The painful load we Nicaraguans carry

TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an initiative that was started in the US some 30 years ago to find people with ideas and experiences worth sharing. TED came to Nicaragua in 2011. After a careful selection process, 13 participants were chosen to speak 20 minutes in a session held this September 27. Nicarguan psychologist Martha Cabrera was one of them. Here she shares with us her contribution that night.

Martha Cabrera

I’m here to talk about love. Yes, about love, even if it doesn’t seem so from the title. I’m here to talk about the work I’ve had the privilege of doing for 17 years, work that has taught me to love Nicaragua deeply.

Marlon, Ernesto and Alba Luz are my sorrows

I want to start by opening my heart and sharing with you the hardest period of my life, when I lost three loved ones. I dedicate my words to them. My sorrows are Marlon, Ernesto and Alba Luz.

One morning in late May 1983, while studying in Leipzig, Germany, I received a package from Nicaragua. On opening it I found a newspaper clipping with a photo of Marlon Zelaya. In the note they told me he had died in combat in Río San Juan. Marlon was an architecture student, an unassuming noble boy and my family was very fond of him. We met him when he came to work in Santa Gertrudis, a coffee farm in Jinotega. The news was a huge shock because I had received a letter from him only a week before. Accepting his death was a very difficult process because I kept most of the pain inside, which affected my performance as a student. I had just finished learning German and was starting a masters in psychology.

One gray November day, a year and a half later, on opening the door to my apartment I found a telegram on the floor. A shudder went through my body. The message informed me that at dawn on the 16th my brother Ernesto had died in combat in El Venado, Río Blanco. My first thoughts were for my mother. To take in the news I walked for hours through a cold autumn drizzle that mingled with my tears. Fortunately I was able to go to Nicaragua to be with my family, to mourn together with them. Remembering Ernesto’s legacy, his generosity, his sense of humor and zest for life helped me assimilate his loss, and a couple of months later I returned to Germany to continue my studies.

When I had almost finished my doctorate, death hit us again. On December 12, 1987, one of my younger sisters, Alba Luz, was taken from us, leaving behind her two-month-old daughter Alba Lucía. Alba Luz was an irreverent sociologist who enjoyed life to the full. I immediately told my tutor, Professor Wolfgang Kessel, that I wanted to return to Nicaragua. He was against it: “If you go you won’t come back. You’ve worked hard and should finish your doctorate.” I reluctantly agreed… because I knew he was right.

A doctorate of survival

In order to survive I put my tears in cold storage. Insomnia became my companion; it was a battle to get up each morning to go to the university. I spent hours in the library in the afternoons trying to write but my mind was blank. Finishing the last chapters was like climbing a mountain because my soul was elsewhere. I finally plucked up enough courage to defend my thesis in November 1988. I didn’t get an excellent and, unlike my colleagues who had big parties, I didn’t celebrate. I was exhausted; I felt as if I had run a marathon and all I wanted to do was go back to my own country.

A post-war country
with history stuck in its throat

Upon returning to Nicaragua I settled into my job as a psychology teacher in Managua’s Central American University (UCA). In 1990 I began to observe that the group dynamic in the classrooms reflected the students’ stories. There were those who had been actively involved in the Sandinista revolution and had put their energies at the service of this social transformation process. There were former soldiers from both sides, many of whom had gone from being heroes to being unemployed. There were also those who came from experiencing exile. Each one carried the intensity of the experiences of the 1980s on his or her back. Listening to them I felt divided and powerless, and found it very difficult to deal with this complex and contradictory reality.

The writings of the Salvadoran social psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró helped me understand that war is one of the most brutal events a society can endure and its aftermath affects several generations. The social polarization and political intolerance manifested in the classroom were symptoms of the postwar period. We were a society with history stuck in its throat.

I began to realize I wasn’t the exception. I once facilitated a workshop with both FSLN and Resistance community leaders and, while working with them, one question burned in my head: Which one of them killed my brother Ernesto? My emotions were a clear sign that the pain caused by the loss of my siblings had not healed.

Hurricane Mitch
opened old wounds

From 1997 on I decided to dedicate my life, heart and soul to psychosocial work. This work involves creating spaces where people can share their life stories, talk about events that have hurt them; talk about their sorrows; reflect on the causes and manifestations of these sorrows and about the right and wrong strategies for getting past them.

A key moment in this work was the series of workshops with survivors of Hurricane Mitch, one of the deadliest tropical cyclones, which passed through Central America in October 1998 causing thousands of deaths and losses valued at many millions of dollars. For several months we conducted psychosocial workshops in Chinandega, Posoltega, Condega, San Francisco Libre, Managua and Puerto Cabezas. We quickly realized the rains had exposed not only wounds in the earth but also deep wounds in the people.

One night, after finishing a workshop on the importance of trauma healing, a rural woman from León timidly approached me and told me that when she was 15 years old she was raped when she went to fetch water from the river. A man from Posoltega said the smell when they burned the dead from the Casita volcano mudslide reminded him of war corpses. A peasant from Condega talked about the depression he suffered from neglect and abuse in his childhood. Many women shared their sadness about their children migrating to Costa Rica.

