The Shape of a Pocket

their being indigenous and
campesinos.
After this Heriberto tells his mother that he spent the morning with the Subcomandante.
    ‘Reading big books,’ says Heriberto, and I believed that this earned him a free hand with a box of chocolate cookies. Eva was more far-sighted, and asked me if I didn’t have a book about her doll with the little red bandanna.
    The act of writing is nothing except the act of approaching the experience written about; just as, hopefully, the act of reading the written text is a comparable act of approach.
    John Berger, ibid.

    Or of distancing, Mr Berger. The writing, and above all, the reading of the written text could be an act of distancing. ‘The written word and the image,’ says my other, which to add problems paints himself, alone.
    I think that yes, that the ‘reading’ of the written word and the image could approximate the experience or distance it. And so, the photographic image of Alvaro, one of the dead combatants in Ocosingo in January 1994, returns. Alvaro returns in the photo. Alvaro with his death speaks in the photo. He says, he writes, he shows: ‘I am Alvaro, I am an indigenous, I am a soldier, I took up arms against being forgotten. Look. Listen. Something is happening in the closing of the twentieth century that is forcing us to die in order to have a voice, to be seen, to live.’ And from the photo of Alvaro dead, a far-off reader from the distance could approximate the indigenous situation in modern Mexico, NAFTA, the international forums, the economic bonanza, the first world.
    ‘Pay attention! Something is evil in the macroeconomic plans, something is not functioning in the complicated mathematical calculations that sing the successes of neoliberalism,’ says Alvaro with his death. His photo says more, his death speaks, his body on the soil of Chiapas takes voice, his head resting in a pool of blood: ‘Look! This is what the numbers and the speeches hide. Blood, cadavers, bones, lives and hopes, crushed, squeezed dry, eliminated in order to be incorporated into the indices of profit and economic growth.’
    ‘Come!’ says Alvaro. ‘Come close! Listen!’
    But Alvaro’s photo also can ‘be read’ from a distance, as a vehicle that serves to create distance in order to stay on the other side of the photo, like ‘reading’ it in a newspaper in another part of the world. ‘This did not happen here,’ says the reader of the photo, ‘this is Chiapas, Mexico, a historical accident, remedial, forgettable, and … far away.’ There are, in addition, other readers who confirm it: public announcements, economic figures, stability, peace. This is the use of the indigenous war at the end of the century, to revalue ‘peace’.
    Like a stain stands out on the object that is stained. ‘I am here and this photo happened over there, far away, small,’ says the ‘reader’ who distances himself.
    And I imagine, Mr Berger, that the final result of the relationship between the writer and the reader, through the text (‘or from the image’, insists my other self again), escapes both. Something is imposed on them, gives significance to the text, provokes one to come closer or go further away. And this ‘something’ is related to the new division of the world, with the démocratisation of death and misery, with the dictatorship of power and money, with the regionalisation of pain and despair, with the internationalisation of arrogance and the market. But it also has to do with the decision of Alvaro (and of thousands of indigenous along with him) to take up arms, to fight, to resist, to seize a voice that they were denied before, not to devalue the cost of the blood that this implies. And it also has to do with the ear and eye that are opened by Alvaro’s message, whether they see and hear it, whether they understand it, whether they draw near to him, his death, his blood that flooded the streets of a city that has always ignored him, always … until this past January the first. It also has to do with the eagle and heron, the European
campesino
who is resisting being absorbed and the Latin American indigenous who is rebelling against genocide. It has to do with the panic of the powerful, as the trembling, that is growing in its guts, no matter how strong and powerful it appears, when, without knowing, it prepares to fall …
    And it has to do with, I reiterate and salute it in this way, the letters that come from you to us, and those that, with these