Category: Experience

Waiting for the train from Aguas Calientes to Ollantaytambo, I asked Daniel how to see and write in terms of affect. Of course it’s important to talk about ideology. But I think I think too much in categories and broad concepts and don’t pay enough attention to how bodies move and are affected by other bodies. I said my writing has been too detached. I’ve been afraid to fuck up. Daniel said I should pay attention to the moments of intensity.

I journal every night in bullet points recounting the day’s events. At the very least a single line, but sometimes I write a few pages. If there’s something I need to flesh out or give more detail I linger on it. I scanned through my journal this past week and found no moments that screamed out at me. Until I noticed something I’ve noted down almost every day here: people confronting me or yelling at me in the street about my race. I feel disgusted whenever I hear the word race but it just feels more honest than the word ethnicity. Ethnicity is race in the language of tolerance. And tolerance is at best a conditional acceptance of difference. Cleansed, aestheticized difference. Difference kneeling in its right place. Ethnicity is not just “cultural,” it is irreducibly political. 

I’ve been bothered by people yelling things like “Chino!” and “Japonés!” here before but I’ve never really been mad. I assumed it was just a crude recognition of difference. One of my favourite race moments was when I was eating chaufa de carne at one of my favourite stands in the Pisac market and the owner, Dina, poked me: “Better than your country, right?” I asked her: “What is my country?” She didn’t reply. But she was right. It was among the best I’d had.

The worst moment was probably in Aguas Calientes. As it’s primarily a tourist town for Macchu Picchu, there are already so many people in the streets and in front of restaurants harassing people and trying to get business. One day a man stopped me as I was leaving the market to ask me where I was from. When I said I was from Canada he refused to accept it. He said: “You don’t look like a Canadian.” I asked him: “What does a Canadian look like?” No response. I gave him a friendly glare and walked off. But on the way back to the hotel a man started yelling at me in the street. I hardly remember what he was saying. It was like all the times before but more intensely aggressive and patronizing. This was the first time I wanted to yell back. I wanted to scream at him like a real righteous fucking racist. I wanted to match him and get all of our ugliness out in the open. Because if you know what it is it’s to be seen as a caricature of all the worst associations you can imagine and to see yourself as that, to become that caricature at the same time. I wanted to take away his humanity. I wanted to make him into a figurine on a shelf. I wanted him to feel on what level it hurts and on what level it works. But I didn’t turn around. I just walked away.

Yesterday after Inti Raymi I stopped at a mercado for water. A few women were chatting there, most likely the owner and her friends. One asked me where I was from: “Canada.” She made a gesture with her fingers and her eyes. “Oriental?” I let her guess a couple times until she got it right and she cheered a little like they always do. But she was very sweet. With the warmest smile, she said: “Welcome to Peru.”

Part of me likes this treatment better than back home. I often feel these impressions implicitly even when it’s unsaid. Sometimes my mom and I notice it in the way a waitress treats us. Without words, we know it’s there. I don’t know if I like pretending it’s not. It doesn’t give us a chance to speak back.

I wonder if any of you have had similar experiences here you’d like to share, and if you feel similarly about them?

A couple days ago, standing upon Sacsayhuamán overlooking Cusco, stretching my eyes to the clouds in the distance, I felt awake in a certain way for the first time in a long time. I was on top of the distant mountains I looked to and overcome with strong sensory impressions like those I experienced all the time when I was little. Everything was whole. I felt myself pulled to the sky by a thread running through my spine and the top of my head. I said I could stand tall because there was no ceiling above me—Jasmine said it because I was not surrounded by tall buildings. 

I wanted to return the next day, so I got a full sleep and prepared. However, I had the most terrible stomach issues. I thought I could thug it out, but eventually, I could only walk a few steps in the sun before I had to stop and rest until my stomach settled. During these breaks, I meditated, took deep breaths, and was approached by tour guides and people selling horse adventures. Thankfully, I was supported by a miracle crew who looked after me along the way—Grace, Jasmine, and later Emma, who brought me a roll of t.p. and a banana. 

The second day inspired an old idea in me: perhaps just as much as it was the space itself that inspired awe in me, it was the me that came to it: fueled by an alpaca burger, but not yet feeling the wrath of what was probably the previous night’s shawarma. If my experience of Sacsayhuamán was only like the second day, I would not have been able to take in its beauty. However, the second day allowed me to pay a particular kind of attention too. My sickness forced me to not hurry by with a “no, gracias” and stop and consider the tour salesmen’s offers, and think about where they were coming from—I learned one man lived in a community of 150 families with 80 horses, just over the hill.

So how to be critical of our experiences? With a great meal and a beautiful sleep, surrounded by my lovely classmates, I might come to the Corpus Christi festival, for example, uncritically in awe of the costumes, the dancing and excitement in the air. However, having read from Carolyn Dean’s Inka Bodies, I might be able to identify how the festival’s representations of Indigeneity serve as an other to be continually symbolically triumphed over by both Christ and the Spanish conquest. So I think there is a balance—to be able to embrace things and feel them wholly, and to reflect and be critical. I want to strengthen my ability to critically interrogate spaces, events and feelings when need be. One way could be to take a step back and reflect on the conditions of your experience. You can find this in a book. You can also find this in your last meal. Of course what you find in the past is irreducibly tied to your current state. I want to hear about how you all have managed to negotiate this balance.

Twenty students are racing through central Lima at night. The streets are packed with people, couples, children, cars, horns blaring, the smell of burnt corn, sugar, fried chicken, garbage. The sweating basement of the seafood restaurant I used to work at, sometimes cigarette smoke, some respite. Couples are laying down in the park without blankets holding each other on sparse and immoderately green grass from an excess of moisture not a lack. Twenty metres in every direction the thick mist takes on the character of the whole: boiling orange and green, green light. I keep thinking, the city is on fire, the city is on fire.

Jon, our pirate captain, is leading the charge, torn leather jacket and ponytail, waving his flag in the air for all to hurry. I watch our caring TA at the back of the pack, making sure none are left behind. I see my classmates dive across the street in flocks, ready for anything. I hear Jon scream:
and hurriedly jot it down on my phone as I hobble after them. I tell Jon I’ve never been to a city like this before. He says: where are you from? Vancouver. He laughs. Vancouver is not a city! Vancouver is a town pretending to be a city! Right then I had the crazy feeling I didn’t know if I’d ever been to a real city before.

All the night my nose is lightly running and when I sit my temperature fevers. I should be more concerned about spreading whatever I have to other people. I justify that it just feels like a personal fever, something that I brought upon myself and is only my duty to deal with. Yet it feels just like the city. My labour adjusting to the city. And the city is beautiful.

I wonder if you all feel the same?