The Walls Are Closing In

Why does the familiar feel so alien?

On the last day of filming in Tamesis, a tiny rural village high in the Colombian Andes, a man hung himself.

We had just finished a 12 hour filming day, travelling a few hours to the closest mining town where we had to be escorted in and out for our own safety. Pulling up to our makeshift home, in which we were the first ever foreigners to stay, we frowned at the police cars and motorbikes spilling over the driveway onto the street. Frankly, my first thought was that we had been robbed.

Then we saw the owner of the hotel weeping, his arm draped around the friend he would sit and smoke with every day at reception. Astrid, our organisational host who had become our friend over our two weeks there, leapt out of the tuk-tuk to question the police and comfort the man. We greeted him softly as we walked past, heading for our cabin, gazing at the police swarming around a neighbouring cabin. The door was open, and there hung the body of a man who had checked in some days ago. Around him, police officers gathered, solemnly discussing. For some reason, they had not cut him down.

The last time I saw a dead body was in the hospital last year with my grandmother. She passed in her sleep at the age of 94, surrounded by her descendants. We spent some time with her after she had died, occasionally stroking her hair, sometimes still talking to her. I studied the stillness of her body, trying to find a physical distinction between a living body and a breathing body which would mirror the emotional distinction of a world with Grandma and a world without her. The more I looked, the more it took shape: she did not look at peace, so to speak, but gone, absent. It was as if all her weight was gathering in her spine and pulling her down, as if gravity had a stronger hold on her. The absence of animation was the distinction, just as my life from that moment would be distinguished by the lack of her animated presence. And yet, despite that, her body did not feel out of place. This new weight I perceived, this tugging towards Earth’s own womb, made her presence, then, an absence of life, not an absence in its entirety, not a shapeless nothingness. I suddenly realised I was not alienated by my grandmother’s dead body, nor her death at all. She felt then, and still feels now, available to me as my grandmother because while I loved her animated presence it was not the reason that I loved her. There was no reason. This is simply what we do with the breath in our lungs and the muscles in our bodies and the blood in our veins: We love.

Seeing the body of the dead man hanging in his cabin, I felt a quiet sadness for him, his family, and everyone who loses a loved one to tragedy. I felt sorry for the owner of the small property and sorry for the town more widely, whose lives are deeply entangled, as they must be in villages so remote. And while I could not understand why the police had not yet cut him down, there was a part of me that was glad to see it, and glad to see them with him, able to talk quietly without having to rush to cover him up. In that brief snapshot—the weak ceiling light in the room trickling out onto the path, the backlit bodies of officers and victim—it was impossible to say whether or not their refusal to yet cut him down was irresponsibility, laziness, disrespect, or simply procedural. But their willingness to be with him in his altered state, as shocking as the scene was, quietened me. In a way, it felt like sitting around a hospital bed with the descendants of a woman as a new heaviness settles in her body.

About 10 months before she died, my younger cousin came to stay with me for a weekend. Grandma called us on a beautiful summer afternoon as we were enjoying watching the sun stream through the soft motes filtering the air, giggling. She was delighted by capturing two granddaughters in a single phone call.

After she hung up, I said to my cousin: “Grandma’s going to die soon.”
My cousin shook her head. “Why do you have to do that?”
I smiled. “I don’t want to pretend that she won’t, and I don’t want to pretend that her death is a problem. Everyone dies. I don’t know why we don’t talk about it.”
”All right,” she said, gazing at me. “All right, let’s try. Let’s talk about it.”

So we talked about it: When it could happen, how it may feel, how it would change our family. We talked about her long life and strong health and all the things that may die with her. We talked about the things unsaid. We talked about how she cared for us. We talked about love. We loved.

