the violence
inflicted on them. Furthermore, in Réquiem NN, two specific acts of nam-
ing show how the adoptions not only humanize and account for the NNs
but also thereby redefine the relations between the dead and the living, not
to mention those among the living themselves.
The first example is the experience of Jair Humberto Urrego and María
Dilia Mena. Unbeknownst to each other, they had been caring for the same
NN. When the gravedigger tells them the news, instead of getting into
some kind of spectral custody battle, they confirm their commitment to
the NN and decide to care for her together. They share expenses, agree on a
birthday for her and celebrate it together, and give her a name that speaks
of their shared responsibility and materializes these new spectral family ties.
The name they inscribe on her tombstone combines the name Jair Humberto
had given her with the name María Dilia had chosen and has both of their
last names: Gloria María de los Ángeles Urrego Mena.8
The transformative and restorative potential of these spectral adoptions
is also condensed in the naming act that closes the film. Réquiem NN ends
with Blanca Bustamente, mother of two desaparecidos, giving an NN she is
caring for the name of her missing son, Jhon Jairo S. B. This does not mean
she has replaced her son. The documentary makes clear that she continues
134  Haunting without Ghosts

to search tirelessly for him and for her daughter, who has also vanished. This
means, as in all adoptions, that she is choosing to care for the son of some-
body who can no longer tend to his needs. Bustamente’s slow and careful
writing of the beloved name is a gift of gratitude toward the NN, who has
granted her the favors requested, a symbol of her continued commitment to
the NN, and a gesture to honor the memory of her son. This intricate affec-
tive involvement neither promises nor wants closure. Rather, it marks a gen-
erous opening, a restorative welcoming, the spectralization of the familial
itself.
Historically, the institution of the family has been, and still is, central to
the accumulation and transfer of wealth and property. Patrilineality within
Catholic matrimony as regulated by the church was the main way of assur-
ing the preservation of status, power, and capital—cultural, symbolic, and
economic—for centuries. International groups such as Tradición, Familia y
Propiedad, still active and influential in the region, exemplify this relation-
ship well. Within this framework, the anxiety to incorporate the NN into
the institution of the family could be seen as a conservative move, a desire
to reinsert the NN into categories with a long history of dispossession, sex-
ism, racism, and colonialism. But the spectral nature of the adoptions com-
plicates this triangulation by bringing back the brutal consequences of the
struggle for possession, power, and wealth at the core of the armed conflict.
The specter speaks primarily of dispossession and violence; and, since Der-
rida, it also questions the advent of a mode of being in history (of being
history) that effaces the exploitation and cruelty of the means of produc-
tion and circulation this historical formation prioritizes, highlighting the
unwillingness to face the brutal consequences of the unequal distribution of
goods and services this economic and social dynamic creates on the part of
those who profit from it. The spectral adoptions bring this disruption into
the heart of the familial realm, unsettling it. Their main claim is not the
transference of wealth and lineage, but of recognition and justice. Instead of
restoring an intergenerational system of inheritance, they inaugurate what
Alberto Ribas-­Casasayas and Amanda L. Petersen call a “transgenerational
ethics,” because they reveal our shared “obligation to victims whose pres-
ence has been excluded from the historical record and hegemonic discourse”
(2016, 3).
The embracing of the other into the most intimate and foundational so-
cial unit regardless of personal history is particularly meaningful in a coun-
try riven by war and sharply divided among political factions, armed groups,
and rival cartels. The question of whether the dead were part of the para-
militaries, the guerrillas, or the army, or were civilians caught in the cross
 The Revenants 135

Figure 3.2. Juan Manuel Echavarría, Réquiem NN, 2013. “No pintar.”

fire, is irrelevant in the face of the extreme violence inflected upon them.
As humanizing as this gesture can be, however, it also poses important
questions about a possible depoliticization of ethics, particularly as it re-
lates to mourning and representation. Ghosts, in Colombia, are not apoliti-
cal ghosts. The violent history of the nation ties them inextricably to con-
crete political parties (either to the Liberal Party or to the Conservative
Party) and, more notably, to the specter of Marx. As Derrida (2006) shows
in his landmark book, despite the triumphalist discourses about the advent
of capitalism in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ghost of com-
munism has not been exorcised or appeased, and in places like Colombia
it continues to be the cause of much violence and to influence the nation’s
political, social, and cultural life. People in Colombia have too often been
murdered for their (real or perceived) association with Marxist ideals and
groups or, on the contrary, because they are thought to be resisting or fight-
ing against them.9
The people of Puerto Berrío must be well aware of this history, which
Echavarría’s film elides entirely. In this sense, Réquiem NN is complicit in
what Rory O’Bryen identifies as a common failure of most novels and films
that deal with historical violence in Colombia: the inability or unwilling-
ness to connect the horrors of torture, murder, and desacralizing mutila-
tion of the body after death to broader socioeconomic or concrete politico-­
historical processes (O’Bryen 2016, 221). But even within the limits of this
political ambivalence,10 Echavarría’s film does manage to partly address and
redress the “crisis in witnessing” that O’Bryen rightly identifies as a major
136  Haunting without Ghosts

concern of the ethics and politics of the historical and cultural representa-
tion of violence in Colombia. Through its cinematic act, Réquiem NN high-
lights the demands that those who died violently make upon the living and
denounces and mourns violence against the human itself, irrespective of
political, ideological, or military affiliation. Even if their names cannot be
recovered, even if their stories cannot be recuperated, there has been an at-
tempt to preserve the memory of the violence inflicted upon them and to
offer them a hospitable return following their forceful departure.
Yet the authorities of Puerto Berrío claim that naming the NNs and
caring for them provokes legal and forensic confusion and interferes with
the official procedure of identifying the dead. Therefore, in 2007 they
banned the practice. A firefighter in the film says that a recent law bans
civilians from pulling cadavers out of the river, because only “authorized
personnel” can do so. The firefighter adds, however, that this has not re-
sulted in a more efficient recovery and identification process of the NNs,
nor in more humane treatment of their remains. Rather, the law has aided
the forces that sought to silence and banish the NNs by turning a blind eye
and allowing them to sink into oblivion: “Ahorita [según] las estadísticas el
Río Magdalena prácticamente es un afluente normal. No pasa nada, por-
que nadie se está encartando, como dicen por ahí, los cadáveres que expulsa
otro municipio” (LuloFilmsLtda 2015). Furthermore, adopting the NNs is
against the religious law of the town. The priest has warned that this practice
borders on heresy and should cease because the writings and decorations on
the graves of the NNs disrupt the decorum due in Catholic cemeteries and
make it a “circus.” While the priest says that “el cementerio no es un circo,
el cementerio es un camposanto donde todo debería ser blanco,” the animero
replies to the camera, “Eso no lo pueden prohibir, es que ni el obispo puede”
(LuloFilmsLtda 2015). Instead of being on the side of justice, religious and
civil laws add an additional (and perhaps final) layer of violence to the fate of
the NNs. As the firefighter explains, they not only endure a “double death”
by being murdered and then thrown into the river,11 they also face the vio-
lence of their effacement at the hands of an official narrative that claims the
region has been pacified and that Colombia is no longer a country at war.
This unwillingness to deal with and to mourn the dead is at the heart of
the earlier film El río de las tumbas and is what triumphs in that film’s end.
By contrast, in Réquiem NN, the tension between, on the one hand, the state
and the church, which claim to have the exclusive right to count and ac-
count for the dead, and on the other, a community that refuses to acknowl-
edge such claims and chooses instead to mourn, is resolved in favor of the
community. Disobeying the prohibition, the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío
 The Revenants 137

continue, as Avery Gordon puts it, to “protect the dead from the dangers
of the present” by adopting them (2008, 65). Réquiem NN focuses on this
act of disavowal and disobedience in the name of justice. It underscores the
importance of a demand for justice, especially when such exigency is con-
trary to the law.

Beyond the Law: A Spectral Call to Justice

The distinction between law and justice is key for Derrida. In “Force of
Law,” he explores the relations between deconstruction and the possibility
of justice. To do so, he focuses on the difference between the realm of the
law and that of justice: the “law” has to do with norms, regulations, and
the authorized violence of the state (1992, 34), while “justice” involves “the
sense of a responsibility without limits, and so, [is] necessarily excessive,
incalculable, before memory” (19). Throughout this book, I have discussed
how in Specters of Marx Derrida further explores these concepts and relates
them to the spectral. He anchors law in the realm of history, men, and the
state, while claiming that justice belongs to the specter. Those who pursue
justice—be they ordinary people like Nuri Bustamente, artists like Echava-
rría, or writers, filmmakers, or scholars—must conjure the ghost and con-
verse with him or her. These spectral conversations encourage the disrup-
tion of the homogeneous, teleological time of a nation marching to fulfill
its promise of prosperity and peace and invite us to listen to the voices that
were silenced in its making. Hence, if authorities use the law to ignore the
demand for justice that the return of the NN utters, the spectral adoptions
disrupt the official discourse of a modern and pacified nation; they haunt
it and invite us to follow their spectral lead. Réquiem NN takes its viewer
in that direction by focusing on the river and the cemetery as spaces of en-
counter, exchange, mourning, and remembering, by making these spaces
spectral sites of counter-­memory and justice.
The river as an image of the endless flow of time is at least as old as Hera-
clitus. In Réquiem NN, this motif allows an alternative notion of time out-
side historicity, a temporality that does not reproduce the linear chronology
of progress. Echavarría’s river simultaneously flows forward and backward;
it moves but does not necessarily advance; its uncanny waters constantly
bring back the dead and the unresolved past they embody. By so doing,
Echavarría turns the river into a powerful visual metaphor of the temporal
disruption that the specter produces. In Réquiem NN, the river no longer, or
at least not only, embodies the ceaseless passing of human time. Instead, it
138  Haunting without Ghosts

becomes Guaca-­Hayo, or River of Tombs, once again (O’Bryen 2016), sig-

naling the “anachronicity” (O’Bryen 2008, 23) characteristic of haunting—
that is, the way in which specters disrupt the ontological ordering of his-
torical time conceived as a linear succession of events. Like all specters, the
NNs that float down the river are revenants that do not belong “exclusively
. . . to the past, present or future” (O’Bryen 2008, 23). Furthermore, because
it “stands for the postponement of mourning and justice” (23), this “anach-
ronicity” is also political, a concept that the film visually reinforces. The
amount of time dedicated to the Magdalena in Réquiem NN, as well as the
emphasis on its ceaseless movement, turns the river into a spectral site that
haunts the film’s viewers. The long sequences devoted to the incessant flow
of its waters, where we see and hear nothing other than its current, force us
to look at it and to reckon with it. Like the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío, we
are invited to disobey the law and to turn to the river as a space of ghostly
encounters. The prolonged shots of tree trunks caught in its swirls, the vul-
tures waiting patiently and attentively at the shore, and the unpredictable
reappearance of the graves that puncture the sequences make the simple act
of looking a disquieting and uncanny experience. The film suspends us in the
whirlpools of the Magdalena, and because of what we already know, we now
look at it with fear and expectation. We can no longer see these images with-
out wondering what lies beneath the waters. Echavarría’s camerawork turns
the river into an eerie and haunted site, a space that acknowledges what has
been lost and refuses to lose it completely. This notion is reinforced by the
way Echavarría incorporates the cemetery and the tombstones in the film.
A cemetery is the rightful place of the dead: it is where they should re-
main, where they go to rest and be at peace. In Réquiem NN, this is not the
case. The NNs are neither at peace nor appeased, and they certainly don’t get
to rest. As I explained, the cemetery of Puerto Berrío is a place of bonding
between the living and the restless souls of the NNs, a site for both mourn-
ing and celebration; it is a place for the exchange of favors and connection,
where new relations are formed both between the dead and the living and
among the living themselves. The tombs of the NNs are the opposite of a
mausoleum. They are humble and dynamic; they change color and name;
diverse messages appear on, and disappear from, their surfaces; different
people inhabit them. Instead of consolidating lineage and inheritance, they
materialize the spectralization of societal and familial bonds. Réquiem NN
highlights a fluid and ever-­changing relationship between the living and the
NNs, a constant renegotiation of kinship and memory that does not allow us
to forget the dead or to comfortably situate them in a realm that no longer
relates to us. This ethos permeates the film and structures its narrative and
representational practices. Long, slow shots of the tombs without music or
 The Revenants 139

sound constantly interrupt the flow of diegetic time, demanding that we see
the NNs, that we recognize their violent fate and attest to their dynamic re-
lation with the living through the changes in their graves. Like the river, the
tombstones in Réquiem NN resist the silencing, dehumanization, and for-
getting that violence seeks to achieve and that religious and local authorities
do so much to consolidate.
In this sense Echavarría resembles the animero, or soul keeper. Héctor
Montoya is Puerto Berrío’s animero, which means he is in direct and con-
stant contact with the souls of the dead, and he cares for them. The animero’s
work is the opposite from that of an exorcist. If the exorcist tries to restore
boundaries and purity by casting away specters, the animero conjures them
and, as one sees in the film, invites them to rise from their graves, to go for a
walk with him and other villagers, and to tell him their violent stories. It is
no coincidence, then, that the animero is also the person who has been (re)‑
writing the story of Puerto Berrío for the past forty-­five years. His concern
for and connection with the ánimas, especially those of the NNs, is what
allows and motivates him to write. The animero summons the NNs, and
together they pen a “diary of Berrío.”12 He is adamant: “¿Cómo las voy a
olvidar? No puedo olividarlas [a las ánimas del purgatorio]. . . . En este diario
yo tengo que contar anécdotas de cuando la violencia empezó aquí en Berrío,
porque de ese puente, si ese puente hablara, ¡Eh, Ave María! Sí que diría a
cuántos han botado de ahí” (LuloFilmsLtda 2015). The text consists of a list
of names, events, and dates outside the time and space of the official nar-
rative. It is a testament to those whose voices were supposed to be silenced
but who linger and reappear in the meticulous writing of the animero and
in Echavarría’s film.
The diary rewrites the history of Puerto Berrío through the voice of the
specter, remapping the town as a spectral site. This remapping takes place
in the film as well. Echavarría alternates between images of the manuscript
and sequences of the places mentioned by the animero. As with the river,
the long, silent sequences of the bridge, a certain house, or an empty road
become eerie and invite the viewer not only to see but also to wander and
wonder: to lose oneself in places that have now acquired an ominous layer
of historical density and to want to know more about what happened there.
The visual insistence on sites where horror has transpired creates a narra-
tive in which silence is pregnant with meaning and absence is recognized
as loss, as the memory of an irretrievable event that nonetheless needs to
be preserved and told. In an effort to defeat the desire of absolute annihila-
tion, the animero summons the impossible witness, the specter itself, thus
becoming the medium through which the unspeakable can be spoken. As
recounted in Réquiem NN, the spectral adoptions of the NNs acknowledge
140  Haunting without Ghosts

the loss of human life as inherently painful and irreparable but also mark
the forging of affective bonds capable of creating new, unexpected relations
of care among those who were nearby but until then estranged. Instead of
letting the desaparecidos flow into the river of death (“pal alcalde de otro
pueblo”), Réquiem NN emulates the adopters’ will to mourn and follows the
footsteps of the animero by conjuring the dead and rewriting with them the
story of Puerto Berrío.
Such is Réquiem NN ’s contribution to the conversation about represent-
ing violence. By acknowledging the impossibility of saying the name of the
specter but summoning it nonetheless, by marking its absence and demand-
ing that such vanishing be accounted for and mourned, by making audible
in the mouth of those who cannot speak, Echavarría is able to contest Witt-
genstein’s judgment that the unspeakable must be kept silent. Echavarría’s
pace and visual work point to a mode of narrating, counting, and extend-
ing affective bonds that welcomes the specter and sees in its reappearance
the (imperfect, unstable, but always necessary) possibility of justice. Thus,
the two Ns stop being letters of “infamy, pain, and oblivion” (Uribe Alar-
cón 2011, 37) and become signs of a will to mourn, a drive toward remem-
brance, and a desire to mend the social and familial bonds ruptured by vio-
lence. Réquiem NN highlights how the extension of kinship based on the will
to mourn defies the attempt at radical annihilation and silencing that the
NNs embody; mobilizes a way to unpack the complex relationship among
representational practices, historical violence, and ethical concerns; and in-
vites the viewer to reflect on the ways that the thousands of disappearances
caused by the armed conflict make Colombia a haunted country—that is,
a country that needs to acknowledge, converse with, and seek justice for its
ghosts. This need to account for those exterminated by violence and to cre-
ate physical and symbolic spaces for processing and mourning—particularly
in contexts where there is an inability or an unwillingness to do so—at the
heart of Juan Manuel Echavarría’s work also haunts the work of the artist
Beatriz González and is at the center of one of Colombia’s most stunning
installations.

Unburied Bodies and Deserted Graves in

Beatriz González’s Auras anónimas

While Echavarría was in Puerto Berrío listening to and collecting the stories
of the NNs and their adopters, hundreds of miles away in Bogotá a woman
was returning to her house late at night. She passed by the national ceme-
 The Revenants 141

tery and came upon a haunting sight: thousands of niches in the colum-
baria stood wide open. The remains they once contained had been moved
so the structures could be demolished. This empty mausoleum, like an un-
canny creature with myriad gaping mouths, struck her as a ghostly symbol
of the country’s war. Perhaps, too, the image conjured biblical resonances:
the dead finally rising from their graves, demanding their due and eager
for justice. The woman was Beatriz González, one of Colombia’s pioneer
female painters and most accomplished artists.13 Regardless of what specific
imagery the vision evoked in her mind, it left a powerful imprint and con-
fronted her with pressing questions: How, in a country with so many un-
buried bodies, could all these graves be empty? What did this contradiction
say about the country’s ongoing violence? What means did she have to bring
this paradox to national attention? The result was Auras anónimas (2007–
2009), a monumental intervention that brought to the capital the plight of
the tombless and exposed the stark inequalities that caused the conflict and
continue to fuel it. Of these inequities, perhaps the most salient one is the
ability to remain oblivious to or unbothered by the war.
Born in 1938 in Bucaramanga, a midsize city in the northeastern part of
the country, González has been producing art for more than four decades.
But it was not until the mid-­1980s that González started shifting her atten-
tion toward Colombia’s violent reality, as both a key part of her aesthetic
vocabulary and an ethical imperative.14 This period coincided with a rapid
deterioration of public safety due in great part to the consolidation of the
most powerful drug cartels in the world, based in Medellín and Cali, their
subsequent battles against each other for control of a larger portion of the
territory and the market, and a full-­on war waged against the government in
order to remove extradition from the Colombian constitution. Furthermore,
the massive amounts of money that resulted from the booming cocaine busi-
ness upended the traditional and usually immobile social, economic, politi-
cal, and cultural hierarchies and provided a sorely needed source of revenue
that greatly improved the military might of the up-­to-­then-­struggling guer-
rilla movements and nascent paramilitary organizations. All of these factors
made the years from 1985 to 1995 some of the deadliest in the nation’s his-
tory. The assassination of elected officials, presidential candidates, and ordi-
nary citizens became part of the country’s news diet, and spectacular acts
of terror such as the bombing of shopping centers and airplanes in cities, as
well as massive kidnappings and numerous massacres in the countryside, de-
stabilized the nation and left profound imprints on at least three generations
of Colombians struggling to survive, process, and navigate the brutalities. It
was then that González’s art started to change. But unlike influential pre-
142  Haunting without Ghosts

decessors such as Alipio Jaramillo, Enrique Grau, and Alejandro Obregón,

she did not focus on the violent acts themselves. She also eschewed the de-
scriptive and expressionistic visual language they favored and produced in-
stead intensely evocative and affective works that focus on the emotional
disruption, the painful absences, and the acute sense of vulnerability left by
violence.15
In spite of the length and diversity of her career, I focus on only one of
her works, Auras anónimas (2009), since it more directly shares with Ré-
quiem NN and the works of Erika Diettes the desire to mark the absence left
by the victims of violent deaths who remain unaccounted for, to reinscribe
them in the nation’s memory and history, and to provide them with a sym-
bolic resting place. The original idea for Auras anónimas dates back to 2003,
when González and her famous disciple and friend Doris Salcedo found
out that the city government was planning to vacate and destroy six mas-
sive columbaria in the national cemetery and repurpose the space as a public
park. González, Salcedo, and other artists, intellectuals, and ordinary citi-
zens opposed the project, concerned with the erasure of memory and history
that the demolition of the ossuaries implied. But by then, two columbaria
had already been destroyed, and all of them had been emptied. In the years
that followed, a group of artists of which González was a member proposed
that the space be used as a site for public works of art that reflected on the
relationship between the city and memory and the shifting and often con-
tentious relationship between the dead and the living, among other topics of
interest (electrofin 2009). The idea was welcomed, but until that night when
González was coming back home, no artistic projects had been started on
the site, which remained abandoned.
By the time González started working on Auras, the four remaining co-
lumbaria stood as massive, white albatrosses puncturing the heart of the city
with their 8,957 hollow graves. González saw a unique opportunity in them
and decided to use the ossuaries as the material support for her work. In this
sense, Auras is an unusual move for an artist who in the last three decades
has rarely left the easel and canvas behind, and it marks a return to her more
experimental early years.16 But the work also follows her modus operandi by
referencing concrete historical events. González has an extensive collection
of newspaper clippings and photographs that she consistently uses as in-
spiration for her paintings and installations. Through them, she studies not
the mangled and exposed bodies of the victims but the attitudes, gestures,
and emotions of the survivors. On the night she was coming home, she re-
membered that in 2006 she had created a series of works called Cargueros de
Vista Hermosa,17 based on newspaper photographs that showed eight differ-
 The Revenants 143

