Projects 2013 > Quipu: Living Documentary > Journal
Karen Tucker and I travelled to London on Friday to meet up with Chaka at the Centre for Creative Collaboration. We spent a day working on the scripts for the Quipu phone line, which is being tested as I write by our promotoras/storyhunters in Peru. One of our principal goals is to make the phone line flexible and accessible enough for our participants to own the structure and share with us the construction of a narrative. Here, we all want to avoid casting our participants as purely passive victims of the sterilization programme: the quipu project wants to find a way around the stories of victimhood that tend to characterise provincial Peruvian women when they appear in the national or global media. We reflected a lot on the advice given to us by Sandra Gaudenzi, which she has blogged about here.
On the train on the way back to Bristol I finished reading Nando Parrado's Miracle in the Andes (2007). For the first time in ages I cried reading a book (sorry, quiet coach train passengers, thanks for your sympathetic glances!) It tells the story of how story-telling, luck, love, rugby and resilience can overcome victimhood even when there seems no way out.
I never watched the film Alive (1993, directed by Frank Marshall), nor read Piers Paul Read's book (1974) of the same name, on which the film was based, about the plane that crashed in the Andes in 1972 as it carried a Uruguayan rugby team to Chile. The sixteen men who survived the crash and over two months in the Andes did so, famously, by eating human flesh. Eventually two of them, including Parrado, climbed and walked out of the Andes to alert rescuers. As I say, this subject did not appeal. I hate flying because I am consumed by fear of crashing into mountains. I hate rugby because it isn't football, and I went to a grammar school that played a game I didn't care for instead of the sport I was obsessed with.
So Alive was never for me. I picked up Parrado's book now because I am working on a research project on the legacies of British sporting endeavours in South America, the football clubs, golf clubs and rugby clubs which were founded from the end of the nineteenth century. Parrado argues that it was the noble spirit of rugby, the teamwork, sacrifice and trust that were imbued in him and his teammates by the Old Christian brothers who taught them, which enabled them to survive. On reflection I'm not convinced it was the rugby that saved them, and I don't think Parrado's text holds this out either: the principal theme is a personal will to survive inspired by love of family not friends, though friends and family mesh into one large network of loved ones whose memories inspire the survivors.
The book, and the motivational speeches that the author has given around the world drawing on its material, moved me, and has moved many people. As I read it, I kept on thinking about our quipu project, whose subject matter, on first glance, couldn't be more different. In the quipu project, we are looking to use new digital technology to create participatory narratives about the forced sterilisation programmes that affected 300,000 people in Peru in the 1990s. One of our principal challenges has been to overcome projecting a sense of perpetual victim hood on to the indigenous women. But what Parrado's book and the quipu project share is an emphasis on the emancipatory power of story-telling, of ownership of a story, which can begin to combat the most terrible events, disadvantages and exploitations.
We know that just telling a story can't change the world on its own. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists in Peru have recognised the limits of the massive National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), which collected thousands of testimonies about the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s. (The stories of those affected by the sterilization programme were not prioritised by the CVR). A massive legacy of impunity remains. Legal cases based on those stories frequently collapse because of inscrutable legal minutae. Disillusion and pessimism is a temptation.
The rugby players stranded after their plane crashed seemed to have no escape option, and could have been tempted to embrace victimhood. What was the point of exerting themselves further when all the odds were stacked against them? But sometimes we can overcome the odds. Sharing our stories, and spreading knowledge about our situation, can be the first step towards changing our status. The quipu project won't just tell you a story so you can feel sorry for the victims of a misguided health programme: it will inspire you with the power of story-telling as a form of resilience.
Posted by Matthew Brown