Over the 12 months I meditated on my grandmother’s death, up until the day she left us, I felt closer to her. On our last birthday, which we share, we talked about her death. With that wisdom of hers which only ever came out of the quiet, she expressed her concerns about her death, and none of them were about her. I had been thinking about them too and so we could talk frankly and sweetly. It was our last proper conversation and I was glad to have had it. I was glad to talk to her about her death and tell her I knew it was coming and hear she knew it was coming and be together in its presence. We were not alienated by her imminent departure. We were warmed by it, just by virtue of our togetherness.

One year later, on my first birthday without her, I spent 14 hours in rural Colombia interviewing and filming a network of farmers which is pushing back one of the largest mining companies in the world. Had she been alive, I would have called her at the end of the day and she would have interrogated me about my safety. Because she is no longer here, I now have to interrogate that myself. And so, while she may not be here, she is with me; and so, while she did not celebrate another birthday, I still celebrated mine with her.

I have been thinking deeply on alienation and intimacy over the past few months of travelling around Latin America for Planet: Coordinate, about experiences which feel part of the fabric of my life and others that are slippery. I have been wondering why a man hanging himself in a neighbouring cabin in a rural village, and the memory of his body, feels like something I want to weave into my life, while ending up in a mountainous base camp and realising that every single other hiker was European/American is something which inspired a subtle physical repulsion. There are experiences I have leaned into and others I have shrunk back from. And it is the experiences greased with familiarity which have been the most alienating.

The first few weeks in Colombia, although at times difficult, were engulfing in their wonder. Whether it was bus conductors doubling as a makeshift postal system or managing to muddle through a conversation with someone despite neither of us sharing a word of each other’s tongue, everything felt very solid and real, as if there was space to step into, room to share, common ground under our feet. Even as we quickly learned customs which were unfamiliar, there was that sense of things making sense, that experience of roughness, of friction, of worlds colliding which give you something to hold onto, to get a grip on. There was an ease which accompanied our time there because there was a profound sense of being somewhere, not just anywhere; of uniqueness which gave it shape and rhythm and allowed us to become a part of it.

The first time that sense went away was during a celebration for an indigenous nation’s new year in the South of the country. We’d been invited to attend with friends, and spent the early morning filming a family preparing themselves for the long parade down the street. With customary generosity, the parade is open to everyone, and many Colombians gather along the pavements watching as the indigenous men, women and children walk past playing drums and flutes whittled with their own hands. The parade converges after different families have spent the morning visiting their neighbours, entering into low, wide rooms and playing music and dancing together. We were grateful for the invitation to join, and hung back in corners, attempting the flute and banging the drum we’d been gifted for the day. With permission, we kept filming, and tried to not take up any more space than we were given.

I was smiling and dancing in one of the corners, happily banging away on the drum, amazed at how lucky we were, when, out of nowhere, a few more people entered. They surprised me. They looked like me: hiking gear, rucksacks, white skin. They didn’t have instruments but bopped along in the background, watching the two families dance. A hint of disquiet threatened in my breast, but I hushed it: not my celebration, not my business.

But as the morning went on, more and more of the hiker-cum-hippy appeared, some solitary, many in groups. Some wore features of the nation’s culture, such as the purple band girls and women sport around their middle which is supposed to represent and celebrate their fertility and connection to Earth’s own life-making magic. Eventually, as we gathered for the large parade, I was barely looking at the celebrations but instead morbidly curious and repulsed by the growing clusters of white people joining in, non-Colombians who had travelled into the region for this famous festival. Gradually, the hikers were outnumbered by the hippies, dressed in fashionably worn and tattered clothes, expensive sandals, and quirky jewellery. Many of them had painted their faces in a parody of indigenous cultures. Lots of them boasted dreadlocks and some of them were barefoot. What I found particularly sordid was how, more often than not, they positioned themselves in the centre of the parade, away from the pavement where people had gathered to bear witness.

