7 minute read
Temporality and Trauma
Jesús Cossio (Peruvian, b. 1974). Pages from Barbarie—Cómics sobre la violencia política 1985–1990, 2013. Digital
In Barbarie: Comics about the Political Violence in Peru, 19851990, Jesús Cossio documents three massacres perpetrated by the Peruvian army, and the guerrilla groups Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and Tupac Amaru, during the first presidency of Alan Garcia. These comics are what he calls a “reconstruction of cases” (7, intro), based on the testimonies collected by human rights organizations in the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Barbarie is divided in three parts—each exploring the events around a massacre in moving and sometimes disturbing detail—as well as an Author’s Note and an Epilogue. In the Epilogue, two black pages frame a photograph and text that states how legal procedures against those responsible for human right violations were systematically dismissed. The photograph shows a group of people from Accomarca, including some whose assassinations are represented in the book. The presence of the victims’ photographic images at the end of the book reminds us that the preceding graphic narratives represent real experiences, and are intended not merely as descriptive accounts of what happened, but as performative denunciations of the guilty, and as part of an ongoing effort to seek justice. Cossio’s techniques are worthy of close reading. Consider, for example, page 20, from the narrative of the first massacre represented in the book. This event, which took place in 1985, is known as “The Murders of Pucayacu II.” In previous pages we witness the nine civilians being kidnapped by agents of the Peruvian state, taken to a military base in Castropampa, tortured, and then driven to an unpopulated area in the town of Pucayacu. This page, therefore, illustrates the horrific culmination of a long process that has already implicated the state machinery of violence, while denouncing specific perpetrators. The panels are organized in three tiers from top to bottom, and read from left to right. The description of the massacre starts with three panels in which a blindfolded person is first grabbed by a large hand in the foreground, then dragged and finally thrown from a truck. The three panels are arranged in a zigzag, an arrangement that is itself suggestive of movement. The three panels are set into one larger panel which combines the image of a dark sky and the screams of the victim. The image of the sky and the cries of pain work visually and figuratively as the literal background and frame of the action. This creates a contrast with the linear sequence of events in the inset panels; time thus appears to be suspended, even as the brutal actions unfold. The temporality of the sequence is accelerated in the second tier, which squeezes seven panels tightly together, even as the edges of the first and seventh panel intrude into the area of the external white frame of the page; the effect is to bring this middle tier closer to the reader. Each panel has the word “bang” running along the top: the sound of a single shot, one for each victim (we learn in previous pages that of the nine kidnapped people, two were girls rescued by their schoolteacher). Underneath the sound effect, Cossio has drawn a series of fragmentary close-ups: alternating between glimpses of the victims and the gun and shells that killed them. This abrupt alternation resonantly conveys the rapid and perverse interaction between victims and perpetrators in the moment of the slaughter, and visually echoes that rapid report of an automatic weapon.
The third and last tier is an expansive single panel—the direct opposite of the prior tier in formal terms—portraying the group of perpetrators. In the foreground stands a uniformed man with a gun still smoking in his hand; he blames the victims, while his colleague gives directions for the illegal burial. Behind them are civilian accomplices with shovels, and a more shadowy group of onlookers, lost in the dark landscape. Since the assassins and accomplices are looking towards us, as readers, we are placed in the same position of those murdered: the gun is pointing at us; we are those “terrucos de mierda”—common citizens executed for being a terrorist (terruco, a slang for the word terrorist(a), was used specifically in the context of the armed conflict in Peru). The reader in this last panel is therefore not only witness to the slaughter, but asked to identify imaginatively with the victims. Though the first tier includes the voice of a victim, in the last we hear only the voice of the perpetrators. This page thus reconstructs and fixes in our memory a precise moment of an extreme abuse of power. All that is left are cadavers. It is worth mentioning that page 20, placed on the left side of the book, is facing a page that contains a striking full-page panel that illustrates the burial. Though the previous page avoids the direct representation of the slaughter, on page 21 we have an aerial view of the dismembered corpses, cast on top of one another, while two shovels throw dirt on the bodies. This page is wordless and itself has the effect of leaving one speechless.
Page 22 then depicts in three tiers the moment in which an indigenous couple finds the illegal burial. Introduced with the contextual information “one month later,” the first tier has three panels that first depict a couple walking in nature while the woman tries to convince the man that she has seen something. Their silhouettes walk down a hill, as she observes that the ground is disturbed. In the last panel of the tier, in the foreground, both horrified faces are rendered in the moment of discovery. The middle tier of the page is then taken up with a page-wide panel depicting what the couple is witnessing (in a classic comics variation on what film scholars call a “reverse shot”): parts of bodies (tied hands, a fragment of a head) emerging from the ground. The tier of the page has two panels: a text box with specific information of the case (the date of the exhumation of the bodies, participants, and details concerning the legal proceedings); and a close-up on the feet and hands of someone dragging the bodies out of the grave. The first and last tiers are made up of smaller panels than the large middle tier, which reaches to the gutter of the whole page. The superimposition of first and third tiers over the middle panel gives a recessive depth to that central image, conveying at once the effort to bury the victims and also their ghastly resurfacing—their shallow grave looms behind the scene as a whole. This superimposition of first and third panels over the middle section gives a depth to the whole page, where the bodies, in the background, are spectral presences that, in time and space, surround and haunt the events.
Page 76 is the last illustration of the book and of the last massacre depicted, “Matanza de los Penales” (The Prison Massacres), that took place in 1986. In previous pages, we witness riots in three different prisons of Peru, where “senderistas” (Shining Path militants) and civilians accused of being terrorists attempt to negotiate with the government. We also witness how in these events more than two hundred people were killed, many of them previously tortured. This last page is composed of two big panels, ordered in top to bottom reading, where the first is a zoom-in of the second. The first panel is the image of the bombarded and destroyed prison and the second, the island where one of the prisons was located, seen from a great distance. We know that the second image is the zoom-out of the first because the long plume of smoke that emanates from the ruins serves as a common line, as a literal and figurative repetition. A series of white boxes that contain information about the event accompany the images, stressing specifically the lack of justice and impunity of those responsible for human right violations, including the president, Alan Garcia. If the smoke in the first image is a thick pillar that comes from the bombarded prison where hundreds of cadavers are burning, in the second there seems to be a crack in the page, an analogy of a broader Peruvian landscape.
