Historia como fantología: Vida onírica, cantos mortuorios y el deber para con los espectros en Bojayá, Chocó

Abstract

Do dreams take place in history? Or are they phenomena that take place outside history, on the margins of historical sense and truth? This paper has to do with dreams that take place in the space of the uncanny, where the familiar becomes menacing (according to Freud’s definition) and from out of which memories of death and violence haunt the present. These dreams constitute a singular history, a spectral history or hauntology, whose logic does not obey the chronological development of historical time, but the present’s indebtedness to justice and the remembrance of the dead. I develop this idea from my fieldwork in Bojayá, Chocó, in 2016 and 2017, with Grupo Cantadoras de Pogue[Group of female singers of Pogue], and the testimonies of Cira Pino, an alabadorato whom the art of singing was taught by the souls who visit her in dreams. Alabaosare funerary songs that guide the deceased to the land of their ancestors. After the massacre of Bojayá, perpetrated by the FARC guerrillas in the town of Bellavista in May 2, 2002, alabaoshave become songs of denunciation and resistance. This opens an unprecedented memory-work in Afro Colombian communities in Chocó, through which they return to the place of the souls to find it transformed into an ominous space, inhabited not only by tradition and their ancestors, but also by the broken souls and bodies of those that have died untimely. I conclude by exploring the ethical dimension of this spectral history and its relationship to justice.