I couldn’t keep up the dancing and the beating. I was mortified and suddenly acutely aware of how I looked, who I most closely resembled in this crowd. Rapidly, my feeling shifted from one of grateful guest to alien spectator. The familiarity of these characters who have spread all over the world in their willingness to consume other cultures not only made me feel out of place, but made the whole experience feel out of place: I couldn’t find where I was because I could have been anywhere, because the signifiers of anywhere were with us in the crowd. I became dislocated from where I was, from when I was, because the friction that arises from worlds colliding became a slippery varnish which washes particularities into familiar certainties. The possibility of lives crossing became a distilled product to be consumed: peace signs for the ‘gram.

It wasn’t the people themselves, the hippies who I have no doubt think they’re engaging in harmless, if not celebratory behaviour. While I think the naiveté of that glib assumption is irresponsible, I don’t begrudge the individuals so to speak. But the experience of being around them was deeply uncomfortable. And that was triggered time and time again over the coming months as we had to leave behind rural communities and venture into well-trodden territories. The first time I saw the McDonalds golden arches, I felt that same repulsion and dislocation. Same again when we reached an area Uber operated in. My stomach sank when we reached a capital city and a hotel tried to scam us out of money—there are so many contexts in which I don’t mind being fleeced and expect someone to try their luck eking more money out of a foreigner, but I want it to be the fruit-seller or the tuk-tuk driver, not the manager representing a corporation. In these cases, what saddened me was very similar to the experience of the parade: Not only was a place suddenly undefined by the presence of these things but my relationship to it became defined: tourist.

In these places, where globalisation has taken hold and people are increasingly more dependent on invisible markets than each other, there was very little feeling of possibility. I felt like I was on a slip and slide with only one exit, everything rushing past too fast to see. I felt like I was seen as a resource to extract and that I was expected to engage with this place as a series of experiences to mine. The beauty, wonder and animation of Life was not on off here. Rather, a curated consumption experience, blunted into homogeneity in order to meet everyone’s standards.

The busyness and insistence of these places felt alienating in a way my grandmother’s death, or my neighbour’s death, never did. And it was because the busyness and insistence was lifeless in a place which should have been bursting with Life: full of chaos and possibility and friction and intimacy. Instead, my passage was varnished, a flume through which I rushed, looking out as if through a one-way mirror. And I was expected to enjoy it, to extract it and consume it and shit it out as social media posts and so every day instead I shrank back from the gripless-ness, from the definition attached to me, and the anywhere-ness of place. It was like the Earth had lost her magnetic poles. I couldn’t orient myself. It was all too familiar, too European, so far from Europe. It was uncanny.

We do not describe the dead as uncanny because they feel different. It is that which apes sameness which feels wrong, like waxworks dolls of real people. It is the sense of familiarity evoked by something incorrect, wrong, false or different which triggers a wary instinct deep inside. Things that are different should feel different. Grabbing a bite to eat in Latin America should feel different than in Europe. Buying clothes should feel different. So should speaking to a taxi driver or a receptionist or just someone on the street. When these things begin to take on an eerily familiar shape, it’s unsettling rather than comforting. It feels like the walls closing in. It feels like the only way to engage in the world is through a pattern of extraction and consumption, slipping and sliding all the way to the grave until we wonder what the point of it all ever was.

Repeating patterns of consumptive relationships greases the wheels for financial markets to make a fortune out of turning the experience of being alive into something you have to buy an admission ticket for: a waterpark stretching over what used to be forest, gleaming brightly in the sun, while people queue for up to an hour for 90 seconds of thrill, paying for the photograph at the end in which they managed to pose for the camera. It’s not too long ago we would have all found this alienating, yet now it is the model for how we live our lives and how we orient towards the world: not in it, but facing outward, at some faceless audience, as if the stars themselves care for our presentation.

My grandmother was horrified by the way the world was going. She actively feared for her grandchildren, seeing the global walls closing in. That man killed himself, we heard before we left, because his own walls were closing in.

The walls are closing in and yet, everywhere, people are queuing to take photos with the graffiti. They seem to know where they are and yet I can’t find us, I can’t find us anywhere.

How many of us want to get out but have nowhere to go?

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