ent pairs of cargueros from Meta—a department just eighty miles south of
Bogotá but worlds apart in terms of the impact of the armed conflict and the
distribution of wealth and political power—and realized the images were
the indexical referent her project was missing. In the contrast between the
empty tombs in Bogotá and the images of the humble cargueros in Meta,
González recognized a tragic contradiction at the core of the Colombian
armed conflict. Cargueros were men, typically indigenous or of African
descent, who acted as human transports, carrying people of higher social
standing on their backs for a living during the colonial years and through-
out the nineteenth century. But the images collected by González show
modern-­day cargueros carrying not nobles or wealthy people but corpses.
The article that accompanies the photographs explains that they capture the
efforts of a group of campesinos when trying to recuperate the corpses of
community members murdered by the guerrillas while working in a govern-
mental initiative of collaborative manual substitution of coca crops in Vista
Hermosa, Meta. The precariousness of the scene is daunting: groups of two
men carry the corpses in improvised hammocks made out of shreds of tar-
paulin or tethered to a pole like a slain animal. González turned the vivid
images into black silhouettes and used them to create a massive intervention
by inscribing them in each and every one of the 8,957 empty niches. Because
of the materials used and the space selected, the project was meant to last
approximately three years.
The history of the columbaria also adds an important layer of historical
density to Auras. Before they were vacated, the ossuaries held the anony-
mous remains of thousands of people, including those of the many uniden-
tified victims of El Bogotazo, the name given to the riots that followed the
assassination on April 9, 1948, of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a populist leader
and favored presidential candidate. The uprising caused by the murder of
Gaitán left over three thousand people dead, destroyed much of Bogotá’s
downtown, and ignited La Violencia, a period of brutal bipartisan vio-
lence between the Liberal and Conservative Parties that continued until
approximately 1958.18 The symbolic violence of the removal did not escape
González, who saw in it another and perhaps final instance of the displace-
ment and erasure of the nameless victims of popular upheaval and revolt
from official history and collective memory.19 The images of the cargueros
imprinted in the abandoned columbaria bring back a series of traumatic and
violent events that many Colombians, particularly those living in large cities
such as Bogotá, would rather relegate to the territory of the “not here, not
now.” The empty graves point to key precedents of the internal conflict: the
fierce repression of the advancement of social-­justice ideals through demo-
144  Haunting without Ghosts

cratic means and the vicious political violence that followed. The cargueros
not only embody the bloodshed caused by the war, but also, since the vic-
tims were murdered by guerrilla fighters resisting an antinarcotics program
of manual crop substitution, they highlight the major impact that the lucra-
tive drug trafficking business has had on the conflict. Auras brings back the
unwanted dead of the modern Colombian nation. With them, the repressed
and unresolved historical, political, and socioeconomic violence that tra-
verses the nation also returns to haunt it, and does so at its very heart.
In that sense, like Réquiem NN, Auras points to the necessity of a “trans-
generational ethics” (Ribas-­Casasayas and Petersen 2016b). That is, it high-
lights modes of cultural production, memory, and justice that make us ac-
countable not only to those who endure violence in the present but also
to those whose untimely death was not recognized or mourned and whose
memory continues to be erased and displaced from the historic record and
official discourse. The emptying of the columbaria meant yet another physi-
cal and symbolic displacement for hundreds of people who met brutal deaths
during El Bogotazo and who were buried hastily and anonymously into
cramped tombs and within the annals of the nation’s history. Auras marks
these ongoing displacements, establishing what Rory O’Bryen, drawing on
Robert Meister, calls “inter-­temporal justice,” a type of transgenerational
justice that includes forms of memory that mark the connections “not just
between the living and the dead, but also between successive generations of
ghosts as they’ve been forced to dislodge one another” (O’Bryen 2018, 12).
These “inter-­temporal” forms of memory are of particular importance in a
country like Colombia, where distinct, yet often overlapping and related
political, social, and ideological conflicts have shaped the modern history of
the nation. In this context, works like Auras caution against “the erasure of
pasts plural by commemorative delineations of pasts singular” and seek to
make visible “the symbolic and material dispossessions that connect these
pasts to the structural violence at work beyond individual and collective in-
jury” (O’Bryen 2018, 7) in the present. Auras’s inscription of the cargueros
on the empty tombs left by previous victims of political violence invites the
viewer to reflect on the continuity of violence in Colombia. It also suggests
questions about the inadequacy and perilous fictionality of the periodization
of violence that dismisses or demonizes frustration and inconformity with
structural marginalization; pushes aside forms of social dissent by declaring
them obsolete or overcome; and proclaims certain conflicts (like La Vio-
lencia) over through political processes that, while providing some redress
to victims of direct violence who are recognized as worthy by state mecha-
nisms and enacting exemplary punishment for the more visible perpetrators,
 The Revenants 145

do not address the structural causes of the violence and continue to protect
those who benefit from it. This dynamic has devastating consequences be-
cause it further obscures the interrelatedness and structural nature of violent
conflict in Colombia and, as a consequence, enables it to endure.
Moreover, in the paradox of hundreds of deserted tombs in a country
haunted by thousands of unburied and vanished bodies, González saw an
uncanny symbol of the profound disparities and contradictions that fueled
the armed conflict: the thousands of vacated plots in the capital’s central
cemetery contrasted sharply with the hundreds of mass graves being un-
earthed in the countryside at the time, where human remains had been piled
up without the dignity of a headstone or the solace of a prayer. González’s
haunting figures bring this paradox to the fore and bring the cargueros’ long
and sorrowful quest to bury their dead to the nation’s capital, inscribing it
into the nation’s history and memory. The figures are also a powerful visual
reminder that campesinos, usually of African or indigenous descent, con-
tinue to carry the weight of the nation’s socioeconomic and political elites
on their backs; and that the nation’s unequally distributed wealth and de-
velopment, as well as its so-­called pacification, are built upon new forms of
exploitation, marginalization, and erasure.
In this sense, the geopolitical aspects of Auras should not be overlooked.
Bringing the dead to Bogotá is important because of the uneven impact that
violence has had in Colombia. Despite the widespread reach of the conflict,
most of its victims have been poor peasants in remote villages or civilians
who live in areas of strategic importance to drug traffickers, guerrilla groups,
or the paramilitaries working in collusion with the military and the politi-
cal and socioeconomic elites. One reason the conflict has lasted for so long
is that it has been experienced as a low-­intensity struggle far removed from
the lives of most bogotanos, particularly since the demise of Pablo Escobar,
the infamous drug lord responsible for many of the most brutal and spec-
tacular acts of terror in urban centers during the 1980s and 1990s. Colom-
bia is a centralized country that has historically disregarded its geographical
and ethno-­racial margins, which, not coincidently, overlap. Regions such
as Chocó, La Guajira, Putumayo, and Amazonas, which have the largest
numbers of indigenous and Afro-­Colombian populations, are also some of
the poorest and most violent. Wealth, power, resources, rights, and protec-
tions are distributed unequally across the national territory. The closer one is
to Bogotá and other major cities, the more likely one is to be safe and have
access to education, employment, and other rights and services supposedly
guaranteed to all but in fact provided only to a minority of the popula-
tion. Even though there are other important urban centers, like Medellín
146  Haunting without Ghosts

and Cali, and even though marked regional differences continue to play
a salient and often contentious role in the history of the country, Bogotá,
with ten million people in its metropolitan area—approximately one-­fifth of
the country’s population—holds immense political, economic, and symbolic
power. For this reason, bogotanos are often accused by their compatriots of
being arrogant and dismissive toward what they see as “the provinces” and of
turning their backs to the painful and violent reality of the country. Further-
more, as the physical center of national government, the city also represents
the erosion of political ideals in favor of a manipulative, nepotistic, and cor-
rupt use of the law, the military, and other state apparatuses.
By placing the dead from Meta at the center of one Bogotá’s most sym-
bolically charged and visible sites, González gives the ghostly journey of the
cargueros added layers of meaning. Auras inscribes the return of the dead into
the very heart of the nation, soliciting not only empathy but also action. On
the one hand, Auras hopes to extend affective bonds between those who are
removed from the conflict and those who have endured its most brutal con-
sequences, reminding bogotanos that, as the art critic Humberto Junca puts
it, “esta guerra es nuestra y estos muertos son nuestros”; yet on the other
hand, the very materiality of the work (which was designed to last no more
than three years) warns us that passive contemplation leads to erasure and
oblivion (electrofin 2009). The fleeting presence of the cargueros, straining
under the weight of their dead, implies that visibility and empathy are not
enough and subtly conveys the urgent plight of those who have suffered
extreme physical violence made possible by decades of epistemic violence
within the discourse of the nation. The fading nature of the cargueros seeks
to mobilize affect toward that “something-­to-­be-­done” that distinguishes
haunting from other forms of empathy or trauma (Gordon 2008) by sug-
gesting that acknowledgement, recognition, and reparation can never be
passive and that they require collective action.
Finally, the scope of the work and González’s use of repetition and seri-
ality are also noteworthy. In Auras, size and quantity matter.20 The juxta-
position between the dimensions of the mausoleums and the small size of
the figures, as well as the seemingly incessant repetition of the cargueros,
creates a physical and spatial sense of the scope and magnitude of the war.
As one walks through the site, one feels dwarfed by the ossuaries, and remi-
niscences of Kafka’s “Before the Law” come to mind. Like the protagonist
of the story, one is overcome by the sense that there is an unsurmountable
distance between the common person and the law, despite, or perhaps in
great part because of, their apparent proximity. But unlike in Kafka’s story,
where individuality and unicity are essential, in Auras, the sheer number of
 The Revenants 147

cargueros surrounds the spectator, producing a powerful double effect. On

the one hand, the magnitude of the Colombian tragedy dawns on the spec-
tators, who find themselves overwhelmed by the thousands of images seek-
ing a place to have their dead recognized and properly buried. But on the
other hand, the audience is encouraged by the tenacity of the cargueros and
is invited to symbolically follow them by sharing and assuming coresponsi-
bility for the ethical weight of their dismal burden.
This insistence on the need to conjure and welcome the expelled specters
of Colombia’s recent violent history, and to create symbolic, and perhaps
reparative instances of collective mourning through art, is shared by both
González and Echavarría. It can also be found at the core of the haunting
works of Erika Diettes.

Suspended Mourning and Symbolic Burials:

The Haunting Works of Erika Diettes

Estamos en los territorios del duelo, de los infinitos

duelos suspendidos acumulados en estas tierras.
Ileana Diéguez, Cuerpos sin duelo

Erika Diettes is one of Colombia’s most creative and thoughtful artists. She
has been thinking, writing, and producing works about violence for most of
her professional life. In particular, she explores how mourning is impacted
by the way violence is narrated and represented,21 and she experiments with
artistic languages and media that encourage collective processes of mem-
ory making and mourning. Photography has been key in these explorations.
Diettes moved with her family to Washington, DC, in the mid-­1990s (one
of Colombia’s most violent periods), when she was sixteen. In Washington,
she had a contradictory experience that marked her professional future. On
the one hand, the language barrier made it hard to communicate and limited
her interactions with others, which made her feel lonely and isolated; her
cultural distance from the United States reduced and closed her world. On
the other hand, for the first time in her life, she was able to move around her
city without fear, which gave her an unknown and exciting sense of freedom.
The physical distance from Colombia expanded and opened her world. This
mixed sense of freedom and isolation led her to look for alternative means
of expressing what she was experiencing, and in photography she found just
what she was looking for. Her passion for photography, and her interest in
Colombia’s violence, particularly as it relates to the intersection of represen-
148  Haunting without Ghosts

tation and mourning, led her to return to her home country, where she ob-
tained a double degree in visual arts and communications as well as a masters
in social anthropology.
For the past decade, Diettes has been using her unusual training to cre-
ate an artistic language that, in her words, explores “the extremely complex
social, political and cultural situation that exists in Colombia” (2015, 25)
and is capable of bearing witness to the pain and suffering caused by the
country’s internal conflict. But like the other artists discussed in this chap-
ter, Diettes is not drawn to the direct representation of violence. Instead,
she is interested in what Doris Salcedo calls “the affective dimension of vio-
lence” (quoted in Malagón-­Kurka 2015, 195); that is, the ways violence not
only destroys the bodies and lives of those most directly impacted by it but
also disrupts and scars the sense of self and daily life of the victims’ loved
ones—how violence irrupts into the sphere of the familial, the quotidian,
and the intimate, making those spaces uncanny, haunted by an abrupt and
unresolved absence caused by the war. In this sense, Diettes’s works engage
(indirectly) in conversation with the works of Oscar Muñoz and Doris Sal-
cedo,22 who for decades have been exploring different means of incorpo-
rating aspects of the processes of memory, mourning, and haunting into the
materiality of the works themselves as a way to subtly evoke the complex and
multilayered impact of violence.
Oscar Muñoz is a towering figure in contemporary art in Colombia. In
the last four decades, he developed a unique set of aesthetic practices that
left a recognizable visual imprint on the country’s artistic landscape. His
particular use of photography has been key in this endeavor. Since the mid-­
1980s, Muñoz’s focus has shifted from photographs (either as aesthetic ob-
jects or archival materials) to the photographic process itself. This shift oc-
curred after a revelatory experience in the studio of Fernell Franco, another
well-­known Colombian photographer and a close friend of Muñoz. Muñoz
explains, “As I entered the dark room I saw how a pair of tongs began to agi-
tate a blank paper in the developer until an image appeared; I was perplexed,
breathless. . . . [T]hat type of experience, about and beyond technique, re-
lated to the image at large, clearly marked my work” (quoted in Gaztambide
2015, 148). This encounter catalyzed a studious and highly creative explo-
ration of the connections between the photographic process and the more
subjective processes of identity formation and memory. The combination
of drawing, photography, and video, as well as constant experimentation
with unstable or ephemeral supporting materials, such as water and tran-
sient images activated by human breath, allowed Muñoz to create haunt-
ing works that reflect on the cycles of life and death, the fleeting nature of
life and memory, and the struggle for permanence in a world where every-
 The Revenants 149

thing—oneself and others—seems bound to disappear, often violently and

without a trace. The use of highly distorted and manipulated photographs
adds historical density to his work.
In most cases, these photos are unrelated to concrete violent events, as is
the case for Echavarría, González, and Diettes. Instead, they usually attest
to Muñoz’s broader preoccupation with memory, the relationships and con-
nections between oneself and others, and mortality, caused by violence or
not. In this sense, his work is only tangentially preoccupied with the coun-
try’s historical violence. It is more subjective and philosophical in nature, as
it is primarily concerned with the representability of the evanescent, not as
the trace or index of an irrecoverable instant or as a way to arrest the motions
and gestures of a bygone loved one, but as a process. His works focus on
the immateriality and instability of memory and subjectivity, foreground-
ing the multiple disappearances and reappearances, accumulations and dis-
solutions, that are part of our individual and collective identities. Aliento
(1995–2002), Narcisos (1994–2003), Píxeles (2003), Editor solitario (2011),
and El coleccionista (2014–2017) are all significant examples. Throughout his
artistic career, Muñoz has provided Colombian cultural practitioners with
an invaluable visual repertoire for musing on disappearance and reappear-
ance, memory and oblivion, and life and death, primarily as complex pro-
cesses in which we all take part and over which we also have agency, even if
it is often passing and uncertain.
Formally speaking, Diettes’s work resonates strongly with Muñoz’s. She
uses many similar techniques to think about the representation of histori-
cal violence in the country, particularly as it relates to the desaparecidos. Like
Muñoz, she uses photography in her works, not as a finished artistic product
but as an “elemento formal, con posibilidades de ser sometido a las inter-
acciones y al cambio” (Malagón-­Kurka 2015, 120). Also like Muñoz, Diettes
experiments with unstable surfaces that have dense historical meaning and
ample artistic potential, and she explores the visual possibilities of water,
light, darkness, transparency, and suspension. This creative effort provides
her with the tools to create a unique visual vocabulary that allows her to
explore in the materiality of her works the tensions between permanence
and evanescence, memory and oblivion, mourning and the impossibility of
doing so.
Diettes also shares significant thematic preoccupations and formal ex-
plorations with Doris Salcedo. Both artists rely on the strong relations they
build with victims of violence or their family members as a key part of their
artistic projects. These human connections inform the creative process in
different ways. For example, they both use the testimonies gathered as direct
inspiration for their works and share an interest in the artistic repurpos-
150  Haunting without Ghosts

ing of everyday objects with high affective value, like shoes, scapulars, hats,
glasses, and so forth. They also have a similar desire to perform interven-
tions in spaces charged with symbolic meaning and to promote different
engagements between the spectators and the works. Diettes has exhibited
her works in venues that range from trendy indie museums in New York
and Bogotá packed with demanding art critics to the churches and small
cultural centers of the villages where the family members of the victims still
live and where memories are still so raw that people bring candles to honor
the dead. Her careful selection of the materials and objects, the bonds with
the family members of the victims, and the spaces in which the pieces are
exhibited transform her works into symbolic sites of mourning and invite
the audience to become witnesses of a violent history that even if it cannot
be fully accounted for, can no longer be ignored.
In the following sections, I focus on four works that not only trace Diet-
tes’s impressive artistic trajectory but also best represent, to my mind, her
conviction that “art not only contributes to the creation of a crucial space
for the configuration of a country’s memory but also provides a space that
allows mourning” (Diettes 2015, 27). Río abajo (2007–2008), A punta de
sangre (2009), Sudarios (2011), and Relicarios (2010) do so by bringing back
the brutally muted cries of the desaparecidos through images and objects that
serve as uncanny metonymies of the missing and by focusing on the sus-
pended grief that forced disappearance brings with it. In this sense, these
four works exemplify what Andreas Huyssen, analyzing the work of Doris
Salcedo, calls the ability of certain artworks to act as “secondary witnesses,”
particularly in contexts of extreme violence; that is, an artist’s potential to
become a “witness to lives and life stories forever scarred by the experience
of violence that keeps destroying family, community, nation and ultimately
the human spirit itself ” (Huyssen 2000, 96). Río abajo, A punta de sangre, Su-
darios, and Relicarios all speak, through different means, of this desire to bear
witness. They seek to include the audience in collective acts of acknowledge-
ment, remembrance, and mourning that pose important questions about
the audience’s own involvement, by action or omission, with the country’s
violence and about their role in building a more equitable and just future.

Deferred Burials and Watery Graves:

Río abajo and A punta de sangre

Most of Diettes’s works can be described as deferred, symbolic burials. She

creates these symbolic burials with two main techniques that infuse her art
 The Revenants 151

Figure 3.3. Erika Diettes, Río abajo (detail), 2007–2008. Courtesy of Erika Diettes.

with a strong sense of the uncanny: an experimental and expressive use of

photography and an incorporation of mementos of the victims. Further-
more, the contrast between the spectral and immaterial nature of the photo-
graphs and the coarse materiality of the objects evokes another painful as-
pect of the forced disappearance of people. The abrupt absence of the person
weighs on the lives of the family members and is often perceived as asphyxi-
ating and overwhelming precisely because of its ethereal nature. This am-
biguous yet unremitting character of disappearance submerges people into a
rarified atmosphere where previously unremarkable objects are infused with
an outsized affective charge that gives the family members the ominous
sensation of inhabiting a haunted time and space, not because these objects
remind them of their loved ones but because they ask unresolved questions
about life and death and, more specifically, about justice. This tension is at
the heart of Río abajo (2007–2008) and A punta de sangre (2009), which
share with Echavarría’s Réquiem NN a keen interest in the river, a symbol
that condenses much of the Colombian armed conflict.
Río abajo and A punta de sangre are closely related to Réquiem NN in their
focus on the gruesome practice of disposing of bodies in the river in order to
erase any evidence of the crime. Like Echavarría’s Réquiem, these works ex-
plore the river as a once-­familiar place that has become profoundly uncanny
due to violence, a spectral site where the dead disappear and reappear. The
152  Haunting without Ghosts

installation Río abajo consists of twenty-­six human-­size photographs of gar-

ments and other objects that belonged to the victims submerged in a pool of
water in the artist’s studio. This was the first time Diettes used the personal
belongings of victims in her work. Family members of desaparecidos whom
Diettes met in Bogotá, Medellín, and Caquetá, among other places, en-
trusted the artist with the precious items, which Diettes returned once the
photo shoot was over. The images of the now-­owner-­less garments floating
in the water conjure feelings of vulnerability, precariousness, and abandon-
ment, as well as a desire to mend and to nurture. They also enact violence’s
radical defamiliarization of the familiar, which Freud saw as intrinsic to
the uncanny, and challenge the viewer by conjuring spectral revenants that
ask questions about memory, mourning, and justice. Pants, glasses, hats,
dresses, and shirts bring to the fore the absence of those whose skin they
once touched and whose bodies they covered, becoming spectral proxies
for the desaparecidos. The way the photographs are exhibited reinforces this
experience. As Diettes explains, the pictures are displayed upright in the
ground “like translucent tombstones in a cemetery . . . [so that] people can
walk in and around them, and begin to experience the grief of loss” (Diet-
tes, n.d.).
A punta de sangre is a follow-­up to Río abajo. It consists of a seemingly
innocuous triptych that nonetheless powerfully evokes the country’s vio-
lence to anyone familiar with it. The composition is made up of three large
images of the same size: on the left, the face of a woman devastated by sor-
row as she tells the story of the disappearance of a loved one; on the right, a
profile of the head of a vulture with a single, bright-­red drop of blood about
to fall from its beak; between them, a bleary black-­and-­white photograph
of an unidentifiable body of water. The water both separates and unites the
woman and the vulture. The water imposes physical distance between them,
but since they are both looking at it, it also creates a macabre visual connec-
tion between the two. The intensity of their gazes, as well as what the viewer
already knows about Colombia’s rivers, suggests that they are looking for the
same “thing” in the murky waters: woman and animal both stare anxiously,
one undone by grief, the other hunger stricken; one hoping for a funeral, the
other eager for a feast.
Diettes’s clever use of photography in Río abajo and A punta de sangre,
combined with the testimonies and mementos of the victims, conjures the
unresolved vanishings of the desaparecidos while acknowledging and honor-
ing their unrepresentability. This technique heightens the affective charge
that according to Roland Barthes constitutes photography’s most intense
effect, thus creating a favorable environment for mourning. In Camera
 The Revenants 153

