ARTicles vol.4 i.1b: The Colombian War in the Theater: Humberto Dorado’s The Keening

The Keeningis an intense monologue, nearly two hours of breathlessness. The work illustrates violence as one lives it in Colombia, displayed with unusual drama and emotion. The story unfolds in a town along Colombia’s northern coast, where a paramilitary landholder exercises power. The work relates how absolute power in the hands of bloodthirsty authorities results in every sort of outrage, how whoever dares to contradict such power is beyond salvation, even family members or friends of the powerful; how paramilitary power has spread under the protecting hand of regular state forces. It allows us to see how both forces trample upon the civil population; in areas that serve as corridors for the passage of men with guns, one group or another will seek the help of civilians, while other groups will attack civilians under suspicion of collaborating with still other groups. War leaves nothing untouched. It dissolves family bonds. It produces acts of unthinkable cruelty even in times of peace, and it distorts the economic, social, and political order.

The Keeningis a monologue that causes us to feel deep sorrow. It is a raw and intense work; through the memories of one woman, who is a mother, a spouse, a lover, and a supportive friend, we approach the gates of horror, of hell, in order to contemplate the naked truth. We see the proof of drug money’s corrupting influence on communities and families, an influence that leads to massacre and assassination. We see how absolute power leads to coercion, coercion to outrage and human depredation. The Keeningis a work that leaves us shaken, forced to confront realities that the mass media is unable to penetrate. It is a cry and an appeal. It is the reality of war in Colombia, offered up naked to the eye.

Violence is one of the fundamental themes of art in Colombia. García Márquez in literature, Fernando Botero in painting, and Víctor Gaviria in filmmaking are some of the best-known artists who have taken up this theme in their works. In theater, the seventies and eighties saw the rise of a vigorous movement with a political edge. Works like Guadalupe años 50, a collective creation of the group La Candelaria, directed by Santiago García, and The Agony of the Deceased, written by Esteban Navajas and brought to the stage by Teatro Libre de Bogotá, crossed boundaries and became icons of the marriage of art and politics. Humberto Dorado comes from precisely this same tradition. He was an actor at the Teatro Libre, and later a film director, a television actor, a writer of short stories, and the author of The Keening.

In order to delve into the work in question and its setting, Colombian reality, it’s worthwhile to ask ourselves the following questions: Why, in a country so privileged by nature – with three mountain ranges, part of the Amazon rainforest, coasts on two oceans, every type of climate at every time of year, from 0 to over 100 degrees – is there more violence than almost anywhere else in the world? Why does Colombia have the oldest guerrilla fighter on the planet, Manuel Marulanda Vélez, also known as “Tirofijo”, commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who has spent the last fifty years in arms? Why, at the northern extremity of South America, listed as one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, are there daily massacres, selective assassinations, massive human displacement, the destruction and seizure of cities, towns, and populations at the hands of paramilitaries, guerillas, and the regular army? Where did this violence come from? Why does it continue? How does it manifest itself?

Origins of the Violence

As in many countries, the development of Colombia as a nation was characterized by violence. For various reasons, however, Colombia has been unable to overcome that violence. Its origins can be traced back to the period of the bloody conquest of the Americas in the 16th century. The area that is now Colombia was occupied by a variety of autonomous and independent indigenous communities that were distinct from the two great precolombian empires. The Aztec of Central and North America; and the Inca, whose axis lay in what is now Peru, both possessed centralized, vertical and hierarchical governments. The conquest of these empires also took its bloody course, but once the rulers had submitted, it was easier to dominate the populace. In Colombia it became necessary to conquer and reconquer, with excessive cruelty and continuous bloodshed, each and every indigenous community on an individual basis(1). Later came the bloody wars of independence, which installed in power a class of creole leaders, bound to their own interests rather than those of society, and immersed in internal feuds that have produced dozens of civil wars throughout the country’s barely 200 years of independence. Colombia is an explosive combination: the factions of a rapacious leadership that is unconcerned with the country and that has gone unrelieved for 200 years exist alongside independent, autonomous, and rebellious factions.

Recent Violence

The more recent origins of violence date from the 1950s, when fighting between the two traditional parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, led to egregious bloodshed in the countryside and in the cities, and culminated in the assassination of political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who embodied, for the first time ever, the alternative of popular power. Radicalized liberal guerrillas, who did not believe in the peace offered by the traditional sectors of power, established the first leftist guerrilla organization, the FARC. Later, in the sixties and seventies, other guerrilla groups arose. In the eighties drug traffickers, allied with urban and rural business interests and the regular forces of the state, gave birth to the first right-wing paramilitary groups. The paramilitaries seek to combat the guerrillas and to capture their zones of influence, without even a thought for the methods used in order to maintain the political and social status quo.

What Colombia endures today is a conflict whose protagonists are paramilitaries, guerrillas, and the state armed forces. Caught in the middle is a civil population that is disrespected, manipulated, and threatened by all the parties involved. The conflict is funded through drug trafficking, which corrupts everything it touches. Such are the paradoxes of life that the coca leaf, which for the indigenous people of South America was part of a fundamental ritual, in the 19th century was processed by westerners into cocaine, the same product which under the current conditions, because it is illegal, reaps the greatest profits possible on the international market. Colombia is the world’s largest producer of illegal drugs. It is a country where social inequalities, intolerance, and drug trafficking money have created a deinstitutionalized nation where power is the preserve of those with guns and money; as long as these drugs are illegal, the war in Colombia will be difficult to end, since the resources they contribute to the men with guns are almost inexhaustible. The northern coast is controlled by the paramilitaries; in the south of the country the guerillas have the greatest influence; in the center these two powers meet with the central government. Although all the parties involved are bloodthirsty and authoritarian, the paramilitaries are the cruelest and the most violent: they are best known for massacres in which they dismember (still living) peasants with electric chainsaws in the central square of a village, in front of everyone, in order to increase the terror of their action.

The Work and the Author

Humberto Dorado, author of The Keening, is a multifaceted creator of stories and scripts typified by their humor and sarcasm. But in this work for the stage, drama takes the place of humor. Dorado, like other artists in his country, feels that violence exists not only in the countryside but also in the intimacy of daily life, and that its echoes strike a chord among those who – in Colombia and in other countries – are unable to live in peace while abuse and injustice are the daily bread of those around them. In this instance, art is performing the role of speaking the unspeakable and naming those who cannot be named, of pointing the finger at (social) protagonists, of touching the prohibited, in order to narrate war and terror, perhaps with the end of exorcizing them.

1. For a broad vision of the conquest of this region see Ursúa, a historical novel by the poet William Ospina (Alfaragua, 2005).

Guillermo Gonzáles Uribe is a Colombian journalist and editor and the director of Número magazine.4-13