Traumatic States: Gendered Violence, Suffering, and Care in Chile

4. Entanglements of Violence and Individualized "Cures"

89 C h A P t e r 4 Entanglements of Violence and Individualized “Cures” When I arrived into this world, they received me without any guarantee of love or attention. Nobody celebrated my arrival. I am an unwanted being, and everything announced that this world for me would be about abandonment, lack of affection, solitude, insecurity, and orphanhood. —Josefina’s diary “My Life and My Experiences, Marked by the Cruelty of My Destiny” I met Josefina in 2003 at Family Care during the weekly group therapy sessions that I observed there for six months, the full course of the sessions . She was then around forty-seven years old and had been married for thirty-four years to a man more than a decade her senior. Josefina was always meticulously dressed, with perfectly drawn makeup and neat, manicured, blondish hair. Often, especially as a child, people had admired her complexion for being “so white.” She expressed pride in her pale complexion, a phenotypic categorization often associated with social capital in Chilean society. She also talked proudly about her overall natural beauty and her aged but remarkably unwrinkled skin. She explained to me why she appeared to be younger than she was: “This is how I am naturally. I’ve never used any kind of cream.” In addition to attending the group therapy sessions, I had the opportunity to get to know Josefina through frequent one-on-one conversations and several interviews I conducted with her in 2003. After some time, Josefina shared her diary, which she had entitled “My Life and My Experiences , Marked by the Cruelty of My Destiny,” with me, an act of great trust. I interviewed her again in 2009, when she revealed a more po- 90 Traumatic States litically oriented analysis of her suffering. From my first meeting with Josefina until the last time I talked with her in 2009, she expressed a great desire to be heard and for people to act upon her suffering. Josefina’s mother had abandoned her as a baby, and Josefina described her with disdain as a woman who was “illiterate” and “without feelings.” Friends of the family adopted Josefina, but when she was around six years old her adoptive mother fell ill and her adoptive father began having trouble at work. From there, Josefina’s memories were filled with violations. Josefina remembered that when she was seven years old an older man seduced her with candy and then raped her. She painfully recounted that she had no social networks in which to seek refuge. She was ridiculed at school for her old clothing and lack of proper materials—in essence, for her poverty. Eventually, Josefina was sent to live with an “aunt and uncle” who did away with her birth name and gave her a “new” name. “I felt a lot of pain in my soul,” Josefina told me. Everything made me vomit. . . . All the time she made me do more work and harmed me physically. She gave me three fractures in my head and left me unconscious. She made me get up at 6 a.m. and go to bed at 11 p.m. . . . I told God I didn’t want to be in this world. . . . It was impossible for me to understand why I was trapped in a pained soul, without having sinned. I always asked God to take me because it wasn’t right to live without love, without affection, a childhood destroyed, that nothing could give back. Josefina’s was an arranged marriage. Her husband’s brutal sexual violence against her on their wedding night was the beginning of a lifetime of suffering she spent with him. “I bled for more than a year,” she told me. “Because every time I was with him—because he was a twenty-three-year-old man, and I, twelve years old—I bled. I always bled.” Josefina soon found herself pregnant twice in rapid succession. During her first pregnancy Josefina did not receive “adequate nutrition ,” and her very young adolescent body “had to handle all of that.” Entanglements of Violence 91 Furthermore, she said, her scars from when she had been sexually abused as a child “never healed.” She expressed how she felt: I suffered so much pain in my soul because I didn’t have anyone. I was so sad not to have a mother, sisters and brothers, not a single family member, and without...