Lucida, Barthes memorably argues that the power of photography is not

to be found in what it shows but in what it produces; it is not located in the
studium, that domain of tepid curiosity, “unconcerned desire [and] inconse-
quential taste: I like / I don’t like” (1982, 27), but in the punctum, the realm
of piercing emotion and love. For Barthes, this “pathos” at the core of pho-
tography (21) is inextricably related to its spectral nature: photography as
a medium brings the dead back and confronts us with our own mortality
(9). This interest in the affective dimensions of photographs leads Barthes
to consider photography “not as a question (a theme) but as a wound” (21).
This is what Diettes’s works underline, but with an added layer of com-
plexity. It is well known that Barthes wrote Camera Lucida primarily as an
exercise of mourning. His mother had passed away, and a photograph of her
as a child awakened an intense emotion that led to one of the most impact-
ful and moving books about photography. Based on this experience, Barthes
describes the power of photography to cut through the sociohistorical dis-
course of the studium, to arrest and puncture time and space, and to prompt
us to see the world in new ways, in a process of acknowledging and assuming
the grief caused by the loss of that which photography insists on bringing
back: “I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think” (21). But Diet-
tes is not mourning a dear family member who died of natural causes in old
age. Her photographs act as evocative and emotive traces of an unspeakable
event. She is preoccupied with mourning when mourning is not possible be-
cause of concrete historical circumstances like the Colombian armed con-
flict, and she is interested in the impact these atrocities have not only on
discrete individuals but also on the nation.
In this sense, Diettes’s photographs are twice spectral. On the one hand,
like all photographs, they are specters in that they present the viewer with
the spectacle of that “rather terrible thing”: the return of the dead (Barthes
1982). On the other hand, however, they are unable to do so. Diettes’s
photographs do not show the contrast within the “then-­so-­full-­of-­life-­and-­
now-­dead” that so fascinated Barthes. The spectacle they confront us with is
that of an aporia: the impossibility of being present in the photograph that
marks one’s own death. If photographs reassured Barthes that even though
now gone, indeed, “they were there” (1982, 82), Diettes’s images ask, “Where
are they?,” “Why are they not there?,” and “What happened to them?”; her
photographs capture not the ephemeral presence of a subject, its “having
been there,” but rather the trace left by its forceful absence. Photos, here,
are not “emanations . . . from a real body, which was there” (Barthes 1982,
80–81), they come from bodies and objects that act as metonymies pointing
to an elusive referent. Her photographs denote the troublesome rupture of
154  Haunting without Ghosts

the umbilical cord that can no longer take us through the carnal skin of light
back to another body (80–81). Instead, it leads us to surrogates who speak
of its vanishing. The distressed faces of family members and the objects vic-
tims loved, wore, or used attest to both their presence in the world and their
brutal departure from it. This double absence inscribed in the photographs
heightens their affective charge. On the one hand, we experience the wound
inflicted by time upon all of us—the disquieting certainty that we too are
going to die. But we are also pierced by the violent wounds inflicted upon
the bodies of those unable to be present because of war’s brutal acts. This
is the specter in her photos; this is what comes back to haunt the audi-
ence and the nation. Indeed, the Barthesian relationship among spectrality,
photography, and grief, and its potential for reparative and symbolic acts of
mourning, is made literal in Sudarios.

Forced Witnesses: Suspended Mourning

and the Pain of Seeing in Sudarios

The series Sudarios (2010) consists of twenty silk portraits of women from
Antioquia, a region particularly hard-­hit by violence, who were forced to
watch the torture and murder of loved ones. Even though Sudarios extends
many of the themes and techniques of Diettes’s other works, it also departs
from them in two meaningful ways: it is the only work by Diettes analyzed
here that does not deal with desaparecidos; and the photo shoot did not take
place in the artist’s studio, but rather on-­site, either where the events oc-
curred or where the women—many of whom had been displaced by the vio-
lence—were staying at the time or then living. Diettes photographed the
women while they were retelling their testimonies and exhibited the result-
ing images without frames, suspending them at uneven distances from the
ceilings of churches, but always hanging low enough to remain accessible to
the audience. Disregarding her photographic training, which mandated that
people be photographed with their eyes open, in all but one of the twenty
portraits the women have their eyes closed. This choice allows Sudarios to
elucidate the ways that vision itself can be used as a weapon.
As noted, the women were unwilling witnesses of the horrors endured by
their loved ones. The photographs acknowledge this and seek to compen-
sate the women symbolically for this brutal denial of agency and to restore,
if only allegorically, the women’s right not to see. The prevalence of closed
eyes in the exhibit brings to the fore the potential for violence embedded in
vision, adding a layer of complexity to Diettes’s body of work and establish-
Figure 3.4. Erika Diettes, Sudarios (detail), 2011. Courtesy of Erika Diettes.
156  Haunting without Ghosts

ing similarities between her artistic project and the concerns of writers such
as Evelio Rosero or filmmakers such as William Vega. Like them, Diettes
explores the slippage between vision and knowledge and the tension be-
tween the inability to see and a highly disruptive excess of vision. In other
words, Diettes, Rosero, and Vega speak of the importance of witnessing
while also warning about the devastating effects of being forced to become
a witness. The problem the women have in Sudarios is not not knowing what
happened to their loved ones, but of knowing in excruciating detail. These
photographs mark the instant in which vision and knowledge become un-
bearable; they present suffering condensed not in the eyes that long to see,
but in the eyes of those who wish they had not looked. In this sense, the
lament of Ismael, the protagonist of Evelio Rosero’s Los ejércitos, “Mis ojos
sufriendo,” resembles the pathos of the women and could serve as an epi-
graph for the exhibit. As in Los ejércitos, in Sudarios the eye stops being the
main organ through which knowledge is acquired and turns into a reposi-
tory of intense emotions and acute pain strongly related to concrete his-
torical circumstances. This conversion endows the images with a profound
affective charge that solicits the engagement of the audience. Confronted
with the bereaved faces of the women, viewers are invited to reflect on their
own relationships with others, particularly in contexts traversed by violence.
Another important aspect of the work has to do with the exhibit’s ma-
terial support and the placement of the photographs. Diettes suspended
the images from the ceiling and hung them low enough that they could
sway back and forth and be touched by visitors, which, combined with the
translucent quality of the silk, gave them a disquieting spectral character.
This was intentional. In an interview with Anne Wilkes Tucker, Diettes ex-
plained that one of the things that most struck her about the testimonies
of the women was how they often described themselves, not their loved
ones, as specters: “You become like a ghost, you have a pulse but you are not
living” (Tucker 2015, 156). Violence spectralized them, made them ghostly.
Due to the extreme cruelty of the events witnessed, the women entered a
state of suspension similar to the one endured by the family members of the
desaparecidos, where the linearity and unidirectionality of chronology are dis-
rupted; the deeply familiar becomes unheimlich, and the victims experience
the visual paradox of the specter: they become both hypervisible, unwanted
presences and possible targets of violence themselves, while being hopelessly
invisible as their claims and stories remain unheard. Diettes strives to convey
that the women are “alive but not living” (Tucker 2015, 157) by embedding
this notion into the material support of the images and extending it to the
exhibit through four main strategies.
 The Revenants 157

First, Diettes’s use of photography reproduces the spectralization the

women experience. As mentioned, the translucent character of the silk turns
the photographs into see-­through images that cannot always be perceived
clearly and infuses them with an ethereal, ghostly appearance. Second, the
fact that they are suspended in the air, rather than attached to the ground
or the walls, reinforces the unearthly feeling they project, reproducing the
sensation of unreality that violence imposes and presenting the viewer with
a literalized image of the suspended temporality of grief. As Ileana Diéguez
remarks, “Sudarios es literalmente un cúmulo de dolor suspendido” (2013,
48). Third, the uneven distribution of the photographs across the space in-
tentionally mimics the disruption caused by specters in that they interrupt
the path of the audience, demanding their attention and soliciting recog-
nition for their plight. Finally, the title of the series enforces the spectral
character of the images.
A sudario is a shroud, a funerary cloth that wraps the face and body of
the deceased in a final embrace. A shroud also serves as a sort of spectral
photograph: the emanations of the dead body are inscribed onto the cloth,
which preserves a physical trace of the body’s existence and an imprint of its
features. This effect endows Sudarios with a highly indexical and symbolic
value. The title of the exhibit suggests that, as in a shroud, the images come
from the gradual dissolution of the subject, undone in this case by grief and
intense pain, and it infuses them with the indexical, symbolic, and affec-
tive charge that all shrouds have. It also places the women in an ambiguous
position between the dead and the living. The viewer can see that they are
not dead, but because the material support of their images is a shroud, they
cannot be alive either. They are, as Diettes says, “the living dead” (Tucker
2015, 157). Furthermore, the images hang low, imbuing the exhibit with
an important tactile dimension.23 Reminiscent of Muñoz’s Cortinas de baño
(1985–1986), a key aspect of Sudarios is the way it integrates the spectator
into the space. Like Cortinas, Sudarios requires the viewer to walk around
the room, looking through and behind the pieces, coming into contact with
them and with others who are contemplating the mourning women. The
shrouds hang in the spectators’ way, not as objects to be avoided but as
sorrowful shadows soliciting their caress. Also, because the airy nature of
the shrouds allows them to move easily with the wind or with the slightest
touch, they physically challenge the audience and demand a response from
them. Spectators are invited not only to share the time and space of the fig-
ures’ arrested sorrow but to walk among the living dead and to be touched
by them, disturbed by them, and affected by them.
This physical connection partially restores the bonds disrupted in Río
158  Haunting without Ghosts

abajo and A punta de sangre. The images of the women act like Barthes’s um-
bilical cord of light that brings people together in the human experience of
bereavement and grief and, in this case, speaks of the will to remember and
to survive. Sudarios is not a glorification of female suffering. The series does
not exalt pain; it dignifies it. The images are not pietàs, where the women
submissively accept the burden of their suffering and turn it into an offer-
ing for salvation. The women are specters whose suspended sorrow demands
answers and action. Thus, the engagement with photographs that Diettes
proposes is similar to Barthes’s, with a slight but transformative modifica-
tion: like Barthes, she is interested in the connections among photography,
spectrality, and mourning. But she takes this intersection beyond the do-
main of the private and into the realm of historical violence, exploring ques-
tions about collective mourning and symbolic reparation. She moves from
pathema, the condition of silent suffering, to poiema, which refers to public
manifestations of the pathema, and to action (Diéguez 2015, 40). This ges-
ture grants Diettes’s work an added layer of urgency. A vital part of a work
like Sudarios is the desire to combine the affective charge inherent in pho-
tography’s punctum with that “something-­to-­be-­done” (Gordon 2008) pro-
duced by the specter. As a result, the process of engagement that according
to Barthes is mobilized by photography would here include a call to action:
“I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, I think,” and, hopefully, “I act.”

Symbolic Tombstones for Colombia’s Desaparecidos

In Relicarios, the last work I analyze in this chapter, Diettes becomes a sym-
bolic embalmer for the missing. Her technical choice of sculpture for this
piece allows her to take the process she began in Río abajo a step further
and to materialize the previously explained relationship between mourning,
forced disappearance, and art. A relicario, or reliquary, is a sacred space that
holds relics, which are venerated personal effects or bodily remains of a holy
person. Diettes, too, venerates remains. But instead of revering the saints
of any particular creed, she pays homage to the thousands of desaparecidos of
the Colombian armed conflict. As mentioned earlier, Diettes’s work solicits
active engagement as an integral part of the creative process and the work
itself. Thus, the objects do not derive, as they do in the works of González
and Muñoz, from the personal archive of the artist but from the most inti-
mate memories and spaces of the victims. Those who mourn and demand
answers select the objects and bring them to the artist, sometimes as loans
(as in Río abajo) and other times as gifts (as is the case here). For years, Diet-
 The Revenants 159

Figure 3.5. Erika Diettes, Relicarios (detail), 2011–2015. “Orgullo colombiano.”

Courtesy of Erika Diettes.

tes collected objects that had belonged to desaparecidos and were donated by
the families of the missing persons. The family members undertook long and
dangerous journeys from war-­stricken regions to generously entrust some
of their most beloved possessions to the artist: a painful, and perhaps also
healing, act of letting go of mundane yet precious objects in the hope of pro-
ducing a more collective and durable act of remembrance. Objects patiently
and lovingly sought out more than simply found, Diettes’s relicarios consist
of toothbrushes, T-­shirts, combs, pictures blurred by time and humidity, old
school trophies and medals, tools such as screwdrivers and machetes, rubber
flip-­flops, soccer jerseys, scapulars, and many otherwise unremarkable ob-
jects that have accrued deep symbolic and affective value by virtue of their
owners’ forced disappearances. Violence has turned the objects into relics,
and Diettes creates a space where the absence they denote can be avowed
and preserved. After listening to the stories of the families and carefully
noting them in her log, the artist encased the mementos in translucent cubes
(11.8 × 11.8 × 4.7 in.) of rubber tripolymer, a resin that resembles amber or
160  Haunting without Ghosts

Figure 3.6. Erika Diettes, Relicarios (detail), 2011–2015. “Toothbrush.” Courtesy

of Erika Diettes.

crystalized honey. Regardless of the venue, the cubes are always displayed
in a dark, quiet room and placed at ground level in a spatial arrangement
strongly reminiscent of tombstones.
In this sense, Diettes’s work is in dialogue with the legacy of Salcedo and
Muñoz. On the one hand, Relicarios evokes Salcedo’s use of objects, par-
ticularly in Atrabiliarios (1991–1992),24 in which Salcedo encased old shoes
donated by the families of the victims of violence in niches embedded in
the wall. She then covered them with a semitranslucent layer of animal tis-
sue (cow bladder) sewn to the wall with medical suture, thus impeding a
clear view. This craft work produces a haunting experience that both solicits
and obscures our view of the objects, making their presence felt but neces-
sarily remote and mediated by absence. Thus, the scene reveals “no un pro-
ceso de duelo, sino . . . la imposibilidad de llevarlo a cabo” (Salcedo quoted
in Malagón-­Kurka 2015, 155), which in turn provokes in the spectator the
trace of a disruptive and disturbing event that has taken place. On the other
hand, Relicarios is strongly reminiscent of Narcisos, a 1994 work by Muñoz in
 The Revenants 161

which he filled Plexiglas squares (13.8 × 13.8 × 2.7 in.) with water and sub-
merged a photoserigraph of himself in each one. The different images were
exhibited lined up next to each other, evoking tombstones in a cemetery. The
result was a dynamic and eerie environment that evolved as the water slowly
deteriorated the images, mimicking the cycle of life and death: from a fully
recognizable image and a cohesive identity into dissolution and disappear-
ance. In contrast, Diettes’s relicarios are solid and fixed, and they replace
the image of the artist with the mementos of the victims. If Muñoz reflects
on the fleeting and ephemeral nature of life, Diettes evokes the (im)possi-
bility of mourning when there is no body to lay to rest in the ground. Self-­
consciously suggestive of gravestones, her relicarios encapsulate the desire for
a remedial materiality perhaps capable of soothing the pain caused by the
absence of a body that could provide the grim solace of closure. They ma-
terialize the will to mourn and to remember when all that is left are traces
that mark the forced disappearance of a loved one and the bewilderment and
anguish left by their vanishing.
With Relicarios, Diettes offers “a symbolic tombstone” (quoted in Tucker
2015, 154) for Colombia’s disappeared.25 The personal objects humanize and
literalize absence and, as in Río abajo, act as stand-­ins for the desaparecidos,
becoming uncanny metonymies that point toward a missing, irretrievable
whole and signaling the urgency of providing recognition, if not closure. In
this regard, the materiality of the objects is significant. They are not what
one would call “beautiful.” They are not new, shiny, or particularly appeal-
ing at first sight. They appear old, worn, chipped, decolored. They speak of
a person’s daily habits and tasks, provide a glimpse of their faith, or afford a
sense of what and whom the person loved. They were never meant to be pub-
licly exhibited. Thus, their relocation and transformation into public objects
raises questions about how they got there and what might have happened
to their owners. Furthermore, the intense contrast between the sturdy ma-
teriality of the objects and the mysterious vanishing of those who used and
owned them makes them look abandoned and orphaned, turning absence
into the most powerful signifier of violence.
The scale of the work is also significant. Diettes has exhibited up to 165
relicarios at a time. The effect is overwhelming. As is the case with González’s
Auras anónimas, the seemingly incessant repetition of the relicarios offers a
glimpse of the extent of human tragedy in Colombia. But Diettes’s empha-
sis on personal objects also highlights a tension between multiplicity and
individuality, the repetition and the uniqueness, which extends to larger
concerns about how the proliferation of images of violent acts erases the
specificity of each event and trumps empathy by precluding the recognition
Figure 3.7. Erika Diettes, Relicarios (detail), 2011–2015. A woman kneels down in
front of a relicario. Courtesy of Erika Diettes.
 The Revenants 163

of, much less identification with, the victims of such acts. Relicarios man-
ages to show the magnitude of the carnage by emphasizing the number of
victims through the repetition and regular layout of the relicarios, while pre-
serving the uniqueness of each one through the personal effects displayed in
each reliquary. Despite the apparent homogeneity of the work, all the ob-
jects are different, and each one points to an irretrievable human loss and to
the truncated lives of those who still mourn. The attention and emotions of
the spectator are then directed inward and outward at the same time: the
everyday nature of the objects points toward deeply personal experiences of
grief, trauma, and loss, but the scope of the exhibit signals that the viewer is
also confronting a massive historical event. The result is a gesture that both
humanizes the abstract notion of the “Colombian armed conflict” and his-
toricizes suffering by signaling toward the specific geographical and socio-
political conditions that produced it.
Much has changed in Colombia since Diettes first started searching for
ways to think about the relationships among historical violence, mourning,
and representation. But the country still faces major challenges in the slow
and arduous path of confronting and processing its recent violent history.
Diettes’s works highlight the key role that art can play, particularly in con-
texts in which one of the major problems is not the excess of corpses but the
notorious absence of bodies. She focuses on a double process that attests to
the devastating effects of extreme violence and to the reparative power of
art at the same time: she highlights how violence transmutes commonplace
objects into relics and how art has the potential to turn such mementos into
indexical signifiers of violent deaths that demand to be publicly recognized
and collectively mourned. Diettes taps into the affective potential of pho-
tography and relics to create strong connections with the spectator, allegori-
cally mending the social and human bonds fractured by violence. Thus, her
works serve as much-­needed commemorative sites for victims of the armed
conflict and their families. By working collaboratively with the family mem-
bers to create Río abajo, A punta de sangre, Sudarios, and Relicarios, Diettes
turns testimonies, photographs, and quotidian objects into spectral reve-
nants that come back to haunt the time and space of a nation desperately
trying to move on. The works reclaim a residual materiality that violence
sought to destroy, acting as uncanny metonymies of the bodies of the miss-
ing, proxies that do not seek to remedy absence but do strive to mark it pub-
licly and to provide a space for its symbolic and collective mourning.
Epilogue

To fight for an oppressed past is to make this past come alive

as the lever for the work of the present.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters

Loss must be marked and it cannot be represented; loss fractures

representation itself and loss precipitates its own mode of expression. . . .
Somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told
about it; no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which
to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full “recovery” is
impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the
condition of a new political agency.
Judith Butler, “Afterword”

Half a block from the presidential palace in Bogotá, in Carrera 7, No. 6b-­
30, stands a small, unassuming house that blends in with the colonial-­style
homes around it. Except for an inscription on its front wall, the house looks
no different from the neighboring buildings. The sign reads “Fragmentos”
in hollow letters that may pique passersbys’ interest as to what is inside.
There, the interior blends old with the new: crumbling structures and an-
cient trees coexist with modern glass walls that separate the space into three
large rooms and an equal number of interior patios; the floor has an indus-
trial air, as if it were made of steel. At the entrance, the high ceilings contrast
with the walls (immaculate white or transparent), which inspire a sense of
tranquility and connection, and the heavy, gloomy, sensation provoked by
the floor is striking. In fact, contrary to what happens in most spaces, the
floor is what captivates attention here. It is dark gray—a color that evokes
ashes—and produces a chilling effect. Countless marks with no apparent

