Church, Sunday and the universe

I moved to Colombia and went to church on a Sunday.

I'm holier than thou in the sixth row of pews, wiping my brow, sitting in a slick pool of my own sweaty prayers. I'm sensing again what this scene reminds me of--my colleagues here have started to ignore how often I say it, but I've been quietly insisting that everything here seems a derivation of an alien world, seems taken from another moment, another city; other realms far away from here.

This church, is it the church of Tierra Magna or is it the old cathedral in my mother's home town Elblag. Are these murmerering Catholics dark-haired or light, Polish or Colombiano, green-eyed or brown? Blancos, negros; rich or poor; inside the walled city, inside los edificios grandes or rinsing themselves in ocean water in the shadows of those building in the shadows of the walls of the walled city. Am I walking through Bogota or that cold, grey business district of Minato-ku, Tokyo. Why do I feel like I'm floating on an island of Hispaniola racism and those familiarly fried platanos from this land mass very firmly connected to the continent...and how come everything I note here in Cartagena catches me in a squinty-eyed memory-seeking mood like I've seen this before somewhere else?

 The women are Haitian (they're not though), distrusting me my glittering brown hair and arrogant boastfully sunburnt skin; their neighors and husbands validating my legs and my flaws over theirs (This is Istanbul, it's Dakar, it's Harlem). I want to comfort them, tell them their boyfriends and brothers don't actually love me--forget me, actually, rapidly, because my blue eyes hover in a sea of blue-eyed money, not unique.

 It is a trick, a riddle; it's an optical illusion I am participating in.

 But it isn't actually a place that reminds me of past homes and different lives; it's a city and a country on the receiving end of a mixed history. Of colonization and the Spanish, and revolutions turned terror and a country of natural resources--waterfalls and coasts and whales and coal mines and narcotics, all a result of the recursos curse. It's mired in contradictions and of complexity and for that reason it takes me more than a day, more than a week to adjust and to focus on Colombia as itself and not as a reminder of the million histories I have seen elsewhere. Colombia, actually, is unique in the way that so many different national-identity narratives exist here. And Cartagena is unique because it houses these narratives as neighbors. The grotesquely rich adjacent to the vulnerable poor, their houses leaning on one another; all Cartageneros. Some look Spanish, some look like me--I couldn't pass in Japan the way I do here, or Senegal. Black communities are poor communities. One of the professors in Los Andes said that he didn't know a single black student in the university in Bogota. I know what that means: racial, social infrastructures are in place, another kind of resource curse--and while I've seen it everywhere else, it's my job if I am going to do good work for Granitos de Paz, the foundation I'm working for, to disengage from the still life portrait that Cartagena seems to be and sells itself as.

 And if I am not very careful, Cartagena can be just a beautiful tourist town or just the most socially inequitable town in Colombia; either description nullifies it into a photo of a photo. In its old city center, a hub of touristy activity, the buildings seem perfectly aged. Sculpted to perfect dilapidation, intentional. Meanwhile, on the drive to the poorest barrio in Cartagena, Rafael Nunez, I'm passing twenty story apartment buildings reserved for tourists here on their month vacation. (The beach is outside their window, but the second or third floors hold a private pool).

 It would be dangerous to sit nostalgic in this country, or to oversimplify Cartagena and to only realize after my wallet is gone or my time spent, wasted on a beach, or sheltered in a hostel, or my life 'napped by the paramilitares (!) or my energies focused on creating resources that already exist across the lot in the other neighborhood...that this place was very present this whole time and that there was a network connection I hadn't wired myself into--that I'd missed everything...because the half-truth without the other half makes it un-true.

 The city invites me to do it. To see one circuit and ignore the other.




 I do not take the baptism.

 I cross myself, an atheist, and leave the church the way I came in.