A farmer from Nueva Segovia complained: “Why have you waited until now to come? I was crazy when I came back from the war. I divorced my wife and now I’m an alcoholic.” And another: “My father was in the war. I find it hard to talk to him and he’s tried to kill me several times.” And another woman: “I lost my four children to Mitch while I was working as a maid in Costa Rica.” Yet another: “My daughter went to the United States. She only called me once from the border then I lost contact with her. Now I have to take care of her four children and I don’t know what to tell them.” And another man: “After I was demobilized from the army I lost everything; I’m so used to losing that I get angry when I win”…

I have a debt of love to these stories because as I submerged myself in them I began my own healing process. I let myself cry for Marlon, Ernesto and Alba Luz and I also cry with the rural women of Estelí and Jinotega, with the young men and women of Mateare, San Judas, Ciudad Sandino and Jorge Dimitrov, with the community leaders of Malpaisillo… I know how much I’ve healed when I can hug Miss Martha, a peasant from Nueva Segovia who fought in the Resistance against the revolution.

Culture of silence
and frozen tears

In the years following Mitch we traveled over almost the whole country listening to people and, although the stories varied, they all had a common melody. Both men and women, young people and adults, from the countryside and the cities, are burdened with pain from the loss of loved ones, the war, sexual abuse, rape, mistreatment and neglect, migration, exile and poverty. These sorrows have not yet had a chance to heal and severely affect the quality of their lives and daily coexistence.

By late 2002 we had a map of Nicaraguan collective subjectivity that enabled us to make this statement: Nicaragua is a country of multiple sorrows. And we asked ourselves many questions: Why have people pent up their tears and locked up the emotions resulting from all these sorrows? Why have they learned to keep silent and feel ashamed to talk about what happened to them, to believe it only happened to them, to not ask for help or be open and to wear so many masks? Why haven’t we given the multiple sorrows issue the importance it deserves? Why, as a society, have we buried our heads in the sand like an ostrich? Why, even though the social and individual bill we’re paying is so very high, has academia turned its back on the multiple sorrows issue and not included it in the universities’ curricula? Why don’t projects include the stories of Nicaraguan men and women in their logical frameworks?

Of course we don’t have all the answers but one thing we do know: this behavior reveals our society’s deep-rooted culture of silence and our enormous social oblivion about the importance of subjectivity.

Psychosocial work helped me understand that just because tears weren’t shed by earlier generations, it doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared. The living carry them in their bodies and the muted pain manifests itself in many diseases because the body speaks even when it’s silenced. This pain expresses itself in the violence that plagues daily life in many homes, and also in grisi siknis (crazy sickness), that collective disease that has long affected the indigenous communities of our country’s Caribbean Coast.

A past that’s still alive

The past is still alive, as shown by systematic trans-generational therapy from family constellations. It’s alive in the addictions afflicting many of our young people and in their suicide attempts, because they don’t feel entitled to be alive and lack energy to build their own life projects, and because they’ve assumed their parents’ feelings and are weighed down with their depressions.

Large and small groups recall the past in different ways but regardless of what a family or a group decides to remember, there are always things that are never mentioned and many would prefer to forget. Some events are very hard to assimilate; they cause great shame because they are very painful and are sent into zones of silence.

Some historical events remain unprocessed in the collective memory. This energy leaves marks on the soul of a country, marks that are expressed in the personal lives of people today. And this situation is exacerbated at the social level because the pain prevents it being seen, generating inertia and an uncritical attachment to the past in both social organizations and political parties.

How to shed our load

I think it’s time to give social sorrows the importance they deserve in Nicaragua. Now that we know how much damage they cause, we must commit ourselves to opening the locks, thawing out the tears and shedding the load.

To do this we need to delve into the roots of authori¬tarianism, machismo, inequity and silence, so we can stop listening to and obeying them. Based on this, we can promote new ways of living and coexistence that recognize that by nature, we’re loving mammals, as the Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana put it.

We’ve got a lot of work to do to achieve this; and I have some suggestions:

 Honor and acknowledge all Nicaraguan men and women killed during wars and, in the name of the dead, commit ourselves to a culture of peace so our country will never again be stained with the blood of brothers, as we sing in our national anthem.
 Build Social Sciences that recognize the importance of subjectivity as a key element for social change.
 Have the universities incorporate the issue of multiple sorrows in their curricula.
 Continue working on the prevention of sexual abuse.
 Promote new models of masculinity and responsible parenthood.
 Provide spaces for liberating conversation and intergenerational dialogue to enable young people to enrich themselves with the experience of the elders; and older men and women to listen, accompany and motivate the aspirations and dreams of the young.
 Implement methodologies that fully integrate the body and teach us to be truthful and honest and connect with our emotions.

We’re a country of young
people with diverse energies

Young people need a healing collective memory to release them from the sorrows of the past and connect them with the wisdom and affection of those who came before them.

Young people bring a fresher worldview, infect us with their energy and creativity and open the doors to new possibilities of our building healthier and happier societies. The experience of working for and with young people has convinced me that there’s enough talent, resources and capabilities in our country to meet this challenge.

To conclude, I’d like to read this poem by Gioconda Belli:

You don’t choose the country where you’re born,
but love the country that gave you birth.

You don’t choose the time for coming into the world,
but must leave traces of your time here.

No one can avoid their responsibility.

No one can cover their eyes, ears,
stay mute and cut off their hands.

We all have a duty of love to fulfill,
a story to be created,
a goal to be reached.

We don’t choose the moment for coming into the world.

Now we can make the world
in which the seed we brought with us
will be born and grow.

Martha Cabrera is a psychologist specializing in healing social trauma.
Giaconda Belli’s poem was translated by the envío team, with apologies to the author and translator if it already exists in English.

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