164
Figure 4.1. Doris Salcedo, Fragmentos, 2018. Entrance sign. Photograph by the
author.
166  Haunting without Ghosts

decorative pattern have been inscribed onto its surface, leaving it a little un-
even. Walking on it feels disquieting because, as one of the first visitors said,
“este piso huele a sangre” (Padilla 2018).
There’s a reason for that. Operated by the Museo Nacional and the Minis-
terio de Cultura, Fragmentos is one of three works that the government of
Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018) commissioned the renowned Colombian
artist Doris Salcedo to create in order to commemorate the official end of
the nation’s armed conflict. At first, Salcedo struggled with the assignment.
She did not want to make a monument, because to her doing so would sug-
gest a glorification of violence. Instead, she proposed what she calls a “contra
monumento”; that is, “una obra que no es vertical, que no es jerárquica, que
no es monumental ni monumentaliza, que no cuenta una versión grandiosa”
(Padilla 2018). In that sense, Salcedo’s “contra monumento” is profoundly
at odds with what Martin Jay, analyzing the work of Walter Benjamin, calls
a “culture of commemoration” ( Jay 2003a, 15) that seeks to “solidify na-
tional identity in the present and justify the alleged sacrifices made in its
name” (18). Instead, she came up with the idea of Fragmentos, a permanent
spatial installation constructed by interposing a colonial house as closely
as possible to the presidential palace, the center of political power in the
country. The space would serve as a multipurpose site carefully refurbished
to acknowledge and host the myriad and often conflicting voices, experi-
ences, and expressions that constitute the memory of the armed conflict in
Colombia. The project had three main components: (1) the house selected
to host the work would be rebuilt from the ground up in order to incorpo-
rate material remnants and cathectic force into the structure of the build-
ing; (2) the site would operate as a cultural and social center, inviting two
artists per year to showcase or create a work related to the conflict, and have
ongoing open calls for victims, ex-­combatants, and civil-­society organiza-
tions to host events; and (3) it would remain free and open to the public for
at least fifty-­three years, which is the official duration of the armed conflict.
Salcedo explained the idea directly to the then president Juan Manuel San-
tos, who greenlit the project. Things moved quickly: within ten months, the
building that houses Fragmentos, the work itself, and a short documentary
about the process of making it were complete (Mimbre 2018). It opened its
doors on December 9, 2018.
From its title, Fragmentos brings two main issues to the fore. On the
one hand, it conjures the many things broken and shattered by violence,
the countless lives and objects that will never be whole again. On the other
hand, it references the fragmented, polyphonic, and necessarily incomplete
nature of the memory of war. These two aspects are also inscribed in the
Figure 4.2. Doris Salcedo, Fragmentos, 2018. “Este piso huele a sangre.” Visitors
walk on the floor made with thirty-­seven tons of melted weapons surrendered by
FARC combatants. Photograph by the author.
Figure 4.3. Doris Salcedo, Fragmentos, 2018. Floor detail. Photograph by the
author.
 Epilogue 169

building that houses the work. Fragmentos was built on a colonial house
that was dramatically changed in order to embed the memory and the traces
of violence into the very structure of the building. Some of the old walls
and tiles remain, but the interior now consists of three small inner gardens
and three large exhibition rooms built on a somber yet hopeful common
ground: the floor that unites and supports the exhibit spaces is made out of
1,296 plates created with thirty-­seven tons of melted weapons surrendered
by FARC combatants to symbolize their transition to civilian life during the
peace process.1 The plates, which are 23 × 23 inches and cover a total sur-
face area of 2,624 square feet, are not smooth. They are rugged, traversed by
thousands of imprints both painful and gendered.
The peace agreement between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) is historic in many respects. It is the
first to include a gender perspective that recognizes women (and LGBTQ
individuals) as victims of different forms of gender violence, particularly,
but not exclusively, sexual violence. It also acknowledges the fundamen-
tal role that women played and continue to play as community leaders and
peace builders and seeks to mainstream their perspectives, experiences, and
needs into the memory and future of the nation. Fragmentos incorporates
this reparative gender component, inscribing it into the materiality of the
work. To do so, Salcedo collaborated with the Red de Mujeres Víctimas y
Profesionales. With the group’s support, twenty women who were victims
of sexual violence at the hands of all armed actors (guerrilla and paramili-
tary groups as well as the military) were invited to work with the artist in a
collective and cathartic process based on their stories and on those of thou-
sands of other women that the network had collected for years. The women,
who came from diverse ethno-­racial backgrounds and regions, were given
hammers, gloves, and earplugs and spent two days working on the steel
sheets that would go on top of the plates created by the melted weapons.
First, they hit the sheets almost to the point of destroying them. Then they
smoothed them out, carefully and slowly reconstructing them, much like
they had done with their lives. But the sheets, like the women, and like all
victims of war, still betray uneven marks of violence. Some marks are highly
visible, making the sheets resemble crumpled paper, while others can barely
be seen; their trace is faint but no less devastating. As Nancy Gómez, one of
the women who participated, said, “Las rayas que dejaba en las láminas sig-
nificaban las cicatrices que me dejó el conflicto” (Rodríguez 2018). Another
woman, who preferred not to identify herself, reiterated this idea: “Son las
marcas que quedan sobre el cuerpo, sobre la piel, sobre el corazón” (Mim-
bre 2018). The imprints left by their hammering create a subtle and dismal
170  Haunting without Ghosts

topography that etches thousands of silenced stories of victims of sexual vio-

lence onto the very surface visitors stand on, acknowledging it as an integral
part of the common ground of the nation. By so doing, Fragmentos provides
a form of symbolic compensation for victims of sexual violence and materi-
alizes the key role they play in forging a future that acknowledges, remem-
bers, and dignifies their experiences and agonies.
Another key component of Fragmentos is that due to its complexity and
numerous components, it is necessarily a collective project. This collectivity
includes and fuses the work of different armed actors, civil-­society organi-
zations, and civilians into a common space for mourning and rebuilding:
the guerrilla fighters who surrendered their weapons; the police officers who
guarded and transported the guns and participated in the process of melting
them; the women who endured sexual violence; the architects, engineers,
and construction workers who designed and rebuilt the house; the artists
who will continue to create in the space; and the ordinary Colombians like
me who visit it as part of their own journey to confront the enormity of war.
I visited Fragmentos in June 2019, six months after its inauguration. It
was a Saturday afternoon during the Copa América, a region-­wide soccer
championship that brings the country to a standstill. Colombia was play-
ing a match against Argentina later in the day, so the streets and the space
were almost empty. Amid the celebratory nationalism that unites Colom-
bians when it comes to soccer, I had gone to face our ghosts and to talk to
the dead about what had torn us apart for decades. I knew it would not be
easy, but I did not anticipate how profoundly emotional and stirring it would
be. At first, I hesitated to enter the space because I could not bring myself
to stand on the floor. I stayed at the edge with my head down, gazing at it,
mesmerized by how massive its presence was, by what it meant to have all
of this at my feet, and noticing every mark on its surface. Then I found my-
self kneeling so I could touch it, feel the cold metal, and pass my hand over
the uneven topography of pain left by the women, like a belated caress or a
useless prayer. As tears rolled out of my eyes, I noticed one of the security
guards was looking at me. I felt embarrassed, smiled apologetically, and was
getting ready to stand up when he came up to me, gently put his hand on
my back, and said, “Tranquila, a mucha gente le pasa lo mismo.” I stayed in
that position for a few more minutes, and then, instead of walking inside, I
turned right, into an inner garden that preserves the original architecture of
the house. It is a quiet and calm space surrounded by plants and trees, and
doves coo softly as they nest in the many holes of the crumbling walls. Under
trees that had probably witnessed decades of political turmoil and violence,
listening to the silence and to the soft sounds of birds that symbolize peace,
 Epilogue 171

and thinking about the many feet that could no longer stand on that floor
but whose presence could be intensely felt precisely because of their absence,
Doris Salcedo’s words resonated strongly in my mind: “Yo no puedo presen-
tar la muerte violenta de manera obscena. . . . Lo único que puedo hacer es
presentar un silencio que genere ecos sobre lo que nos ocurrió. Cada colom-
biano tiene sus memorias y las traerá a este sitio” (Padilla 2018). Indeed, I
had brought my own memories as a humble offering to nurture that silence,
a few more irrecoverable echoes to resonate and wander through the frac-
tured yet hopeful horizon that lay at my feet.
By the time I finally entered the space, I knew I was passing through
haunted territory, hallowed ground meant to serve as a site for collective
mourning and rebuilding. I moved slowly, sensing the rough texture left by
the marks embedded in the tiles, overcome by the intensity of the historical
contingency that allowed me to stand on that dreary yet promissory ground,
and reflecting on what this process of fundición/fundación both materialized
and symbolized: the possibility of forging a future that seeks to acknowl-
edge, account for, and embrace its ghosts. As a site literally built from the
remnants of war, one that holds the painful memories and hopeful dreams
of victims of sexual violence inscribed in its very foundation, Fragmentos
emerges, as Judith Butler would describe it, “in Benjaminian fashion” from
the ruins, as the ruins, of decimation (2003, 468). What is produced, then,
is a space that houses and welcomes the very impossibility of the mandate
it intends to accomplish: also in Benjaminian fashion, to make whole what
has been shattered. Rather than smoothing out the fractures and sutures
caused by the irretrievable memories, many absences, and painful wounds
of war, Fragmentos unites, centers, and activates their aesthetic and ethical
potential. Drawing on Butler once again, one could say that Fragmentos is
fundamentally determined by a violent past that continues to inform it. As
a site that seeks at once to preserve and honor the memory of horror while
pointing to the future, Fragmentos bears the trace of the unspeakable loss
that produced it and will continue to define it, not as a burden to be sur-
mounted in the name of the future but as an animating absence to be per-
sistently reckoned with in the present (Butler 2003, 468).
Hence, like all haunted sites, Fragmentos confounds unidirectional tem-
porality by physically making past, present, and future inseparable and
refusing to relegate the dead to a glorified or unmarked past. As Walter
Benjamin’s Angel would have wanted, Fragmentos manages to gather the
wreckage of past violence and awaken the dead as it propels itself into the
future. Furthermore, as a place that reiteratively welcomes the many and
varied voices of the victims of the armed conflict, Fragmentos creates a space
172  Haunting without Ghosts

for what Salcedo calls a “memoria activa” capable of resisting totalitarian

forms of history (Padilla 2018), or historical accounts that ignore the victims
while privileging the voices of those who benefit from war and that therefore
justify and glorify violence. Fragmentos is a haunted house. Its very materi-
ality makes us aware that we are standing on a surface of restless specters,
and that we cannot build a future without accounting for their violent ab-
senting. In a country torn, or fragmented, by violence, Fragmentos is both a
site to mend, connect, collaborate, and build anew and a space that acknowl-
edges the debts of justice and symbolic reparation we owe to those who are
no-­longer-­not-­yet-­there (Derrida 2006, xvii) by inscribing their plight into
a necessarily haunted present and future. It is spectral realism at its best.

War in Times of Peace: The Continuum of Violence

The material and symbolic characteristics of Fragmentos, as well as the vastly

different political contexts of the work’s commissioning, construction, and
inauguration, serve as an apt summary of spectral realism’s main elements
and relevance and constitute a potent reminder of the ways in which vio-
lence operates, of its multilayered and intersectional nature. As noted, Frag-
mentos was commissioned during the administration of Juan Manuel Santos,
which successfully negotiated and ratified the peace accords with FARC.
The work was built during a contentious and deeply polarized presidential
race that was seen as a second referendum on the peace process,2 and it was
inaugurated in December 2018, during the first months of a radically differ-
ent government: a coalition of right-­wing and conservative politicians who
opposed the accords. Led by the former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, this
alliance of strange bedfellows managed to get Iván Duque Márquez, a forty-­
one-­year-­old with almost no experience in government, elected as presi-
dent.3 Perhaps the main issue of the campaign was an entrenched resistance
to the structural transformations at the core of the peace process, particu-
larly with regard to land tenure and restitution, the political participation of
former guerrilla members, the eradication of illicit crops and destruction of
cocaine laboratories and transportation routes, and the Jurisdicción Especial
para la Paz, a transitional justice system meant to ensure the principles of
truth, justice, reparation, and nonrepetition for all involved with the con-
flict (regardless of the military affiliation of the perpetrators, be they FARC,
paramilitary combatants, or soldiers from the National Army).
The powerful and successful opposition to the peace accords in a country
devastated by war serves as an apt reminder of the danger of underestimat-
 Epilogue 173

ing or disregarding the lengths to which the historical beneficiaries of war

are willing to go to protect the hefty economic, political, and social divi-
dends accrued not in spite of conflict but because of it. In other words, it
highlights the perils of overfocusing on what Slavoj Žižek calls subjective
violence at the expense of analyzing and addressing what he calls objective
violence. Subjective violence “is violence performed by a clearly identifiable
agent” (Žižek 2008, 1), hence it is “experienced . . . against the background
of a non-­violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peace-
ful state of things” (2). In contrast, objective violence “is the violence inher-
ent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it
sustains the very zero-­level standard against which we perceive something
as subjectively violent” (2). Those who led the opposition against the ac-
cords were well aware that the subjective violence of the conflict was both an
effective way of appropriating and accumulating land and other coveted re-
sources and a useful, even necessary distraction from objective violence, ob-
scuring the myriad ways in which these socioeconomic and political actors
reaped the benefits of war while others payed its mortal price.
Santos managed to shield the accords from their possible repealing
through safeguards protected by congress and the Constitutional Court.
But the gutting of most provisions aimed at transforming the structural
conditions (objective violence) that gave rise to the conflict (subjective vio-
lence) has become the foremost endeavor and most effective rallying cry of
Duque’s administration. Thus, as Colombia transitions into its postaccord
era, important questions about what Rory O’Bryen, drawing on Philippe
Bourgois, calls “the continuity of violence in times of peace” (O’Bryen
2018, 3) must be not only taken into account but foregrounded. To under-
stand the “rapidity and ease” (Bourgois 2017, 428) with which El Salva-
dor became the most violent country in the hemisphere after signing the
peace agreement in 1992 with the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Libera-
ción Nacional (FMLN), instead of becoming a more peaceful and equitable
society,4 Bourgois points to the peril and shortsightedness of accords based
on an oversimplified and ultimately violence-­generating understanding of
peace merely as the cessation of military warfare. Though obviously a nec-
essary and urgent component of any process seeking justice, reparation, and
a more livable society for all, this limited conception of peace obscures the
ways in which unevenly visible yet inextricably intertwined forms of vio-
lence intersect and feed each other. Bourgois points to his own analytical
blindness. Like many scholars and political leaders at the time, he had been
unable, or unwilling, to see, much less to confront, the tight linkages be-
tween direct political violence and the structural, symbolic, interpersonal,
174  Haunting without Ghosts

and everyday forms of violence that fueled the conflict.5 These issues re-
mained unaddressed by the accords, and in fact intensified in the years that
followed, through the implementation of the aggressive neoliberal reforms
that defined the 1990s in the region. This dynamic, which both perpetuates
and diffuses violence, making it harder to identify and redress and therefore
even deadlier, is what Bourgois calls the “continuum of violence in war and
peace” (2017, 428). The concept is helpful in that it underscores the inter-
twining of direct political violence with structural, symbolic, and everyday
forms of violence often presented by political discourse and cultural produc-
tion alike as separate or unrelated.
Furthermore, like Žižek’s objective violence, Bourgois’s continuum is
deeply tied to international market forces and to the aggressive privatization
of public goods, resources, and services. In this scenario, profit, not political
ideology or armed resistance, is the main driver of violence. Hence, the con-
cept of the continuum of violence is key to better understanding why peace
too often erodes into a “violent pacification” (O’Bryen 2018, 2) embedded
in the neoliberal logic of the extraction of resources, the production and
transport of restricted or banned goods and substances (including but not
limited to narcotics), and agro-­industrial and high-­impact tourism projects,
among other activities. In Colombia, these dynamics have translated into a
quiet yet steady bloodshed in its postaccords era. Even though, according to
the Fiscalía General de la Nación, 2017 had the lowest murder rate in forty-­
two years, the assassination of social leaders, particularly those who defend
the land-­tenure rights of peasants, and of indigenous and Afro-­descendant
communities, was at a historic high and has only continued to grow.6 In
this context, representational practices capable of avoiding and unveiling the
“toxic alignment of structural and symbolic violence” (O’Bryen 2018, 13) at
the core of the continuum of violence in Colombia and elsewhere are more
needed than ever. As I hope to have shown throughout this book, spectral
realism has much to contribute to this endeavor.

The Time of the Specter Is Now: Spectral Realism’s Relevance

As a mode of representation imbued with historical density, critical perspec-

tive, and ethical anxiety, spectral realism asks destabilizing questions about
the erasures underlying dominant ways of producing goods, knowledge,
affect, history, and time, as well as constituting a valuable tool to better
understand and address the complex relation between representation and
historical violence in Colombia and beyond from an ethically informed per-
 Epilogue 175

spective. It does so by taking the ghost seriously but not literally, shifting the
focus from what the ghost is to what the specter does and formally assum-
ing the disruptive characteristics most associated with spectrality: a pro-
found distrust of vision, the challenging of modernity’s spatial and temporal
coordinates, and a deeply rooted ethical anxiety that reflects on the reach
and possibilities of justice beyond the limits of the law. In a world plagued
by technologies of hypervisibility available for consumption through social
media platforms, I have highlighted novels, films, and artworks that com-
plicate vision by exploring the ethics, limits, and unreliability of visibility
and that resort to haptic perception as an alternative to the hierarchical,
objectifying, and rapacious gaze of classic realism—and of much cultural
production that grapples with historical violence in and about Colombia.
In contrast, haptic perception is a synesthetic mode of seeing whereby the
eye has other, nonvisual capabilities. It mobilizes an oblique gaze that does
not present, transcribe, or explain; it prioritizes environmental sound over
dialogue, embraces tension and ambiguity, permeates space with historical
density, is emotionally charged, and points toward the unresolved.
The cultural practitioners foregrounded in the previous pages found in
spectrality a productive language to summon the voices and demands of
those who refuse to vanish despite not being present any longer. They are
writers, filmmakers, and artists who understand and mobilize haunting as
a disruptive force that encourages critical reflection and demands repara-
tion for unacknowledged or unresolved physical and symbolic violence. De-
spite the many differences between the aesthetic projects examined in these
pages, the common use of a set of representational techniques that weave
disappearance, ambiguity, and critical reflection into the cultural fabric con-
verges in a visual and literary grammar that, though broad, remains distinc-
tive. To varying degrees and with emphasis on different components, the
writer Evelio Rosero, the filmmakers William Vega, Felipe Guerrero, and
Jorge Forero, and the artists Juan Manuel Echavarría, Beatriz González, and
Erika Diettes share these traits as constitutive aspects of their work, encour-
aging a productive haunting of Colombia’s national imaginary and symbolic
repertoire in a key moment of the country’s history.
As Rory O’Bryen points out, “The choice of content is never innocent,
[and] neither are the specific requirements of form” (2008, 184). Without
critical reflection on the complex relationship between specific modes of
representation and violence, it is easy to fall back, consciously or not, into
sublimations of violence through romantic neofoundational fictions based
on a future that expels rather than welcomes its ghosts;7 or to make vio-
lence an uncritical object for consumption through a voyeuristic gaze that,
176  Haunting without Ghosts

as the filmmakers Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina decried in 1977 with
their mockumentary Agarrando pueblo, exploits and fetishizes social ailments
and objectifies, exoticizes, and eroticizes the poor, rural, feminine (or femi-
nized), and otherwise marginalized bodies that most often bear the brunt
of war and the violent acts themselves, thus turning the reenactment of his-
torical violence into a pleasurable and profitable spectacle. Without critical
reflection about the possible complicity of specific modes of representation
in the reproduction of the epistemological, cultural, social, and economic
structures that underlie the violence that is supposedly being denounced or
addressed, subjective, objective, and, of particular interest to spectral real-
ism and to this book, symbolic violence will continue to occur.
Symbolic violence is a form of violence that “underpin[s] representa-
tional practices themselves. . . . [It] relates to both form and content, and
alerts us as much to the risks of historical abstraction as to the ethical conun-
drums arising out of national efforts to produce a cultural politics of mem-
ory” (O’Bryen 2008, 184). The works associated with spectral realism avoid
symbolic violence by focusing on the intersections among political, struc-
tural, symbolic, gender, and other forms of everyday violence and by deploy-
ing a series of shared thematic and formal choices associated with haptic
perception and spectrality, including (1) an oblique gaze as visual as it is con-
ceptual, which leads to plot lacunae, open endings, and multiple ambiguous
scenes left unexplained; (2) an emphasis on what Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari (1987) call “smooth spaces,” which highlights the ideological, eco-
nomic, and sociopolitical tensions that underlie processes of appropriation
of rural lands and other areas rich in mineral or other natural resources;
(3) the deceleration and elongation of narrative time, which produces a pen-
sive and cathectic temporality; and (4) what Miguel Hernández, the sound
designer of La sirga, calls “that other sonority” (Navas 2012), a type of sound
management that makes scarce or no use of dialogue and relies almost en-
tirely on environmental sounds and subtle contextual cues to establish the
historical background, advance the plot, and create emotional engagement
with the story and its protagonists.
Furthermore, this interest in and ability to establish subtle yet key links
between individual struggles and larger historical forces and socioeconomic
processes activates the mediatory potential of the specter. As explained by
Avery Gordon, haunting has the capacity to connect “a social structure and
a subject, and history and a biography” (2008, 19). The works I have ex-
amined do so through various formal tools that allow some of the many
stories of disavowed loss and mourning produced by the armed conflict in
Colombia to be expressed rather than repressed. In that sense, these works
 Epilogue 177

also serve as mediums: material bodies (books, films, or artworks) that offer
themselves as sites to be haunted, spaces to be occupied by presences and
murmurs that seek a voice and strive toward justice. Through haptic percep-
tion and a reworking of vision, time, and space, the works of Rosero, Vega,
Guerrero, Forero, Echavarría, González, and Diettes encourage reflection
on the devastating consequences of economic and social policies and dis-
courses based on flawed distinctions between discrete yet interrelated forms
of violence and trouble the discursive and representational practices that
normalize, justify, and uphold such violence.
In that sense, the words Martin Jay uses when analyzing what he calls
Walter Benjamin’s “melancholic intransigence and resistance to commemo-
rative healing” ( Jay 2003a, 22) also capture spectral realism’s ethos. Like
Benjamin, the cultural practitioners associated here with spectral realism
“scornfully reject the ways culture can function to cushion the blows of
trauma,” seeking instead “to compel [their] readers [and viewers] to face
squarely what had happened and confront its deepest sources rather than let
the wounds scar over” ( Jay 2003a, 14). This does not mean, however, that
spectral realism is revictimizing or masochistic or otherwise takes pleasure
in reexperiencing trauma. As Jay notes about Benjamin in words that once
again are illuminating for spectral realism, there is “a critical distinction
between a refusal to mourn that knows all too well what its object is—in
Benjamin’s case, the antiwar suicides of his idealist friends—and is afraid
that mourning will close the case prematurely on the cause for which they
died, and a refusal to mourn based on a denial that there was anything lost
in the first place” (23). In Colombia’s case, what spectral realism refuses
to forgo are the thousands of unacknowledged and unmourned deaths and
forced disappearances caused by the armed conflict. These deaths, left un-
grieved by official denial or glorified as necessary sacrifices for the building
of a supposedly pacified nation, are at the heart of spectral realism and haunt
both its stories and its formal elements.
Efforts to resist “commemorative healing” and to “let the wounds scar
over” through artistic representation are of further importance at a time
when the structural changes contemplated in the accords in terms of po-
litical participation, restitution of land tenure, victim recognition and re-
dress, and implementation of a justice system that goes beyond a punitive
model are at great risk of being gutted or outright dismissed. If the claims
of Colombia’s many specters are not heeded, the country’s postaccord era
may, in a similar way to what happened in El Salvador, be defined by a con-
tinuum that portrays the different forms of violence that still plague the lives
of thousands of people either as individual deviations in an otherwise peace-
178  Haunting without Ghosts

