THE KNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN

The two weeks I spent in Bogota felt sort of like a dream sequence in movie.

There was an overarching sense of “I know it... I know it... it's on the tip of my tongue but I can't quite remember the word;” a certain sense of deja vu. I had, indeed, seen a lot of it. My grandmother's apartment, where I was staying, was a couple of blocks away from the first apartment we owned, and my aunt's house is right next to the house were I lived most of my life in Bogota. So there were many familiar sights. But they were surrounded by a myriad of changes which, added to the fact that I had left bogota at 13 when one barely starts to learn how to get around the city, made me feel totally lost in a city full of familiar instances that seemed to be sprinkled around as if they had spilled by mistake.

It is quite strange to simultaneously know and not know something, or someone for that matter. I know my family. My very large, supportive and loving family. But most of the contact I have had with them for the past 9 years has been limited. I know all sorts of things about their lives, but I had not had a real conversation with most of them for years. This is mostly because I hear about them through my mother, who I would call almost everyday from college, and who, in turn, would call her own mother almost everyday. So there was a literal game of telephone going.

But to some extent my family does not know me as a person, they know me as an idea, as a set of accomplishments and failures (I would guess mostly accomplishments since that is what parents tend to pass on...), as a part of their family, and as such they love me. It is strange to be able to trust someone, to know that they know more about your early life than you yourself, but that who you have become is something that eludes them to an extent, something they are still discovering. Love is very strange.

I think part of the reason why the experience was so strange was that I had to rely so much on my family for everyday things. Part of the reason why I was going to Bogota was to get laser eye surgery so that I would no longer need glasses (and as an aside, I must say there is nothing more wonderful than being able to see everything right from the moment you wake up, to see every instant clearly), so during the process I had to rely a lot on people. This was a bit hard for me as I'm used to being rather independent.

Again, this was compounded by the fact that my family is somewhat overprotective (this was also a sort of familiar feeling as my lovely parents are also somewhat overprotective, but there are usually just two people rather than a whole family), and did not want me going around the city by myself. Even to go to the gym which was a block and a half from where I was staying my grandmother asked her maid to accompany and come back later and pick me up. Which made me feel like I was young girl again and was spending the summer at my grandmother's house in Giron, a small town in Santander.

The feeling of knowing and not knowing extended to my feeling of safety. I felt safe, people feel safe in their everyday, but it is a sense of safety that has been adjusted to fit within their circumstances. There is an expression in spanish, “Dar Papaya” to look for it, an abbreviation from the longer saying, “Papaya ponida, papaya partida” if you put a papaya down it will get cut. People have gotten used to living in a limited state of freedom, where they allow themselves to do certain things and not others in order to keep themselves safe and while they do this they, indeed, feel safe. This sense of limited freedom to secure oneself is something I knew. Something that I grew up with, but after being able to walk home at 3 in the morning without feeling unsafe in Williamstown, having to be walked to the gym at 6 pm felt slightly unfamiliar, and rather than making me feel safer made me feel as if I should worry about something.

Overall after two weeks I don't feel I know Bogota any better than did. That feeling of knowing and not knowing, of independence and limitation, of opposing feelings that are felt simultaneously as one, has left me wondering what Bogota could be as a strange new city, without any memories attached, and without any loving family to protect me. At the same time, I was glad to be able to spend sometime surrounded by so many people who were happy to see me and just wanted to let me know they care. People who I too discovered as people and not just family, and was happy to meet again.

Perhaps in December when I return to Bogota I will get to experience more of it. To sandwich the unknown with the knowledge of my childhood and new knowledge of the present. who knows?

THERE IS NO SEA IN BOGOTA, BUT THERE IS A BIKE ROUTE

Years ago, when someone in the US found out I was South American, he asked me if I had ever seen the Andes. “I was born in the Andes,” I replied.

Bogota envelops you. The grand metropolis that defies odds by being on a plateau 2600 meters above sea level sits in the middle of the andes surrounded by even larger mountains. Standing in the middle of the capital it is hard to know if those mountains around the city, the beautiful fortress of the chibchas, serve as a type of comforting protection or as a chocking entrapment. It is hard to know.

But that seems to be the case with most of Bogota. It is just hard to know anything except the most obvious, unimportant facts. Facts that become, to a certain point, the only abstract common experience that is shared by its diverse population, and simultaneously, the only concrete and true things that can be said about the capital. I know that Bogota is 2600 meters above sea level, because Bogota's city slogan is, “Bogota: 2600 meters closer to the stars.” It brings us pride as Bogotanos to know this unique fact about the capital of our country, yet it tells us nothing specific about our experience in the capital, it tells us nothing about Bogota itself.

A couple of years ago, for the first exercise for my video class at Williams, I made a short video of appropriated material. The starting point was Mr and Mrs Smith, and its very short, but meaningful, depiction of Bogota. In the movie, Mr Smith and Mrs Smith are both secret agents, unbeknownst to each other. They meet in Bogota, which is depicted as a jungle with helicopters flying over it as bombs explode in a midst of greens. The capital itself is little more than shacks, and for a city that is fairly cold, especially at night and in the morning, everyone is sweating a lot and wearing a ridiculously small amount of clothing. There are military men everywhere with huge machine guns reminding everyone that ,from the start of their relationship, Mr. and Mrs. Smith were in the most dangerous situation in the world.

My video mixed the images of Bogota from Mr. and Mrs. Smith with images from advertisements for Bogota made by the Bogota's Mayor's office. The ads had a basic thread, “Y tu, que sabes de Bogota?” “And you, what do you know about Bogota?” followed by beautiful images of the capital which included lots of playing children, beautiful malls, beautiful parks and cultural events, the unexpected and unrecognized beauty in Bogota. The images flashed one after the other, with dramatic music that seemed to signal forward motion.

The last set of images I used for the video was a preview for a documentary someone had posted on YouTube, Yo Soy de Bogota, where you heard several people saying the frase “I am from Bogota” and then a man speaking about the “reality” of Bogota and Colombia. He suggested that all Colombians are like brothers and sisters and that the stories about drugs and kidnapping are just stories that make us all look bad and hide the truth about Bogota and Colombia.

In class I was told by my peers that it was interesting to point out the misrepresentation of Bogota in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but they thought I had gone far too much to the other side representing Bogota as a dream-like place and thus had failed to present a true sense of Bogota. At the time, still wrapped up in the hours that it took to edit my first video, I took the criticism thinking they had a point. But now, as I prepare to return to Bogota, I cannot help but think that the whole video, more than a statement about what Bogota really is, was a question. What is Bogota, in fact what do I, after having lived there for 13 years, and then experiencing what life is like outside of Bogota for 9, actually know about the capital? Is it the beautiful images? The nice people? The most dangerous, backward place in the world?

It seems as if all I know about Bogota for sure is that Bogota, Bogota no tiene mar, Bogota no tiene mar, pero tiene ciclovia.