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

Prologue

1 ProloGue That wound is open until the end. That’s what he’s done to me. —Josefina, in 2003 In so far as the past is felt to continually reenter the present, time is synchronous. —Michael Jackson (2010:139) Life after Death On a late afternoon in the early fall of 2002 Luz stumbled her way from her house in a suburb of Santiago to a nearby street corner, her chest bathed in blood, a bullet lodged in her chest. Her husband had shot her at point-blank range in their bedroom, almost mortally wounding her. The doctors told her later that her survival was miraculous . “I wasn’t living,” Luz told me about her twenty-five-year marriage to her husband, as we talked over coffee in a bustling downtown Santiago café in 2009. Luz felt that her life had revolved around trying to be a good wife, a good mother, a good woman. “Chilean women are too good,” she mused. By 2009, Luz was living her life after death and recovering herself after years of abuse and repression. Her husband was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot fired directly after he attempted to murder Luz. So many women have suffered. Bruises, broken arms, broken ribs, bloody noses, knife wounds, scarred faces, gunshot wounds, burns, coma, paralysis, loss of language , depression, anxiety, brain damage, rape, damaged vaginas, sexually transmitted diseases, gushing blood, hopelessness, near-death. Purchasing himself a car and neglecting her sore tooth, using her hardearned money to buy drugs, telling her she is a slut and a whore, telling 2 Traumatic States her that without him she would die because he provides the food, constantly surveilling her every move. Pain. In 1991, the first-ever study of domestic violence in Chile confirmed that in Santiago, the capital of about five million people, 60 percent of women had suffered some form of domestic violence in their lifetimes.1 In 2002, another study confirmed the magnitude and widespread nature of women’s suffering, with 50 percent of women reporting that they had suffered domestic violence.2 The problem once thought of as limited to the intimate sphere of the family and interpersonal relationships between men and women had only recently been named “domestic violence” and called into question by the feminist movement in Chile, as it has been globally. The numbers now highlighted what many women had already lived in obscurity. The abuses and suffering are entrenched. In 2002 Luz almost became one of a multitude of women murdered by their intimate partners, but she survived to tell her story and to live again.3 Yet numbers paint a sterile picture, obscuring the broken limbs, the broken lives, the ruptured and diminished selves. They distract the vision from women’s active and continuous struggles for life after death, for recoveries in their many forms. I listened, with an ethnographer’s ear, to stories of women, like Luz, who had suffered such abuse, and paid close attention to the effects of various forms of violence on their bodies, minds, and senses of self. Pain is written onto and into their embodied minds and mindful bodies, but this is only part of the story they tell. Dead in Life: Patti Patti and I met twice in 2003 in a large and warm room, surrounded by a beautifully maintained garden full of fruit trees. The room was often used for group therapy sessions at Safe Space, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) dedicated to women’s rights and to addressing domestic violence in particular. As we walked there I noted that Patti had some difficulty moving her legs and walked in an awkward way, as though her feet didn’t move as she wanted. In one of her arms she Prologue 3 clutched a magazine close to her chest. She explained to me that it had been seven years since she had suddenly become “sick.” “I was in very bad shape, in intensive care . . . in a coma. . . . Everyone thought that I was going to go. They told my husband: ‘Unfortunately , your wife will not make it through the night. And if she does, she will be a vegetable.’” Patti smiled and told me, “So, I’m a miracle of God. . . . A real living miracle.” “Do you remember being in the hospital?” I asked, wanting to understand more about her experiences and memories of that time. “Everyone came to see me when...