ful and equitable system or as part of the normal functioning of modern

neoliberal democracies. In either case, the privileges, profits, and power of
those who control and benefit from such violence in wartime and peacetime
alike will remain untouched, all but ensuring the continuation of objective,
subjective, and symbolic violence.
In this context, spectrality’s refusal to view past violence simply as past—
as enclosed, bygone events that cannot and should not disrupt the present
or the future—is of great relevance. As Fragmentos suggests, spectral realism
reminds us that the ground we stand on is a haunted landscape, a territory
of restless specters that yearn for what O’Bryen (2018), drawing on Robert
Meister, calls “inter-­temporal forms of justice,” or justice that, on the one
hand, is sensitive to “the erasure of pasts plural by commemorative delinea-
tions of pasts singular [and to] the symbolic and material dispossessions that
connect these pasts to the structural violence at work beyond individual and
collective injury” (O’Bryen 2018, 7), and, on the other hand, is capable of
“connecting the historical discontinuities generated by political expediency,
and of allowing dialogue not just between the living and the dead, but also
between successive generations of ghosts as they’ve been forced to dislodge
one another” (12). But intertemporality does not mean that all violence is
the same. One should remain vigilant about not equating events that vary
in scope, actors, and consequences. The push for forms of representation
that foreground intertemporal structures of memory and justice should not
be confounded by lumping together the dead or by flattening the histori-
cal context. In matters of the spectral, as in all things related to the analysis
and representation of historical violence, careful contextualization is a must.
These considerations aside, spectral realism seems more exigent than
ever. Spectral realism disrupts hegemonic perspectives on violence, helping
us to see where we have been told there is nothing to see and encouraging
us to listen to what is supposed to be only silence, irrelevant mumbling, in-
audible murmurs. As a mode of representation, it foregrounds the multiple
ways in which the present is haunted by what violence has undone, rup-
tured, and quashed and focuses on those who have borne the brunt of the
conflict because of intersecting vectors of oppression and concrete historical
and socioeconomic conditions. By so doing, spectral realism reminds view-
ers and readers that specters need to be listened to instead of demonized
and expelled. This response is of enhanced relevance in moments where vio-
lence runs the risk of being state sanctioned, heralded as necessary and even
patriotic, or simply made to vanish in Colombia’s rivers, jungles, and lejeros
(remote towns) once more. Key to this effort, particularly at a time when the
specter of war looms large over the nation once again, are Rosero’s harrow-
 Epilogue 179

ing stories about the refusal to forget and to stop searching for those who
have vanished, the tenacity and will to survive shown by the women in La
sirga and Oscuro animal, the appalling mundanity of violence in Violencia, the
quest of the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío to rehumanize and establish bonds
with the maimed bodies of the NNs, González’s cargueros looking for a place
to bury their restless dead, Diettes’s haunting reminders of the many ab-
sences that inhabit this country of ghosts, and the pain and hope embedded
in the very foundation of Fragmentos.8 At this historical crossroads, I offer
this book as an invitation to reflect on the ways in which the thousands of
disappearances and violent deaths caused by the armed conflict and the war
on drugs make Colombia a spectral country: a country that must acknowl-
edge, converse with, and seek justice for its ghosts.

Enter the Ghosts

Derrida’s Specters of Marx ends with an invocation of the transformative

potential of the specter as central to endeavors for the betterment of society.
He closes his book with a gesture of opening, inviting scholars to listen
to those who are no-­longer-­not-­yet-­there as a way to name, and perhaps
even disrupt, the violence of political and representational practices that
depend on the suffering and labor of so many: an invitation to speak, pre-
cisely, of that which cannot be spoken. To do so, the intellectual, like Hora-
tio in Hamlet, must be capable of talking to and with those who have been
physically and symbolically exterminated—not merely about them. “If he
loves justice,” Derrida claims, “the ‘scholar’ of the future, the intellectual of
tomorrow,” should learn it from the ghost (2006, 221). The importance of
this gesture cannot be underestimated at a time when Colombia is seeking
to transition to a more peaceful and equitable future. The 2003 demobili-
zation of the AUC and the 2016 peace agreement with FARC officially in-
augurated the country’s postconflict era. In this context, it is more necessary
than ever to ask what acts of mourning and remembrance help us cope with
the aftermath of war and more intentionally point to the principles of repa-
ration (if not monetary, at least symbolic), nonrepetition, and justice. In Re-
turn to the Postcolony, T. J. Demos accepts Derrida’s invitation and explores
the ethical potential of the specter in the work of cultural practitioners. He
focuses on artworks and films that complicate the ways in which European
subjects comprehend and represent the “here” and “now” and argues for the
need for a “spectropoetics” that would “help us to begin to live more justly
with the ghosts of the past, and which refuses to accept a cultural amnesia,
180  Haunting without Ghosts

one of irresponsibility to the past” (Demos 2013, 43). The cultural practi-
tioners I discussed in this volume heed this call, and their works can be pro-
ductively regarded as instances of such a spectropoetics.
This is of particular relevance in contexts where violence is deeply re-
lated to the lack of burials and the impossibility of mourning. And even
though one must remain alert to the perils and limits of depoliticizing ethics
and representational practices that seek to address historical violence by ac-
knowledging, summoning, and receiving the many disappearances and re-
appearances that constitute Colombia’s recent history, the works this book
analyzes demonstrate the pertinence and relevance of a spectropoetics that
activates the transformative potential of haunting. That is, they show an af-
fective engagement with the past that acknowledges loss but also encour-
ages that “something-­to-­be-­done” to differentiate haunting from trauma.
This sentiment is echoed by the artist Erika Diettes. When asked what she
hopes the audience will take away from her works, she replies, “Empathy . . .
the idea that grief belongs to all of us” (quoted in Tucker 2015, 159). The af-
fective charge at the heart of the transformative potential of the specter is
unsettling and disruptive but also profoundly humane and humanizing, be-
cause it speaks not of a desire for individual gratification or vengeance but of
a yearning for renewed social bonds and justice. This response is key because
the specter does not want pity, it wants action; it comes to demand that its
story be taken into account in the name of justice. As the ghost of his father
tells Hamlet, “Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing” (Shakespeare
2016, act 1, scene 5). In moments of profound national soul-­searching, the
works of Rosero, Vega, Guerrero, Forero, Echavarría, González, Diettes,
and Salcedo stand as powerful symbols of the yearning for mourning, re-
membrance, and justice that resonate with so many Colombians, particu-
larly when extreme violence truncates such processes or powerful political
and economic interests actively discourage or thwart them.
Cultural practitioners and others interested in unpacking Colombia’s re-
cent history as a key element in building a more equitable and just future
have much to learn from the works discussed here. These writers, filmmakers,
and artists offer their works as uncanny repositories for the voices and lives
stifled by the decades-­old conflict and create haunting spaces that point to
the loss, grief, and trauma experienced by so many, without sensationaliz-
ing, glorifying, or eroticizing the violence that caused it. They seek to pro-
duce a more even distribution of grief that allows all deaths to be mourned
through a shared responsibility for the thousands of brutal disappearances
wrought by the armed conflict. This is what spectral realism has to con-
tribute to the conversation about the ethical and aesthetic implications of
 Epilogue 181

the country’s historical violence. By following the path of the specter, and
by making their works welcoming spaces for uncanny encounters with des-
aparecidos and sites for collective mourning and healing, these artists show
that contrary to Wittgenstein’s judgment, we must keep looking for ways
to speak of the unspeakable, which requires a profound commitment in a
country of silenced stories, deferred burials, and watery graves. Finally, like
all things ghostly, spectral realism knows no boundaries. Hence, it is my
hope that the questions explored, the theoretical framework proposed, and
the methodology used in these pages can serve as a productive analytical
blueprint to address literature, film, and art about violence in diverse socio-
historical and geopolitical contexts in which horror has gorged itself.
Enter, then, the ghosts.
Notes

Introduction

1. The estimated number of desaparecidos during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile

is three thousand. Argentina’s military junta is thought to have disappeared thirty
thousand people (Semana 2011).
2. La Violencia was a political struggle between the two major political parties,
the Liberals and the Conservatives, that took on civil war proportions. Its time frame
is contested, but the dates most commonly cited are 1948 to 1958, with the murder of
the Liberal and populist presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the political
agreement known as the National Front as the events that mark its official beginning
and ending, respectively. Exact numbers do not exist, but it is estimated that over ten
years, La Violencia took the lives of two hundred thousand people.
3. This small yet influential book collects Rama’s notes and thoughts on a course he
taught on García Márquez’s work at Universidad Veracruzana in 1972. It was edited
and published posthumously in 1985 by the journal Texto Crítico, but the most circu-
lated version was published by the Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Universi-
dad de la República (Montevideo) in 1987. In Colombia, however, the text would only
become widely known after its publication in the country in Cuadernos de la Gaceta, a
periodical of the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura.
4. See, for example, Kalyvas 2006.
5. See, for example, Lukács 1965, 1966; and Williams 1977–1978.
6. The most notable case is Chiampi’s O realismo maravilhoso: Forma e ideologia no
romance hispano-­americano, translated into Spanish in 1983.
7. For more on the topic, see Spindler 1993; Warnes 2009; Chiampi 1983; and
Carpentier 2004a. For a good compilation, see Parkinson Zamora and Faris 2000.
8. Authors as diverse as Toni Morrison, Mikhail Bulgakov, Salman Rushdie, and
Haruki Murakami have been labeled, not without controversy, as “magical realists.”
9. For a more detailed account, see Buford 1983.
10. Broadly speaking, the New Latin American Cinema was a politically engaged
cinema that saw in filmmaking a valuable tool for consciousness-­raising and social and
cultural transformation, primarily during the 1960s and 1970s. It prioritized content
over technical precision (hence, it received other names, like “Imperfect Cinema” or

182
 Notes to Pages 11–17 183

“Third Cinema”) and made extensive use of techniques associated with documentary
film, often blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Some of the most notable
figures include Fernando Birri, Fernando Solanas, and Octavio Getino in Argentina;
Glauber Rocha and the Cinema Novo in Brazil; Jorge Sanjinés and the Grupo Uka-
mau in Bolivia; Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in Cuba; and Miguel
Littín, Raúl Ruiz, and Patricio Guzmán in Chile. The bibliography on New Latin
American Cinema is copious; see, for example, Martin 1997; and Wayne 2001.
11. Some of the most common techniques include shooting primarily or entirely on
location, favoring nonprofessional actors, and using direct sound, among others. For
more on the topic, see Haddu and Page 2009.
12. Margarita Jácome further defines the figure of the sicario: “El sicario como
figura social tiene una identidad híbrida con características rurales y urbanas. Algu-
nas de sus prácticas de asesinato, religiosidad y lenguaje tienen un origen rural y se re-
montan a la época de la Violencia, siendo herencia de delincuentes como el pájaro y el
camaján que llegaron a la juventud a través del héroe-­narco. Pero también es un joven
inmerso en la dinámica de lo urbano, en la música punk y rock, el ruido y la velocidad
de los medios y la noción de caducidad de los productos en el mercado, lo cual incluye
el concepto mismo de la vida humana como bien de consumo” (2009, 204–205).
13. Jácome explains, “Los contenidos temáticos de la novela sicaresca incluyen los
nexos entre los traficantes de droga y los jóvenes asesinos, en los que el sicario aparece
como objeto, y las prácticas culturales heredadas del narcotráfico, especialmente el afán
consumista y un énfasis en ritos religioso de protección y agradecimiento” (2009, 205).
14. Alonso Salazar’s No nacimos pa’ semilla (1990) is a notable exception. Salazar’s
text, based on testimonies, is one of the few attempts to give direct voice to the young
men and women who are both victims and perpetrators of violence. For more in-­depth
analysis of sicaresca literature, see Jácome 2009. For a more nuanced perspective on the
use of parlache, consult Polit Dueñas 2013, particularly chapter 3; see also Rueda 2011.
And for a thorough reading of the figure of the narrator in La virgen de los sicarios, see
Aristizábal 2015; as well as Falconi 2010.
15. For more on this, see “Market Matters,” the special issue of the Arizona Jour-
nal of Hispanic Cultural Studies edited by Christine Henseler and Alejandro Herrero-­
Olaizola. See also “Los varios sentidos del desarraigo” in Rueda 2011.
16. For a thorough bibliography on the matter, see Blanco and Peeren 2013.
17. In a footnote, Derrida explains: “The necessity of this distinction does not entail
the least disqualification of the juridical, its specificity, and the new approaches it calls
for today. Such a distinction appears on the contrary to be indispensable and prior to
any reelaboration. In particular, in all the places where one may remark what is called
today, more or less calmly, ‘juridical voids,’ as if it were a matter of filling in the blanks
without re-­doing things from top to bottom. . . . To believe that it is merely a matter of
filling in a ‘juridical void,’ there where the point is to think the law, the law of the law,
right, and justice, to believe that it is enough to produce new ‘articles of the legal code’
to ‘regulate the problem,’ would be tantamount to turning over the thinking of ethics
to an ethics committee” (2006, 231).
18. See, for example, Demos 2013; Skoller 2005; Blanco 2012; and Ribas-­Casasayas
and Petersen 2016a.
19. As González Echevarría points out, Facundo is a complex book that “is impos-
sible to pigeonhole; it is a sociological study of Argentine culture, a political pamphlet
184  Notes to Pages 17–19

against the dictatorship of Juan Manuel Rosas, a philological investigation of the ori-
gins of Argentine literature, a biography of the provincial caudillo Facundo Quiroga,
Sarmiento’s autobiography, a nostalgic evocation of the homeland by a political exile,
a novel based on the figure of Quiroga; to me it is like our Phenomenology of the Spirit”
(1998, 97).
Facundo starts with Sarmiento conjuring the specter of Facundo Quiroga, “a cau-
dillo, or strong man, from the Argentine pampas, whom Sarmiento wishes to study
in order to better understand Rosas and the genesis and exercise of political power in
his country” (González Echevarría 1998, 98). Sarmiento writes, “Sombra terrible de
Facundo, voy a evocarte para que, sacudiendo el ensangrentado polvo que cubre tus
cenizas, te levantes a explicarnos la vida secreta y las convulsiones internas que des-
garran las entrañas de un noble pueblo” (Sarmiento 2003, 37). It is very interesting,
however, that in his judicious analysis of Facundo, González Echevarría omits this
significant element. By disregarding the spectral origin of the text to argue that sci-
entific discourse is the book’s “masterstory,” González Echevarría misses the oppor-
tunity to think about how Quiroga’s ghostly voice and presence throughout the book
haunt and trouble the scientific discourse the novel itself is trying to conjure (for more
on González Echevarría’s take on Facundo, see González Echevarría 1998, chap. 3).
This repression of the ghostly voices that haunt Latin American literature in
González Echevarría’s comprehensive study is accentuated in the conclusion of his
book. Even though he identifies death and, particularly, the presence of “dying or dead
figures” (1998, 185) as fundamental for what he calls “the archival novel” (by which he
means the main modern Latin American fiction after Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos per-
didos [1953], including Cien años de soledad, Yo el supremo, Tres tristes tigres, Rayuela, and
Pedro Páramo, among others), González Echevarría does not use the language of the
ghost or the conceptual metaphor of spectrality to better understand how these “dying
or dead figures” haunt the three main truth-­bearing discourses that for him structure
Latin American narrative: the law, science, and anthropology.
20. The case of Cien años de soledad is particularly interesting here. If, as González
Echevarría points out, Melquíades’s room—where the manuscripts that contain the
revelations about the destiny of the Buendía family and humanity as a whole are
kept—represents a new kind of archive for Latin American history and literature
(1998, 21–22), it is no coincidence that this room is fundamentally haunted.
Melquíades is the guardian of the archive: he who holds the key to the novel’s and
the family’s meaning. And he is a ghost. He lives in a small room in the back of the
patio and devotes his afterlife to speaking with multiple generations of Buendía men
who know that only by listening to the dead will they be able to understand their
past and present and foresee their own future. Furthermore, the room itself is marked
by the asynchronicity of the specter. For some characters, the room looks dusty and
moldy, corroded by decay and oblivion. For them, there is nothing to see or to do there.
For others, however, Melquíades’s room is a space of suspended temporality where it
is always Monday in March—a space where one can talk and, more importantly, learn
from and work hand in hand with the ghosts in order to reconstruct, to build, and to
understand both the past and the future.
21. As stated, the bibliography around realism is copious. Aside from the references
to the foundational texts of Georg Lukács mentioned earlier in the notes, influential
works include Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach; “Epic and Novel: Towards a Method-
 Notes to Pages 20–21 185

ology of the Study of the Novel,” by Mikhail Bakhtin; “The Reality Effect,” by Roland
Barthes; and Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, The Melodramatic Imagi-
nation: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, and Realist Vision, by
Peter Brooks. For a comprehensive yet accessible compendium of the main theories
and critiques of classical realism, see Morris 2011.
22. More specifically in regard to literature, Raymond Williams places the emer-
gence of realism within the contours of the “bourgeois drama of the eighteenth cen-
tury” and identifies three defining characteristics of the new genre: the secular, the
contemporary, and the socially extended (2002, 108).
23. As Jonathan Crary points out, “a massive transformation in the nature of visu-
ality” (1999, 1) took place during this century. This transformation, however, was not
related exclusively to visual practices. As Crary remarks, “problems of vision then, as
now, were fundamentally questions about the body and the operation of social power.”
Hence, “the break with classical models of vision in the early nineteenth century was
far more than simply a shift in the appearance of images and art works, or in systems
of representational conventions. Instead, it was inseparable from a massive reorgani-
zation of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad ways the productive,
cognitive, and desiring capacities of the human subject” (3).
Jean-­Louis Comolli seconds this idea and notes that this preponderance of vision
intensified during the second half of the nineteenth century. For Comolli, this period
was marked by “a sort of frenzy of the visible” that produced (and was produced by)
a multiplicity of scopic instruments that allowed an until then unseen proliferation
of images. This generated “something of a geographical extension of the field of the
visible and the representable: by journeys, explorations, colonization, the whole world
becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable” (Comolli 2015, 284).
Furthermore, Comolli keenly notes a contradictory and somewhat unexpected effect
in visuality caused by the mechanical reproduction of images that defined the time
period: the human eye both consolidated its stronghold as the most powerful episte-
mological instrument of the era and, at the same time, lost that very same “immemo-
rial privilege,” because “the mechanical eye of the photographic machine now sees in
its place, and in certain aspects with more sureness.” Hence, “the photographic stands
as at once the triumph and the grave of the eye” (284).
But as Martin Jay points out in many of his works, particularly in “Scopic Regimes
of Modernity,” one has to be mindful of the nuances of the supposed preponderance
of vision in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. As Jay explains (1993d, 114–115), the “scopic regime of modernity” should
not be equated with a “harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and prac-
tices.” Instead, it could more productively, and accurately, be understood as a “con-
tested terrain . . . characterized by a differentiation of visual subcultures.” He identifies
three main such subcultures: Cartesian Perspectivism, the Baconian art of describing,
and the baroque. Furthermore, in his postscript, he couples each scopic regime with
specific urban cityscapes, thus establishing an explicit link between epistemologies of
vision and spatiality, which is key for spectral realism. In spite of acknowledging these
differences, Jay remains clear that vision is, indeed, “the master sense of the modern
era” (114).
24. Balzac was a prolific writer. When he died, at forty-­nine years of age, he had
written more than ninety novels.
186  Notes to Pages 21– 31

25. Balzac was an avowed Catholic and royalist. See also Brooks 1995.
26. “He bombastically takes every entanglement as tragic, every urge as great pas-
sion; he is always ready to call every person in misfortune a hero or a saint . . . and he
calls poor old Goriot ce Christ de la paternité. . . . It was in conformity with his emo-
tional, fiery, and uncritical temperament, as well as with the romantic way of life, to
sense hidden demonic forces everywhere and to exaggerate expression to the point of
melodrama” (Auerbach 2003, 482).
27. Peter Brooks is but one of many critics who have studied extensively the pre-
ponderance of vision in the modern era, pointing to the many epistemological, philo-
sophical, ethical, and artistic issues that derive from it. I base much of my conceptual-
ization of vision on Brooks’s work due to the insightful connections he makes between
a critique of the scopic regimes of the nineteenth century and literary realism (particu-
larly French), as well as the relevance of his triangulation of sight, mastery, and desire,
which are at the core of spectral realism. For a thorough, even monumental, review of
the philosophical tradition that looks critically (pun intended) at the scopic regimes
of modernity, see Jay 1994. Also of interest are his texts “The Rise of Hermeneutics
and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism,” “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” and “Ideology and
Ocularcentrism: Is There Anything behind the Mirror’s Tain?,” all in Force Fields: Be-
tween Intellectual History and Cultural Critique; and “Returning the Gaze: The Ameri-
can Response to the French Critique of Ocularcentrism,” in Refractions of Violence. For
more on the topic, see Metz 1982; Foster 1999; and Crary 1999.
28. It is worth noting that the term “magical realism” comes from painting. It was
coined by the art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe German postexpressionist paint-
ing. Only decades later it would be used, with some controversy, by Arturo Uslar Pietri
and other critics in the 1940s, and later on by the writers themselves, to describe the
literary style of a new generation of Latin American writers.
29. See Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992) and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975),
respectively.
30. I will address this point in detail in chapter 1. For examples, see pages 16, 31, 44,
51, and 71, among many others, in Rosero 2003.
31. Though the subject of much scholarly debate, broadly speaking, novela de la
tierra is the label used to group a series of modernist literary texts produced in Latin
America in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Despite their many differ-
ences in content and style, these novels are situated in the contact zones between the
confines of the nation and its civilizing project and denounce different forms of vio-
lence related to the exploitation of rural and nonurban lands, including environmental,
sexual, gender, and ethno-­racial violence. Canonical texts include Don Segundo Sombra
(Ricardo Güiraldes, 1926, Argentina), Doña Bárbara (Rómulo Gallegos, 1929, Vene-
zuela), and La vorágine ( José Eustasio Rivera, 1924, Colombia). For a comprehensive
analysis, see Alonso 1990.
32. Christian Metz coined the term “scopic regime” in The Imaginary Signifier:
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema to distinguish between the cinema and the theater:
“What defines the specifically cinematic scopic regime is not so much the distance
kept . . . as the absence of the object seen” (1982, 61). Martin Jay expanded the concept
to name modernity’s ocular-­centric epistemic, philosophical, artistic, and technologi-
cal traditions. For more on the topic, see Jay 1993d.
33. Slavoj Žižek (2008) distinguishes between two main forms of violence: sub-
 Notes to Pages 37– 44 187

jective and objective. Subjective violence “is violence performed by a clearly identifi-
able agent” (1), and hence it is “experienced . . . against the background of a non-­violent
zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things” (2). In
contrast, objective violence, which can be “systemic” or “symbolic,” “is the violence in-
herent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains
the very zero-­level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively vio-
lent” (2).
34. Evelio Rosero, in talks at the University of California, Berkeley, February
21–24, 2012.

Chapter 1: Evelio Rosero’s Spectral Landscapes of Disappearance

Parts of this chapter have been published in two different book chapters: Juliana
Martínez, “ ‘La mirada sin perspectiva de la niebla’: Fantología y desaparición en En
el lejero,” in Evelio Rosero y lo ciclos de la creación literaria, ed. Felipe Gómez and María
del Carmen Saldarriaga (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2017),
37–56; and Juliana Martínez, “Fog Instead of Land: Spectral Topographies of Disap-
pearance in Colombia’s Recent Literature and Film,” in Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in
Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives, ed. Alberto Ribas-­Casasayas and Amanda L.
Petersen (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016), 117–131. They are both
reprinted here with permission.

1. See, for example, Ungar 2010; and Jiménez 2007.

2. According to a report from the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (2013,
9), 39,058 people were kidnapped in Colombia from 1970 to 2010, the majority of
them from 1996 to 2002 (9–11). The crimes reached their highest point in 2000,
with 3,706 registered kidnappings, or more than ten people per day (Pax Christi
2002, 27), most of them at the hands of guerrilla groups, particularly FARC (Centro
Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2013, 12). The years from 1996 to 2002 also marked
the peak for massacres (Grupo de Memoria Histórica 2013, 48), with the AUC being
responsible for six of every ten mass killings and murdering at least 7,160 people
(47). Though official statistics vary, Colombia also has some of the highest numbers
of disappeared peoples. In 2011 the Registro Nacional de Desaparecidos reported
50,891 conflict-­related missing persons (Grupo de Memoria Histórica 2013, 58),
and paramilitary groups were again linked to the majority of these cases (Haugaard
and Nicholls 2010, 4). More recent statistics from the Centro Nacional de Memoria
Histórica (2018) raise that number to 80,472 as of September 15, 2018. With all this
violence, it is no surprise that people fled or were forced to leave their homes. The
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2018) estimates that from 1985 to 2014
more than 10 percent of the country’s population was forced from its land and homes
due to violence, which at the time placed Colombia as a country with one of the high-
est percentages of internally displaced peoples, second only to Syria (Internal Dis-
placement Monitoring Centre, n.d.).
3. The English translation of Père Goriot makes some of those connotations more
tenuous. For example, where the original presents a clear phallic reference, “ce beau
monde dans lequel il avait voulu pénétre,” the English version treats this more subtly:
188  Notes to Pages 48 –52

“that great aristocratic society into which he’d wanted to move.” For comparison, I in-
clude the two texts in full:

Rastignac, resté seul, fit quelques pas vers le haut du cimetière et vit Paris tortueuse-
ment couché le long des deux rives de la Seine où commençaient à briller les lumières.
Ses yeux s’attachèrent presque avidement entre la colonne de la place Vendôme et le
dôme des Invalides, là où vivait ce beau monde dans lequel il avait voulu pénétrer. Il
lança sur cette ruche bourdonnante un regard qui semblait par avance en pomper le
miel, et dit ces mots grandioses: “A nous deux maintenant!” Et pour premier acte du
défi qu’il portait à la Société, Rastignac alla dîner chez madame de Nucingen. (Balzac
2019, 223)

Left alone, Rastignac walked to the highest part of the cemetery, and looked down at
the heart of Paris, winding tortuously along both banks of the Seine, where lights were
beginning to glim. His glance settled almost greedily, there between the high column
of the Vendôme and the roof of the Hôtel des Invalides, the center of that great aris-
tocratic society into which he’d wanted to move. He looked at the swarming beehive,
his very glance to suck out its honey, and then declared, grandly, “Now it’s just the two
of us!—I’m ready!”
And then, for the first challenge he hurdled at Society, Rastingac went to have
dinner with Madame de Nuncingen. (Balzac 1994, 217)

4. The massacre of Bojayá occurred on May 2, 2002. After days of intense combat
with paramilitary forces, FARC guerrillas launched several gas cylinders around the
church, trying to reach the soldiers hiding behind the building. One of the canisters
went through the roof of the church, where most of the civilian population was seek-
ing shelter. The cylinder exploded inside the temple, immediately killing dozens and
wounding many more. The death toll was much higher than the one in the novel: 119
in Bojayá, 14 in fictional San José.
5. The complete scene is narrated as follows:

Pude entrever los quietos perfiles de varios hombres, todos de pie, contemplando algo
con desmedida atención, más que absortos: recogidos, como feligreses en la iglesia a la
hora de la Elevación. Detrás de ellos, de su inmovilidad de piedra, sus sombras oscu-
recían la pared, ¿qué contemplaban? Olvidándome de todo, solo buscando a Geral-
dina, me sorprendía avanzando yo mismo hacia ellos. Nadie reparó en mi presen-
cia; me detuve, como ellos, otra esfinge de piedra, oscura, surgida en la puerta. Entre
los brazos de una mecedora de mimbre, estaba—abierta a plenitud, desmadejada—,
Geraldina desnuda, la cabeza sacudiéndose a uno y otro lado, y encima uno de los
hombres la abrazaba, uno de los hombres hurgaba a Geraldina, uno de los hombres
la violaba: demoré todavía en comprender que se trataba del cadáver de Geraldina,
era su cadáver, expuesto ante los hombres que aguardaban, ¿por qué no los acompa-
ñas, Ismael?, me escuché humillarme, ¿por qué no les explicas cómo se viola un cadá-
ver?, ¿o cómo se ama?, ¿no era eso con lo que soñabas?, y me vi acechando el desnudo
cadáver de Geraldina. . . . Estos hombres deben esperar su turno, Ismael, ¿esperas tú
también el turno?, eso me acabo de preguntar, ante el cadáver, mientras se oye su con-
moción de muñeca manipulada, inanimada—Geraldina, vuelta a poseer, mientras el
hombre es solamente un gesto feroz. (Rosero 2007, 202–203)
 Notes to Pages 55–71 189

6. The freezing rain not only makes Jeremías even more vulnerable and exposed but
also further disrupts his ability to see: “Esa pertinaz llovizna de briznas de hielo, ex-
asperante, que se metía en las pestañas igual que alfileres, obligando a cerrar los ojos”
(Rosero 2003, 16).
7. Some examples include the following (my emphasis): “Resbala a tu lado, por fin,
desprendiéndose del fondo más alto de la niebla, la figura borrosa y enorme de un cón-
dor” (Rosero 2003, 16); “Te enderezaste a mirar su cara, pero ya el desconocido había
saltado a la noche, desapareciendo” (18); “Hubo un silencio. Otro denso trozo de niebla
pareció separarlos para siempre; sólo se distinguían las puntas encendidas de los ciga-
rros. Pero al segundo las caras reaparecieron, los ojos, los cuerpos borrosos detrás de la
fina llovizna que empezaba a escucharse con los charcos” (31); “De nuevo la niebla los
separó eternamente. Sólo se oyó la voz del gordo, como si se compadeciera, cada vez
más lejana. . . . De nuevo la niebla fue arrastrada por el viento, y ambos reaparecieron”
(31); “Fue durante ese instante iluminado que pudo ver las sombras de los niños refle-
jadas en el muro blanco de la calle, las sombras caminando a su lado, desvanecidas. . . .
Eran los mismos niños de la plaza de mercado. . . . Tan pronto comprendieron que él
los había descubierto desaparecieron. Y, sin embargo, muy de vez en cuando, mientras
él caminaba, una u otra cabeza se asomaba como un rayo y fisgoneaba. Desaparecieron
para siempre cuando el instante de sol desapareció. Otra vez los jirones de niebla se apo-
deraron de las esquinas” (44); “De un salto había abandonado la habitación y sin dejar
de reír, daba vueltas y revueltas por el patio, a veces desapareciendo detrás de los escom-
bros, y reapareciendo en los sitios más inesperados, como si transitara a través de túneles
secretos. Apareció por último trepándose a la cumbre de guitarras” (51); “Él iba detrás
del hábito como si persiguiera destellos blancos; pues cada vez más la monja se alejaba
y desaparecía tragada por una ramazón de niebla” (71).
8. This practice has been documented in victims’ testimonies. For example, the in-
habitants of Bijao Cacarica (Chocó) claim that the paramilitary forces of El Alemán
played soccer with the severed head of a man in February 1997. El Alemán has denied
such accusations, but survivors insist they are true. See Builes 2008.
9. See, for example, “ ‘Profesor’ me dijo al oído, ‘¿a usté no lo mataron mientras dor-
mía?’ ‘Claro que no,’ pude decir cuando me repuse de la pregunta. Y traté de reír: ‘¿No
ves que estoy contigo?’ Y, sin embargo, nos quedamos mirando unos segundos, como
si no nos creyéramos” (Rosero 2007, 178). Other cases include “¿Ismael? ¿No te habían
matado mientras dormías?” (182) and “ ‘Qué, viejo, ¿usté está vivo o está muerto?’ . . .
‘Oíste, el muerto habló’ ” (187).
10. Instead of producing warmth, the spectral bodies that surround Jeremías pro-
duce cold. See, for example, “En el vórtice de cuerpos sintió que se congelaba” (Rosero
2003, 66); or “Se volvió a mirar la marejada de rostros. El frío de los rostros lo cercó,
lo paralizó” (67).
11. In his lucid reading of Restrepo’s novel, Rory O’Bryen makes a similar case, ar-
guing that La multitud errante highlights how “the sentimental language of ‘mourning’
can entail a violent displacement of a subject’s search for justice” (O’Bryen 2008, 187).

Chapter 2: Beyond Vision

Parts of this chapter, particularly those related to La sirga, have been published in
Juliana Martínez, “Competing Visions and Contested Space in La sirga and Colombia
190  Notes to Pages 79– 83

magia salvaje,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 53, no. 1 (March 2019): 121–142; this ma-
terial is reprinted here with permission from the journal.

1. See, for example, Williams 1977–1978, 2002; and Jameson 2007.

2. The bibliography on the matter is voluminous. Classic and much debated texts
include Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality; André
Bazin’s What Is Cinema?, volumes 1 and 2; and Fredric Jameson’s Signatures of the
Visible.
3. Because of his apparent faith in cinema’s ability to capture reality and reveal
truths, André Bazin’s conceptualizations of film and of cinematic realism have often
been labeled, and disregarded, as idealist. This approach to film, which was perceived
as naïve and essentialist, was revised and reformulated after 1968, particularly in France
but also in the English-­speaking world, due to the increasing sophistication of film
theory produced by the institutionalization of film studies in universities in the United
States and England. This post-­1968 critique was heavily informed by Marxist theory,
by appeals to Louis Althusser’s widely influential conceptualization of ideology, and by
the growing influence of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Jean-­Louis Comolli’s series
“Technique and Ideology,” written and published serially in Cahiers du Cinéma from
1971 to 1972, is a case in point, as is Fredric Jameson’s impatience with what he dis-
dainfully calls Bazin’s “ontology” and “metaphysics” ( Jameson 2007, 267) in Signatures
of the Visible, his landmark treatise on cinema. But such readings have in turn been re-
evaluated in a proliferation of critical texts that show the relevance and complexity of
Bazin’s postulates, productively revitalizing his “writings on neorealism, as well as his
understanding of cinema’s deep power to register and interpret particular nuances of
history and place into contemporary and classic realist films” (Margulies 2003, 11). In
this sense, as Daniel Fairfax writes in his introduction to Cinema against Spectacle, even
Jean-­Louis Comolli’s—and, more broadly, Cahiers du Cinéma’s—supposedly “unam-
biguously anti-­Bazinian” stance in the 1970s (Fairfax in Comolli 2015, 28) should be
taken with a grain of salt, for as Comolli himself noted, “in trying to critique Bazin, I
ended up very close to him” (Comolli 2015, 30). For more on the topic, see Margulies
2003; and Dudley and Joubert-­Laurencin 2011.
4. For a detailed account, see Getino 2012.
5. The political landscape in Latin America has once again shifted toward a political
right supportive of neoliberal policies and socially conservative values.
6. As Getino explains in detail in his study, these laws are the result of regional
efforts toward political, economic, and cultural integration, in part due to the need
to strengthen the ability of Central and South American nations to resist and provide
alternatives to the aggressive demands coming from the United States and neoliberal
multilateral organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
In the realm of filmmaking, this materialized in the passing of international agreements
like the “Acuerdo Latinoamericano de Coproducción Cinematográfica,” the “Acuerdo
para la Creación de un Mercado Común Cinematográfico Latinoamericano,” and the
“Convenio de Integración Cinematográfica Iberoamericana” (Getino 2012, 19–20);
and in the creation of highly influential initiatives such as IBERMEDIA, a stimu-
lus program for the coproduction of fiction and documentary films subscribed to by
twenty-­one states: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Para-
guay, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
 Notes to Pages 83 – 84 191

7. In Argentina alone, there were close to fifteen thousand film students in 2010, a
number close to or possibly higher than the number of film students in the European
Union that same year (Getino 2012).
8. For a complete explanation on tax incentives and quotas, see Castañeda 2009.
9. As Octavio Getino (2012) points out, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil have his-
torically dominated the industry, accounting for almost 90 percent of the region’s cine-
matographic production throughout the twentieth century.
10. It is also worth noting that the influx of transnational capital and the emphasis
on coproductions and regional collaboration have challenged and redefined the cate-
gory of “national cinema” itself across the hemisphere. This debate is broad and com-
plex and is beyond the scope of this project. For the purposes of this book, however,
I adhere to the definition of “Colombian film” inscribed in the Ley de Cine, which
Liliana Castañeda summarizes in the following way:

Film legislation considers a feature film Colombian according to a ranking system that
measures the participation of national capital and citizens involved in the film project,
similar to that of Argentina and Canada. Colombian standards require that 70 per-
cent of the artistic crew and 51 percent of the technicians be nationals and 51 percent
of the capital come from local investors and producers. . . . [I]t is interesting to see that
neither language nor location is a requirement to define a movie as Colombian, and
policymakers are very flexible. . . . This differs from other more strict national regula-
tions like those in Argentina . . . or Peru. . . . In the latter country, feature movies must
also be in Spanish, Quechua or Aymará, and filming locations must be in the country
in order to receive official support. (Castañeda 2009, 35–36)

11. Data from Proimágenes Colombia (2007) show that only two Colombian films
premiered in 1993, one in 1994, two in 1995, three in 1996, one in 1997, six in 1998,
three in 1999, and four in 2000.
12. For a clear explanation of the complex institutional structure of the Colombian
film model, see figure 1 (p. 29) in Castañeda 2009.
13. Colombia’s 1991 constitution replaced the country’s conservative 1886 con-
stitution. It separated church and state and redefined the country as a pluralistic,
multiethnic, and participatory democracy. This framework proved fundamental for
advancing the rights (including rights to collective land tenure) of historically margin-
alized populations such as indigenous peoples and Afro-­Colombians and has been key
to achieving the recognition of sexual and reproductive rights of women and LGBTQ
people through constitutional challenges to laws and policies, including the decrimi-
nalization of abortion (2006), gay marriage (2016), and gay adoption (2015).
14. For a thorough analysis of the Ley de Cine and the current state of cinemato-
graphic production in the country, see Castañeda 2009; Picciau 2014; and Tafur Villar-
real 2013.
15. A good case in point is the way the government and nonprofit organizations
created the Coalition for Cultural Diversity, which successfully lobbied to adopt the
concept of “cultural reserve” to exempt cultural production from free-­trade negotia-
tions with the United States. As Castañeda notes, “Colombia was the first Andean
country to use this tool to protect its cultural industries from opening its market, as the
Free Trade Agreement negotiations with the United States required. This decision set
a precedent for other states that previously seemed resigned to emulate Mexico’s deci-
192  Notes to Pages 84–103

sion in 1994 to include cultural industries within the NAFTA, which had devastating
consequences for its film industry” (2009, 41).
16. Specialized literature on contemporary Latin American film is extensive. See,
for example, Alvaray 2012; Bermúdez Barrios 2011; and Copertari and Sitnisky 2015.
17. On the concept of “global auteur,” see Jeong and Szaniawski 2016. For an analy-
sis of the merits and limitations of the “glocal” category when thinking about Colom-
bian and Latin American cinema more broadly, see Rueda 2019. For further insight
into national and transnational practices within Colombian cinema, see Luna 2013.
18. See, for example, Luna 2013; Palaversich 2013; and Rueda 2017, 2019.
19. Víctor Gaviria’s films Rodrigo D: No futuro (1990) and La vendedora de rosas
(1998) are the most representative and well-­accomplished examples.
20. See, for example, Fowler and Helfield 2006.
21. For a thorough review of what Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page call the “syn-
ergies” between fiction and documentary film in Latin America, see Haddu and Page
2009; and Andermann and Fernández Bravo 2013.
22. Vega explains, “Ha sido una premisa desde Contravía films que el trabajo estas
comunidades periféricas se haga con mucho respeto, que se haga con mucho tacto en
el sentido de no es que yo vaya 15 días a planear un rodaje y luego me meta dos meses
y ya, y me vaya. Sino, cómo me acerco, cómo podemos dialogar con esas comunidades
para crear un producto cinematográfico. . . . Es el nexo que uno establece. No se trata
de ir y sacar una imagen, un sonido del lugar e irse, sino [de] mantener una relación”
(Palencia 2012).
23. Vega adds, “Algo que siempre buscamos fue no irrumpir en un ambiente tan
delicado en el tema de ecosistemas, sino siempre estar de una manera muy invisible,
como que no se sintiera que había un rodaje. Eso quería decir también cumplir con
los ritmos del lugar, eso quería decir, por ejemplo, tuvimos la oportunidad de contar
con el apoyo del cabildo indígena. Esa autorización para nosotros era muy impor-
tante, si no hay esa autorización, sencillamente no hay rodaje. Entonces es eso. No se
trataba de llevar camiones de luces y un montón de gente y crear todo un evento que
no es normal, sino de entrar de una forma muy delicada y respetar mucho ese espa-
cio” (Palencia 2012).
24. As María del Carmen Caña Jiménez (2015) examines, and as I explore in the
next chapter, El Morro has particularly eerie connotations for Colombian viewers, who
are used to a long tradition of bodies floating down rivers.
25. The report On Their Watch: Evidence of Senior Army Officers’ Responsibility for
False Positive Killings in Colombia describes the falsos positivos as follows: “Between
2002 and 2008 [note that the years coincide with President Álvaro Uribe’s admin-
istration (2002–2010) and his policy of ‘Democratic Security’], army brigades across
Colombia routinely executed civilians. Under pressure from superiors to show ‘posi-
tive’ results and boost body counts in their war against guerrillas, soldiers and officers
abducted victims or lured them to remote locations under false pretenses—such as
with promises of work—killed them, placed weapons on their lifeless bodies, and then
reported them as enemy combatants killed in action. Committed on a large scale for
more than half a decade, these ‘false positive’ killings constitute one of the worst epi-
sodes of mass atrocity in the Western Hemisphere in recent decades” (Human Rights
Watch 2015, 1). More than three thousand extrajudicial killings have been investi-
gated, and more than eight hundred army members have been convicted, mostly low-­
 Notes to Pages 107–119 193

ranking soldiers. Senior officers have yet to face responsibility. For more information,
see Colombia Reports 2017.
26. José Eustasio Rivera’s masterpiece La vorágine (1924), which chronicles in de-
tail the ruthless exploitation of indigenous populations in the caucherías at the turn
of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, is perhaps the main referent in
Colombia.
27. For a fascinating read about the cinematographic and philosophical implica-
tions of the deceleration of time in film (though, with the exception of Argentina, not
related to Latin America), see Jaffe 2014.
28. “The uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar
and old-­established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through
the process of repression” (Freud 1959b, 944).
29. Throughout the chapter, I use the terms “gender violence” and “gender-­based
violence” interchangeably. These terms include physical, sexual, psychological, and
economic forms of violence that are based on sociocultural preconceptions and expec-
tations about the different, and hierarchal, roles of men and women. Some of the more
common forms of gender violence are rape and sexual assault, harassment and exploi-
tation, forced domestic service, and control over women’s reproductive rights through
the imposition or prohibition of birth control and abortion.
30. For more on violence against women in the context of the Colombian armed
conflict, see Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2011, 2017.
31. According to a report, from 1980 to 2012, there were 1,982 massacres in Colom-
bia (Grupo de Memoria Histórica 2013, 48), with the majority of them, or 55 percent,
occurring from 1996 to 2002 (51). Even though all armed actors are responsible for the
violence, six out of ten massacres were committed by paramilitary forces. The study
estimates that the paramilitary killed 7,610 people through this brutal form of violence,
which corresponds to nearly 62 percent of the total number of massacre victims in the
country during that time period (48–49).
32. Examples include the decision of the woman in the first story to take care of the
young child whose parents have been murdered; and the woman in Bogotá who takes
in the Afro-­Colombian woman after finding her lying in the street, unable to move
due to her intense pain and exhaustion.
33. “En todas mis películas el conflicto colombiano siempre está presente, pero lo
que yo he tratado de hacer con cada película, es tratar de elaborar o de ver cómo se
representa ese conflicto armado, de ver cómo se puede hacer una película sobre eso.
. . . Quise elaborar un proyecto que se cuestionara sobre cómo representamos el con-
flicto colombiano, sobre cómo los cineastas, sobre cómo los artistas trabajamos sobre la
guerra, cómo miramos la guerra y cómo podemos re-­elaborarla, cómo podemos crear
nuevas perspectivas, nuevas imágenes, nuevos sonidos” (International Film Festival
Rotterdam 2016b).
34. The lyrics, which are repeated several times, are as follows:

En el campo conflictos
La miseria y yo
atemorizados
por las balas,
sonidos de metralla
194  Notes to Pages 119–129

que caen y caen

de ambos lados.

Y ahora en brazos crecerá mi hijo

lleno de odio
lleno de odio

Alucinando con patria

Odiando la fe,
odiando la fe,
odiando la fe.

35. Jaime Garzón was a beloved, politically engaged comedian and satirist who was
murdered in 1999. Though his case remains unsolved, it is speculated that he was killed
by paramilitary forces with the support of Colombian military and intelligence forces,
particularly the Departamento de Seguridad Nacional, for his involvement as a nego-
tiator in the release of hostages held by FARC. His assassination was a state crime. It
shocked the country and continues to be one of the most painful episodes of Colom-
bia’s armed conflict. For more, see Semana 2016.

Chapter 3: The Revenants

An earlier version of this chapter’s section on Juan Manuel Echavarría’s work was
published as “ ‘Making Audible in the Mouth Whereof One Cannot Speak’: Spectral
Adoptions in Juan Manuel Echavarría’s Requiem NN,” Journal of Latin American Cul-
tural Studies 27, no. 4 (2018): 433–449; it is reprinted here with permission from the
journal.

1. For a thorough analysis of the relationship between violence and tourism and in-
vestment policies during the administration of Álvaro Uribe, see Ojeda 2013.
2. Throughout the chapter, I use the term desaparecidos, in Spanish, to emphasize
the concrete historical connection between the word and the Latin American region,
where the strategic and systematic deployment of the practice of disposing of politi-
cal opponents by making their bodies disappear was first recognized and eventually
categorized as a discrete human rights violation. For more on the topic, see Frey 2009.
3. For a review of Colombian art as it relates to violence from 1950 to 2000, see
Malagón-­Kurka 2010.
4. The Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica has recovered 1,080 corpses from
190 rivers in the country. For more on the relationship between Colombian rivers and
forced disappearance, see Rutas del Conflicto, n.d.
5. The river as a depository of unidentified corpses has a long history in Colom-
bia. Classic “novelas de la Violencia,” such as Daniel Caicedo’s Viento seco and Alfonso
Hilarión Sánchez’s Balas de la ley, both from 1953, mention corpses being thrown into
rivers by armed groups associated with either the Liberal or the Conservative Party,
depending on the author’s own political affiliation. As Rory O’Bryen (2008) points
out, the practice is also mentioned in Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal’s Cóndores no en-
 Notes to Pages 129–135 195

tierran todos los días (1971), Alfredo Molano’s Los años del tropel (1985), and Laura Res-
trepo’s La novia oscura (1999), among others. More recent novels that address the issue
include Que me busquen en el río (2006), by Adelaida Fernández Ochoa; En el brazo del
río (2006), by Marbel Sandoval Ordóñez; and El vuelo del flamenco (2017), by Alejan-
dra López González. The short stories “Sin nombres, sin rostros ni rastros” (2011), by
Jorge Eliécer Pardo; and “Un río lleno de cadáveres flotando” (2017), by Hernando
Vanegas Toloza; as well as the chronicles of Patricia Nieto collected in Los escogidos
(2012) similarly touch on the matter.
6. “As the principal route for the traffic of people, ideas, and capital between colo-
nial times and the early twentieth century, the Magdalena was for a long time central
to the construction of the nation” (O’Bryen 2013, 227).
7. For a thorough account of the importance of the Magdalena River in Colom-
bian history and cultural production, particularly as it relates to historical violence, see
O’Bryen 2016.
8. The name of the NN reflects naming practices in Latin America. People are
typically given two last names: the first one comes from the paternal lineage, and the
second one passes on the mother’s family name.
9. One must remain critical of the possible depoliticization of ethics in Réquiem
NN. As the nation’s long history of targeted assassinations and widespread violence
shows, ghosts in Colombia are indeed political ghosts. The extermination of the Unión
Patriótica, a left-­wing political party associated with FARC and the Communist Party
is a case in point. As several historians and political analysts have shown, the party was
the target of a political genocide orchestrated by a deadly alliance among government
intelligence services, the military, and paramilitary forces. Within a decade and a half,
more than three thousand of its members were murdered. For a thorough account,
see Dudley 2004. The assassination of presidential candidates associated with the left
and with communism is also part of this violent history. Some of the most memorable
cases are as follows: Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (Liberal Party, killed 1948), Jaime Pardo Leal
(Unión Patriótica, killed 1987), Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, (Unión Patriótica, killed
1990), Carlos Pizarro Leongómez (M-­19, killed 1990), and Manuel Cepeda Vargas
(senator for the Unión Patriótica, killed 1994).
Furthermore, Marx’s ghost continues to haunt Colombian politics, now in the
form of the vague yet powerful specter of “castrochavismo.” The term, which preyed
on fears of “becoming Venezuela,” meaning a socialist, authoritarian, and impover-
ished country overrun by corruption, was leveled against the presidential candidate
Gustavo Petro, a former member of the demobilized guerrilla group M-­19 (19th of
April Movement), to delegitimize his candidacy in the June 2018 elections. The elec-
tions were won by Iván Duque, a political amateur and protégé of Álvaro Uribe, a
former president (2002–2010) and current senator strongly associated with the coun-
try’s paramilitary forces and under whose government thousands of young men from
poor neighborhoods in Bogotá were murdered by the military and dressed up as FARC
combatants in order to boost the military’s performance indicators in the human rights
abuse scandal known as falsos positivos (“positive” is the military term used to refer to a
combat-­related enemy casualty).
10. This political ambivalence can be traced in other works by Echavarría. In some
previous instances, he has sought to recuperate human suffering and preserve the
memory of war without identifying the political affiliations of victims and perpetra-
196  Notes to Pages 136–143

tors. For example, in 2009, Echavarría opened an exhibition called La guerra que no
hemos visto (The war we have not seen). The exhibition displayed ninety paintings made
by ex-­combatants of the Colombian conflict but did not provide any other information
about the artists or the acts of violence depicted. Viewers would know that “they are all
combatants in the war between the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, and the Colombian
armed forces, but are told nothing about their affiliation or that of the people in the
images; there are also no details about the precise circumstances in which the atrocities
occurred” (Rueda 2011b, 53). But these silences do not condone violence; on the con-
trary, “it is in this interaction between what is said/shown and what remains unsaid/
not shown that a memory of war is constructed” (Rueda 2011b, 54). As is the case in
Réquiem NN, the integration of the silences that violence produces into the process of
remembering “not only bring[s] forward the void in any process of remembrance but
also open[s] the way to reflections on the reasons for these voids, reasons that are often
enmeshed in the political fabric of a society” (54). I subscribe to Rueda’s interpretation
that in this context, the absence of facts does not sanction or justify violence; rather,
these omissions “are the bearers of the silences of violence” (67).
11. “Después de muerto, tirado al río, o sea, una doble muerte” (LuloFilmsLtda
2015).
12. The fact that the animero chooses the word “diary” to describe his writing is
meaningful because it emphasizes the personal nature of the writing—its distance
from historical and official narratives that purport to be objective and independent
of their creators. The animero speaks in a personal voice that is nevertheless not indi-
vidual, because it is haunted, inhabited by the many NNs whose stories need to be told.
13. For a thorough retrospective of the work of Beatriz González, particularly as
it relates to the representation of historical violence in Colombia, see Ostrander and
Ramírez 2019.
14. In several interviews, González has identified the 1985 siege of the Palace of
Justice in Bogotá by the M-­19 guerrilla group and the brutal military raid that fol-
lowed—which burned down the building and left eleven Supreme Court justices dead
and many other people murdered or disappeared—as a tipping point in her career.
Until then, she says, “yo hacía esas cosas tan alegres alrededor de ciertos presidentes.
Me parecía como una tragicomedia. Cuando llegamos al Palacio de Justicia, eso se vol-
vió solo una tragedia, la parte de comedia se quitó; por eso ya no podíamos reír más”
(Rázon Pública 2013).
15. See, for example, Mátame a mí que yo ya viví (1997), or Las Delicias (1998), a
series inspired by and named after the 1996 FARC-­led takeover of the military base
Las Delicias in Putumayo. As a result of the attack, sixty soldiers were kidnapped and
over two dozen lost their lives.
16. During the 1970s, and while exploring very different topics, González used
furniture and other objects as material supports for her work. See, for example, Natu-
raleza casi muerta, Baby Johnson in situ, and La última mesa. But González had never
attempted anything of a similar scope. This project came about in part because of the
influence of and collaboration with her famous disciple and dear friend, Doris Salcedo.
17. González describes the work as “a funeral parade, with ‘pallbearers,’ represented
by black silhouettes, slowly fading into gray until they turn into a line that explodes
and disappears” (quoted in Ostrander and Ramírez 2019, 217).
18. La Violencia is said to have “officially” ended in 1958, when Liberals and Con-
servatives reached a political deal known as the Frente Nacional. Both parties agreed to
 Notes to Pages 143 –172 197

alternate power for a period of four four-­year presidential terms, starting with the Lib-
erals. The Frente Nacional did ameliorate the violence, but its long-­term consequences
were devastating. El Frente was perceived by many as proof of political collusion by
elites desperate to hold on to power as populist, socialist, and communist movements
were becoming increasingly popular. El Frente sent the message that democracy was
a facade and that achieving power through the polls was impossible for emergent po-
litical actors. This perception produced further conflict and strengthened the nascent
guerrilla groups that would be responsible for much of the country’s violence in the
decades to come.
19. As Paolo Vignolo (2013, 126) points out, during the second half of the twenti-
eth century, but particularly in the first decades of the new millennium, the Cemen-
terio Central has been “el epicentro de una restructuración de envergadura tanto sim-
bólica como material [que] deja entrever un modelo de metrópolis en construcción en
el que se juegan las relaciones entre sus habitantes de hoy, de ayer y de mañana.” The
cemetery evokes key questions about the ways in which “el gobierno de la ciudad de los
muertos va transformando la ciudad de los vivos” (126). For a thorough critical analysis
of the history of the Cementerio Central, see Vignolo 2013.
20. For high-­quality images of Auras anónimas, see http://​ bga​.uniandes​.edu​.co​
/catalogo​/items​/show​/ 1182.
21. See, for example, Diettes 2010.
22. Diettes does not see her work as directly influenced by Muñoz or Salcedo; how-
ever, because of important resonances in technical and thematic elements, as well as
the major role both Muñoz and Salcedo have had in shaping Colombia’s artistic land-
scape, particularly when it comes to exploring a language of memory and the represen-
tation of violence, connections among their works are both relevant and productive.
23. In personal communication with me (email, August 31, 2019), Diettes acknowl-
edged that because of logistical or security concerns, in some exhibits the images could
not be hung low enough for visitors to come into contact with them, but that this tac-
tile dimension remains a key part of the work.
24. In fact, many critics note the resemblance of Atrabiliarios to “a kind of minia-
turized cemetery . . . that conjure[s] ghostly corpses” (Smith 1994). For further refer-
ences, see Malagón-­Kurka 2010 (194).
25. Beatriz González also explored the topic of symbolic and deferred burials in her
2000 painting Enterradores from her series Dolores. The painting depicts the corpse-­
less burial of the victims of a massacre perpetrated by the paramilitaries in Barran-
cabermeja in 1998. As in the newspaper clip, Enterradores shows a scene of chaos,
wherein people carry caskets with only the photograph of the missing person inside.
The title, which in English means “gravediggers,” is both ironic and macabre since ex-
treme violence has not even left a body to bury. For a thorough analysis of the painting,
see Malagón-­Kurka 2015 (79–81).

Epilogue

1. This is not the only time Salcedo has used the floor as the main element of
her work. See, for example, Shibboleth (2007), Sumando ausencias (2016), Palimpsesto
(2017), and Quebrantos (2019).
2. After signing the peace accords with FARC, the Colombian government held a
198  Notes to Pages 172–179

referendum on October 2, 2016, to ratify the agreement. Given the devastating impact
of the conflict, the vote in favor of peace was projected to win. But because of a dirty-­
tactics campaign based on shrewd political manipulation of the content and supposed
implications of the accords, the referendum failed, with 50.2 percent voting against
it and 49.8 percent voting in favor. It is worth noting that the areas most affected by
war, where the majority of direct victims of the conflict live, voted overwhelmingly in
favor of peace, while the urban centers, where the economic, social, and political elites
live, voted against it.
3. The coalition included representatives from almost all parties who sought to reap
political and financial dividends by gutting the accords and prominent figures with
up to then vastly different ideological and political trajectories, including the former
president Andrés Pastrana Arango (1998–2002), who himself led a failed peace pro-
cess with FARC; the former president and the then chair of the Liberal Party, César
Gaviria; and Alejandro Ordóñez, an ultraconservative, Lefebvrite, former inspector
general who was demoted for corruption, who is well known for his attacks on sexual,
reproductive, and gay rights, and who was appointed in 2018 as Colombia’s ambassa-
dor to the Organization of American States in Washington, DC.
4. El Salvador reached the highest homicide rate in the Western Hemisphere after
the civil war: “6,250 people per year perished from direct political violence during the
civil war in the 1980s, compared to 8,700 to 11,000 killed every year by criminal vio-
lence in the 1990s following the peace accords” (Bourgois 2017, 431).
5. Bourgois provides the following definitions of violence:

Direct Political: Targeted physical violence and terror administered by official authori-
ties and those opposing it, such as military repression, police torture, and armed
resistance.
Structural: Chronic, historically entrenched political-­economic oppression and social
inequality, ranging from exploitative international terms of trade to abusive local
working conditions and high infant mortality rates. . . .
Symbolic: Defined in Bourdieu’s . . . work as the internalized humiliations and legiti-
mations of inequality and hierarchy ranging from sexism and racism to intimate
expression of class power. It is “exercised through cognition and misrecognition,
knowledge and sentiment, with the unwitting consent of the dominated.” . . .
Everyday: Daily practices and expression of violence on a micro-­interactional level:
interpersonal, domestic and delinquent. Concept adapted from Scheper-­Hughes . . .
to focus on the individual lived experience that normalizes petty brutalities and terror
at the community level and creates a common sense of ethos of violence. (Bourgois
2017, 426)

6. See the Fiscalía General de la Nación’s report, cited in El Espectador 2018; and
https://​pacifista​.tv​/tag ​/ lideres​-­­asesinados/.
7. See, for example, my analysis of Laura Restrepo’s La multitud errante in chap-
ter 1 of this book.
8. As I finished the final revisions of this book, Colombia’s fate took a devastating
turn toward further seemingly unending war. On August 29, 2019, a small but mean-
ingful cadre of guerrilla combatants led by Iván Márquez, Jesús Santrich, “El Paisa,”
Aldinever Morantes, and “Romaña,” among others, announced the military reactiva-
 Note to Page 179 199

tion of FARC due, they argued, to the failure of Iván Duque’s government to fulfill
the compromises reached in the peace agreement. But the vast majority of former com-
batants, as well as historic leaders such as Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, a.k.a. Timo-
chenko, remain firmly committed to the accords and to a transition toward a more
peaceful and equitable society.
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Index

Note: page numbers in italics denote figures.

Allende, Isabel, 8; La casa de los espíritus, Balzac, Honoré de, 21–22, 23, 185nn24–
17 25; characters of, 50; and classical
A punta de sangre (Diettes): and desapa- realism, 46. See also The Human
recidos, 152; photographic technique Comedy (Balzac); Père Goriot (Balzac)
in, 152; river as symbol of conflict in, Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida, 152–
151, 152; and shared concerns with 153; and mourning and memory,
Requiem NN, 151; as triptych, 153; 153–154, 158; and photography, 79;
and unresolved questions, 151 and punctum, 153; and the “Reality
Auerbach, Erich: on Balzac, 21; and Effect,” 184n21
Mimesis, 184n21; on Odysseus’s scar, Bazin, André, 79–82; and “great holes,”
61–62 105–106; as idealist, 190n3; on Ladri
Auras anónimas (González), 141, 144– di biciclette, 80; on photography, 79;
145; and collective mourning, 147; on Roberto Rossellini, 80–81
and empty tombs, 143–144; geo- Benjamin, Walter, 166, 171; and the
political aspects of, 145; and history Angel of History, 171; and mourn-
of Colombia, 142–143; images of, ing, 177; on ruins, 171
197n20; and “inter-­temporal justice,” Bentham, Jeremy, 22, 23. See also
144; and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” panopticon
146–147; and Meta, 143, 146; and El Bogotazo, 143, 144
socioeconomic inequality, 145; and Bombal, María Luisa, 17
“transgenerational ethics,” 144; use Bourgois, Phillipe: and “the continuum
of repetition and seriality, 146 of violence,” 174, 198n5; on peace
Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia accords, 173–174
(AUC), 39, 122; and 2003 peace Brooks, Peter: on Balzac, 23, 44, 50;
agreement, 1, 30, 179; and disappear- and defining classical realism, 19, 25,
ances, 122; violent means of, 122– 91; on Le diable boiteux (Lesage), 42;
123 Realist Vision, 22, 184n21; and scopo-
philic impulse, 27, 57; on vision in
bacrims (bandas criminales), 123 the modern era, 186n27
Baer, Ulrich, 26 Butler, Judith: Precarious Life, 123; on

213
214  Index

Rosero, Evelio, 75; on ruins, 171; on Conservatives, 5, 182n2

spectral agency, 164 criminal organizations, 30, 35, 123. See
also bacrims; drug trafficking; Esco-
Cargueros de Vista Hermosa (González), bar, Pablo
142–143 Cristero War, 18
La carroza de Bolívar (Rosero), 38
Castle, Terry, 15 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari,
classical realism, 19–21; and cinema, 79; 25, 91–92; A Thousand Plateaus,
and the Enlightenment, 20; gaze of, 27, 56–57; and “time-­image”/ 
174; and main theories of, 184n21; “movement-­image,” 109. See also
and nineteenth-­century novels, 19. haptic perception
See also realism Derrida, Jacques, 2, 4, 134; “Force of
Collazos, Óscar, 10; Morir con papá, 13 Law,” 137; and “hauntology,” 16;
Colombia: and 1991 constitution, and “juridical voids,” 183n17; and
191n13; armed conflict in, 3, 12, 28, law versus justice, 137; “ontopology
30, 35–36, 39–40, 46, 47, 56, 59–60, of presence,” 5; Specters of Marx, 2,
64, 67–68, 71–72, 78, 86–89, 97, 102, 15–16, 28, 34, 37, 56, 135, 179
114, 122, 176; and art scene of mid-­ desparacidos, 119, 194n2; and Columbian
1980s, 125; and Bogotá, 106, 112, statistics, 123; family members of,
113, 117, 119, 143, 145, 146, 164; and 152; and rivers, 140, 194nn4–6; under
bogotanos, 145–146; and “castrocha- Pinochet, 182; See also disappearances
vismo,” 195n9; and idea of nation, Le diable boiteux, 42
30; massacres in, 193n31; and mili- Diettes, Erika, 3, 4, 13, 34, 36; and the
tary state apparatus, 99; and National affective dimension of violence, 148;
Army, 65, 88, 122, 172; national and artwork as secondary witnesses,
founding of, 6; and paramilitaries, 150; and artwork as symbolic burial,
122; regional differences in, 145–146; 150–151; and the audience, 150; and
and teleology of nation, 30; and bearing witness, 150; and collec-
tourism, 98–99 tive mourning, 163; and Colombian
Colombian cultural production, 3–6, 11, armed conflict, 151, 152, 154; and
12, 13–14, 16, 32, 37, 108, 180; ethical commemorative sites, 163; and des-
implications of, 33; and NNs, 129; aparecidos, 149; and disappearances,
and violence, 33 126; and Dolores, 197n25; and em-
Colombian filmmaking, 33, 77–79, pathy, 180; exhibitions by, 149–150,
191n11, 191nn14–15; 1990s defund- 197n23; as exorcist, 37; and spec-
ing of, 82; boost in production of, trality, 153–154; and spectral realism,
82; and “film laws,” 83–84; “glocal” 178; training and work of, 147–148;
cinema, 84, 86, 192n17; and haptic and productive haunting, 175; use
perception, 86; hybrid forms of, 86, of photography by, 147, 148, 149,
88; legislation around, 83–84; model 150, 151; and work of Óscar Munoz,
for, 84; political concerns of, 84–86; 148–149, 197n22; and work of Doris
and pornimiseria, 33, 85–86; and Salcedo, 149–150, 197n22. See also
rural spaces, 86–88; and smooth A punta de sangre (Diettes); Relica-
spaces, 90; and time, 193n27. See rios (Diettes); Río abajo; Sudarios
also individual works (Diettes)
Colombian Office of the Attorney “dirty realism,” 10–11
General, 1 disappearances, 24, 36, 56, 70, 122;
 Index 215

1980–2016, 122; Columbian statistics 48, 49, 52, 58–59, 61, 74; Oye (char.),
for, 187n2; desaparecer, 24; as his- 50, 52; plot of, 39–40; publication of,
torical phenomenon, 40; as “human 40; rape in, 49, 51, 52; in relation to
absenting,” 123; legal recourse absent En el lejero, 40; Rosero on, 40; scopo-
for, 124, 126; and Magdalena River, philia in, 46, 47, 50, 52, 59, 62, 66,
129–130, 195nn6–7; and revisionist 74; and smooth spaces, 57; themes
impulse, 124; statistics concerning, of, 41; the unheimlich in, 61; violence
123; techniques for, 126–127. See also and sexuality in, 48–51, 52; violence
desparacidos and visuality in, 47–51, 53, 63, 64,
displacements: Columbian statistics for, 71, 73; and visual exposure, 62; visual
187n2; and gender, 113 representation of violence in, 36, 110
drug cartels, 1, 6, 10, 12, 30, 34, 141; and El Salvador: and peace agreement of
work of Rosero, Evelio, 39. See also 1992, 173; violence in, 173–174,
Escobar, Pablo 198n4
drug trafficking, 13, 144 En el lejero (Rosero), 24, 25, 26, 36;
Bonifacio, 70; chronology in, 58,
Echavarría, Juan Manuel, 3, 4, 34, 68; and complicit reader, 53, 58, 74;
36, 140; and disappearances, 126; disappearance as theme of, 55, 58,
as exorcist, 37; and political am- 66–67; disorientation in, 53, 55, 57,
bivalence, 195n10; and productive 58, 59–60; distrust of the visual in,
haunting, 175; and Puerto Berrío, 42; ending of, 53, 70; formal experi-
126–136. See also La guerra que no mentation in, 40; El Guardadero, 54,
hemos visto (Echavarría); Novenarios 66–69; and hauntology, 41; histori-
en espera (Echavarría); Réquiem NN cal violence in, 39, 40–42, 59–60,
(Echavarría) 67, 68; initial sequence of, 53; and
Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), Jeremías Andrade, 53–54, 57, 59, 60,
39 62–64, 66–69, 70, 189n10; kidnap-
Los ejércitos (Rosero), 24, 31, 36; El Bra- ping in, 54, 67–69; El Perdedero, 67;
silero (char.), 49; characters in, 45; photographs in, 40, 53, 66–67; plot
Chepe (char.), 64; chronology in, 58– of, 39–40; publication of, 40; in rela-
59; Cristina (char.), 50; disappear- tion to Los ejércitos, 40; remoteness as
ance as a theme of, 55, 58, 60, 66; theme of, 55; Rosaura (char.), 53, 57,
disorientation in, 57; ending of, 70– 58, 66–67, 69, 70; scopophilia in, 62,
71, 74; Eusebito (char.), 48, 49, 50, 66, 74; and smooth spaces, 57; spec-
61, 67; Geraldina (char.), 50–52, 69, tral realism and, 58, 69; themes of,
71; Gracielita (char.), 48, 49, 50, 60, 41; third-­person narrative voice in,
67; and hauntology, 41; historical 53; unnamed town in, 54–55; vio-
violence in, 39, 41, 42, 47, 48, 49, 50, lence and visuality in, 53; and visual
60, 62, 67–68; and implicated reader, exposure, 62; visual representation
50, 51, 52, 74; Ismael (char.), 44, 45, of violence in, 36; warm and cold
46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 58, 61–63, in, 63
64–65, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74, 156; kid- Enlightenment, the, 20, 21–22
napping in, 49, 51, 61, 64, 65; liter- Escobar, Pablo, 35, 39, 145. See also drug
ary prizes for, 38; and mass media, cartels; drug trafficking
64–66; naming in, 71–73; National Espinosa, Julio García, 33
Army in, 65–66; Odysseus’s scar, “ética ansiosa” (anxious ethics), 34
61–62; opening of, 44; Otila (char.), exorcists: authors as, 37
216  Index

falsos positivos, 88, 104, 105, 192n25, political beings, 135; and violent his-
195n9 tory, 17
FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucio- González, Beatriz, 3, 4, 34, 36, 141; and
narias de Colombia), 1, 3, 39, 172, 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice
196n15; and assassinations, 195n5; in Bogotá, 196n14; and campesi-
military reactivation of, 198n8; and nos, 145; and cargueros, 143, 144, 145,
murder of Jaime Garzón, 194n35; 146, 147; and disappearances, 126; as
and peace agreement, 1, 30, 35, exorcist, 37; and productive haunt-
94, 169, 179, 197nn2–3; and Juan ing, 175; and spectral realism, 178;
Manuel Santos, 3, 172; and Unión work of, 141, 142, 196n16. See also
Patriótica, 195n9 Auras anónimas (González); Car-
film: and death, 79; versus photography, gueros de Vista Hermosa (González)
79; and temporality, 80 grief. See mourning
Forero, Jorge, 3, 4, 13, 34, 36; concerns La guerra que no hemos visto (Echavarría),
as a filmmaker, 90; as exorcist, 37; 195n10
and productive haunting, 175. See Guerrero, Felipe, 3, 4, 13, 34, 78; con-
also Violencia (Forero) cerns as a filmmaker, 90; as exorcist,
Foucault, Michel, 22 37; and productive haunting, 175.
Fragmentos (Salcedo), 165, 167, 168; and See also Oscuro animal (Guerrero)
Walter Benjamin, 171; as collective
project, 170; as commission, 166, 171, Hamlet (Shakespeare), 16, 179, 180
172; as “contra monumento,” 166; haptic perception, 19, 25, 27, 28, 32, 57,
creators and creation of, 169–170; 78, 86, 91–92, 176; oblique gaze of,
exhibition rooms of, 169; floor of, 174; thematic and formal choices
164, 166, 170, 172, 197n1; and gender of, 176. See also Deleuze, Gilles, and
violence, 169–170; as haunted site, Félix Guattari
171, 172; interior of, 165, 169, 170; haunting as a disruptive force, 37, 174
and “inter-­temporal” forms of justice, “hauntology,” 27, 32, 41, 56–57. See also
177; location and outside ­appearance Derrida, Jacques
of, 164, 166, 169; as “memoria ac- Human Comedy, The (Balzac), 21
tiva,” 172; on memory of war, 166; as
multipurpose site, 166; and spectral El incendiado (Rosero), 38
realism, 172, 178; and temporality, Internal Displacement Monitoring
171; three main components of, 166; Centre, 1, 113
on violence, 166 Italian neorealism, 80–82, 109
Franco, Jorge, 10; Rosario Tijeras, 13
Fuguet, Alberto, and Sergio Gómez, 9 Jameson, Fredric, 2, 108, 190n3
Fukuyama, Francis, 15 Jaramillo, Darío, 10
Justice and Peace Law (2003–2006),
Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, assassination of, 4, 122
143, 182n2
Gaviria, Víctor, 10, 11, 25; Rodrigo D: kidnapping, 30, 39, 68; Columbian
No futuro, 11, 12; La vendedora de statistics for, 187n2
rosas, 11
ghosts, 14, 175; in Colombia, 134; as Latin American film: flourishing of, 83,
conceptual metaphor, 15; and Latin 190–191nn6–7, 191nn9–10; literature
American cultural production, 17; as on, 19n16
 Index 217

Liberals, 5, 182n2 neoliberalism, 10, 11, 84–85, 97, 174,

Luzardo, Julio, 129–130, 136 178, 190n5
New Latin American Cinema, 11, 33;
magical realism, 7–8, 10, 11, 14, 181n8, scope of, 181n10; seminal texts of, 33;
186n28 techniques of, 181n11
Maillé, Emilio, 13 NNs (nomen nescio), 127, 195n8; adop-
Márquez, Gabriel García, 6, 8, 10, 13, tion of term as heresy, 136; banning
14; Cien Años De Soledad, 5, 7, 65, adoption of term, 136; and burial,
183–184nn19–20; “Dos o tres cosas 138; and the family, 134; and jus-
sobre la novela de la violencia en tice, 137; material bodies of, 130;
Colombia,” 6; and ghosts, 17, 18–19; processing of, 127; and the will to
and La Violencia, 7 mourn, 140. See also Echavarría, Juan
Márquez, Iván Duque: administration Manuel; Réquiem NN (Echavarría)
of, 173; election of, 172, 195n9, novela de la tierra, 26, 186n31
198n8; campaign of, 172 Novenarios en espera (Echavarría), 127–128
“marvelous realism,” 8
Marxism, 15–16, 135; and “castrocha- O’Bryen, Rory, 2–3
vismo,” 195n9. See also Derrida, ontology, 16, 29, 190n3
Jacques; Jameson, Fredric “ontopology,” 5, 27, 29, 41, 56–57. See
massacre of Bojayá, the, 40, 188n4 also Derrida, Jacques
Mayolo, Carlos, and Luis Ospina, 33– Oscuro animal (Guerrero), 28, 36, 117,
34, 85, 86, 90, 176; Agarrando Pueblo, 119; and armed conflict, 115, 121;
176. See also pornomiseria camerawork in, 118; concerns of,
McOndos, 9–10, 11 113; and critical reflection, 108–109;
mediation, 34 ending of, 120; environmental cues
memory: collective, 84, 126, 143; in, 94; forms of violence in, 110–111,
counter-­memory, 131; “inter-­ 113–115; and gender, 113–115; haptic
temporal,” 144; and names, 133; and perception in, 86, 90, 118, 120; and
nation, 142, 145; “obstinate memory,” hope, 114; and male gaze, 114–115;
124; repression of, 29; and violence, narrative time in, 109; narrative voice
128, 130, 136, 138, 148 absent from, 101–102; plot of, 88–89,
Mexican Revolution, 18 113–114; and scopophilia, 115, 117,
modernity, 4, 5, 11, 19, 29; and teleology, 118, 120; screenplay for, 89; setting
30 of, 119; sound management in, 100,
mourning, 123–124; and Antigone, 124; 118, 119, 120; spectral mode of per-
Judith Butler on, 123; as collective ception in, 92; and spectral realism,
act, 147; and desaparecidos, 126; and 178; structure of, 113; as triptych, 88;
forced disappearances, 124; politics violent reality and artistic representa-
and, 135; and unacknowledged pro- tion in, 89; visuality and visual ambi-
cesses, 126 guity in, 28, 94, 105, 120
Muñoz, Oscar, 125, 126; and display Ospina, Luis, 33–34. See also Mayolo,
in Narciscos, 160–161; photographic Carlos, and Luis Ospina
practice of, 148; and themes of inter- otra sonoridad, 28–29. See also Guerrero,
est, 148–149 Felipe

naturalism, 7 panopticon, 22–23

“neoconflict,” 30 Pedro Páramo, Pedro (Rulfo), 17–18, 28
218  Index

Père Goriot (Balzac), 23–24, 42, 44, memory, 130; as documentary,

186n26; English translation of, 128; and end of film, 133; Héctor
187n3; final scene of, 44; and Ras­ Montoya (char.) as animero in, 139,
tignac (char.), 44, 45, 46, 47; socio- 196n12; and inhabitants of Puerto
economic and political context and, Berrío, 128–137; justice in, 136–138;
108 Magdalena River in, 137–138; and
Petersen, Amanda, 3 naming, 132–134; opening sequence
photography: and film, 17; and indexi- of, 129; politics and political ambiva-
cal quality, 79, 125; as “mechanical lence of, 134–136, 195n9; representa-
eye,” 185n23; and mortality, 153; and tion of violence in, 140; and silence,
nations, 27; and spectral realism, 26. 128, 129, 130, 139, 140, 195n10; and
See also Barthes, Roland spectral realism, 178; temporality in,
“pink tide,” the, 82 137; testimonies in, 129, 133; the-
Pinochet dictatorship, 182n1 matic concerns of, 128; tombstones
“pornomiseria,” 33. See also Mayolo, in, 138; and the will to mourn, 140
Carlos, and Luis Ospina Restrepo, Laura, 10; La multitude
errante, 70–71, 73
Quiroga, Horacio, 17 Ribas-­Casasayas, Alberto, 3
Río abajo (Diettes), 151; and desapareci-
Rama, Ángel, 5, 182n3 dos, 152; photographic technique in,
readers as complicit, 24, 25 152; river as symbol of conflict in,
realism, 7; bibliography for, 184n21; and 151; and shared concerns with Re-
the city, 25; and conception of space, quiem NN, 151–152; and unresolved
25; and the gaze, 23; and narrator in, questions, 151; and use of mementos,
23; origins as a term, 22; and Ray- 152, 153; and the uncanny, 152
mond Williams, 185n22; and tempo- Rivera, José Eustasio, 193n26
rality, 108–109; and visuality, 22–24, Rocha, Glauber, 33, 85
42–43 Rosero, Evelio, 3, 4, 13, 34, 37, 74; biog-
realismo sucio, 10–11, 25 raphy of, 39; as exorcist, 37; and
La regenta, 42; Fermín De Pas, 42–43; historical violence, 39, 46; and im-
opening sequence of, 42–43 portance of witnessing, 156; as intro-
Relicarios (Diettes), 159, 160, 162; and vert, 38–39; and literary awards, 38;
desaparecidos, 158, 161; exhibition of, and literary devices, 40; novels of,
160, 163; and family testimony, 159; 39; and productive haunting, 175;
and mourning, 158; and objects as and representations of violence, 48;
relics, 159, 163; as sacred space for and scopophilia, 38–39; and spec-
relics, 158–161; as sculpture, 158; and tral realism, 45–46, 74–76, 178–179;
spectator, 163; and use of mementos, themes of, 39; and visuality, 46. See
158, 159, 160, 161; and violent history, also La carroza de Bolívar (Rosero);
163; and works of Oscar Muñoz, Los ejércitos; El incendiado (Rosero);
160–161; and works of Doris Salcedo, En el lejero (Rosero)
160 Rulfo, Juan, 20; Pedro Páramo, 17–19,
Réquiem NN (Echavarría), 32, 123, 127– 28
128, 132, 135; as acknowledgment,
130; adoptions in, 131–133; camera- Sabato, Ernesto, 17
work in, 138; cemeteries in, 138; and Salazar, Alonso, 10; No nacimos pa’
collective mourning, 147; as counter-­ semilla, 13
 Index 219

Salcedo, Doris, 125–126; Mieke Bal on, telling, 19, 175; and temporal disrup-
128; and use of objects, 160. See also tion, 59; thematic and formal choices
Fragmentos (Salcedo) of, 176. See also specters; spectral
Santos, Juan Manuel, 3, 166; and peace realism
accords, 172–173 spectral realism: as boundaryless, 181; in
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino: Facundo, Colombia, 26; in Colombian cinema,
17, 183n19; and ghosts, 17 90; contributions of, 180–181; and
Schroeder, Barbet, 13 the countryside, 26; and cultural
scopophilia, 23–24, 25, 27, 57, 78, 91, mediation and remediation, 34–35;
115; Laura Mulvey on, 115 definition of, 3–4, 13–14, 19, 20, 24,
Señor que no conoce la luna (Rosero), 38 35, 36, 75–76, 174, 178; and distrust
sicaresca, 12, 14 of the visual, 24, 108; ethical con-
El sicario (Bahamón Dussán), 13 cerns of, 86, 108; exigency of, 178;
sicarios, 12; definition of, 181nn12–14 and the gaze, 26, 91; and haptic per-
La sirga (Vega), 24, 27, 28, 36, 93, 96, ception, 27–29, 91; and historical
116; Alicia (char.), 88, 94–95, 96, 97, violence, 34, 40, 174; and the indi-
98, 100, 115; characters in, 99–100; vidual quest, 69; and Italian neoreal-
La Cocha as setting of, 88, 89–90, ism, 80–81; and memory, 62; and
93, 94–95, 96–97, 98, 99, 100–101; nostalgia, 31; practitioners of, 34;
collaboration on, 90; and critical and sound, 28–29; and space, 26, 91;
reflection, 108–109; difficulty of and storytelling, 36; versus symbolic
seeing in, 93–94, 96, 100–101, 105; violence, 176; and time, 29–30, 90,
economic exploitation in, 97; ethics 91; as a tool for understanding, 174;
and aesthetics in, 89; first and last and violence toward ordinary people,
sequences of, 94–96, 100; Freddy 62; and the violence of visuality, 25.
(char.), 97, 115; and gender, 113–114; See also individual works
haptic perception in, 86, 90, 92, 93, spectral turn, the, 14–15
94, 101, 120; landscape in, 100; Miri- spectropoetics, 179–180
chis (char.), 96, 98, 99, 100; and El Sudarios (Diettes), 154, 155; and Roland
Morro, 95, 192n24; narrative time Barthes, 158; and closed eyes as dis-
in, 109; narrative voice absent from, ruption of vision, 154, 156–157; and
101–102; Óscar (char.), 88, 95, 97, desaparecidos, 156; exhibition of, 154,
100; plot of, 88; and scopophilia, 115; 156–157; on-­site setting, 154; and
La Sirga, 97–98; sound in, 90–91, photographic medium, 154, 156–157,
100, 176; spectral mode of perception 158, 163; and specters and spectral-
in, 92; and spectral realism, 100, 178; ization, 156; and suffering, 158; and
state violence in, 99, 121; title, 98; the unheimlich, 156; and use of suda-
and tourism, 98–100 rios, 157; vision and knowledge in,
space: and nation, 26; “smooth,” 27, 28, 156; and vision as a weapon, 154; and
56–57, 91–92, 176; “striated,” 27, 34, women’s testimonies, 154, 156; and
57, 91–92; See also Deleuze, Gilles, witnessing violence, 156
and Félix Guattari
specters, 29, 56, 69, 92; aims of, 180; and Third Cinema, 11
anachronicity, 29, 59; role of, 174. See time: and ghost stories, 17; and moder-
also spectrality; spectral realism nity, 29; narrative, 176; and realism,
spectrality, 15–16; and disappearing, 108–109; and spectrality, 16, 28, 30,
56; and Latin America, 17; as story­ 31–32, 58–59
220  Index

unheimlich, the (the uncanny), 16, 24, 61, 121; or “A Day in the Colombian
111, 193n28 Armed Conflict,” 88, 102; environ-
“urban realism,” 10 mental cues in, 94; falsos positivos in,
Úribe, Alvaro, 192n25; and tourism, 88, 104, 105, 192n25, 195n9; haptic
98–99, 194n1 perception in, 86, 90, 104, 112, 120;
and jungle, 106–107; narrative voice
Valenzuela, Luisa, 41, 73–74 absent from, 101–102, 106; narrative
Vallejo, Fernando, 10, 13, 25, 31 time in, 108, 109; and normalization
Vega, William, 3, 4, 13, 34; concerns as of violence, 103–105, 107, 111–113;
a filmmaker, 89–90; as exorcist, 37; plot of, 89, 107–108; sound manage-
and importance of witnessing, 156; ment in, 100, 105, 111; spectral mode
and productive haunting, 175. See of perception in, 92; as triptych, 88,
also La sirga (Vega) 112; and the unheimlich, 111–112;
Vélez, Álvaro Uribe, 172, 195n9 vignette format of, 102; violence in,
Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural 110–112; visual ambiguity in, 94, 105,
Uncanny, 15 106
violence: artistic reflections on, 177; vision and visuality, 3, 10, 18, 20, 22;
and colonialism, 69; ethical con- ambiguity of, 36; and desire, 47; dis-
cerns about representation of, 36, 37, trust of, 24, 175; and hypervisibility,
174; “gender” violence and “gender-­ 174; politics and ethics of, 120, 175;
based” violence, 51, 92, 113–121, and power, 46–47; realism and, 42;
169, 193nn29–30; historical, 2–3, and “scopic regime,” 27, 57, 91, 92,
4, 5, 13–14, 19, 20, 31, 32, 34–35, 100, 185n23, 186n32; technologies
37, 56, 78; and literary devices, 40; of, 21; transformations in the nine-
and movement from countryside to teenth century, 185n23; and violence,
cities, 10; sexual, 113–117; as social 25; and visual command, 23. See also
co­hesion, 6; as symbolic, 176; and the individual works
viewer, 78; and visuality, 47. See also
individual works war on drugs, the, 13; and the United
La Violencia, 2–3; definition of, 182n2; States, 34. See also drug cartels; drug
end of, 196n18; period of (1948– trafficking; Escobar, Pablo
1958), 2, 5–6, 12, 143; and spectral Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 140, 181; Tracta-
realism, 178 tus Logico-­Philosophicus, 128
Violencia (Forero), 36, 103; camera-
work in, 106, 107; closing sequence Žižek, Slavoj: and objective violence, 31,
of, 111–112; complicity of viewer of, 173, 174, 186n33; and subjective vio-
112; and critical reflection, 108–109; lence, 173, 186n33
daily life of armed conflict, 103, 112, Zola, Émile, 21–22