We felt it even before we disembarked. La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, sits about 3,640 meters above sea level. The city’s airport, in fact, is in an even higher, adjoining city called El Alto. At 4,150 meters above sea level, El Alto is the highest city in the world. Leaving customs with our backpacks weighing down our shoulders, we felt the classic signs—shallow, insufficient breaths, a pounding behind the temples, a strange sense that the air around us was suddenly lighter, thinner, emptier.
The next morning wasn’t much better. Despite several cups of mate tea, which is supposed to help with altitude sickness, we gasped our way around La Paz, groaning each time Google Maps took us up a hill (exertion is harder at high altitude, something the world painfully learned at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, where athletes found themselves out of breath and ill-prepared; the event became a critical turning point in the rise of altitude training in sports)
A runner in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics being given oxygen after collapsing due to altitude. (Photo by Rich Clarkson /Sports Illustrated /Getty Images)
I have never known a drug like the first day in a new country, realizing anew that despite all of us being similar, we are, in fact, very different from each other. After a breakfast of choripan, we sat in the main square, outside a cathedral built in a mestizo baroque style, a hybrid architecture style that merges the “horror of empty spaces” characteristic of the European baroque with the iconography of pre-Columbian Andean cultures. It was a Saturday, and a festival celebrating the many indigenous groups present in the La Paz area was going on in the square. The colors and cut of the clothing around us was unlike anything I had ever seen, and it was an overwhelming feeling, the recognition, that sometimes fades in the monotony of daily life, that one knows nothing, or close to nothing.
That afternoon, in search of coffee, we ended up in a smaller square. A wedding was finishing up at the church, and grains of rice dotted the steps. The guests were all outside, taking photos with the bride and groom. That’s when we noticed that of the older women, almost everyone was in traditional clothing similar to the ones we had seen in the morning. Of the middle-aged women, very few were. Teenagers were exclusively in standard party wear.
“Do you think in twenty years, anyone’s going to be wearing those clothes?” Bryan asked, and we both shook our heads.
“History’s hell of a bitch,” one of us said off-handedly, and then we walked to the fountain in the square, where children were overfeeding pigeons, and said overindulged pigeons were shitting all over the concrete.
From La Paz we went to Lake Titicaca, a large freshwater lake that Bolivia shares with Peru in the north. While on a ferry to a nearby island, we passed a a group of men in fatigues doing drills. Our guide told us it was men from the armada—the navy—which is funny because Bolivia is famously one of only 2 landlocked countries on the South American continent (the other one’s Paraguay). This wasn’t always the case. They lost all 250 miles of their coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific in the 19th century, a loss the country has not economically or spiritually recovered from. At least five different people brought it up during our time there. In a visit to the catacombs of the Spanish church I mentioned, we saw caskets with the remains of various martyrs of the revolutionary wars, alongside a box containing sand from the coastline that the country lost. History, I repeat—hell of a bitch.
Our next stop was Sucre, a beautiful colonial city built all in white, with stunning courtyards and plazas teeming with the many students that attend various colleges and universities in the area. I walked around cursing Europe during my two days there, for how indelibly it has shaped ideas of beauty for all of us, so that now those courtyards and columns look so unmistakably, so easily like beauty. (If you don’t believe me, look up Sucre). La Paz I had found fascinating and sometimes frustrating—cacophonous, asymmetrical, full of the jugaar that most big Third World cities survive on. Sucre was harmonious and pleasant.
Next we took a bus to Potosi, a once-rich mining town that stocked the coffers of the Spanish Empire, allowing it to defeat the Ottomans. The mountain that produced the silver that caused this prosperity looms over the city. Most of the silver mined here was shipped off to the metropole. Today, it has dried up, but the miners remaining, extracting tin and zinc several thousand feet below the mountain. The mining is done through private cooperatives, and there is very little oversight for safety. Not a day passes without a man dying inside. There is a widows’ association for the men who die. Average life expectancy for a miner is about 40 years. But it is good money, and if, sometimes, a nice SUV drives past you in Potosi, it could well be a miner who got lucky.
The mines are so dangerous that a curious industry of “tours” has cropped up. Tourists can pay a small fee to visit the mines and “see the conditions the men work in.” They are asked to take gifts of dynamite and Coca-Cola for the men—the former because the mining’s all private and the men have to buy their own dynamite, the latter because they need the caffeine from the Coke to work what are sometimes 20-hour shifts. If you look up the tours online, you will find self-professed “globetrotters” talking about how they risked their lives in a mine in Bolivia, or how they found the tour eye-opening, awful, scary, but ultimately brilliant. We didn’t do it—I have bad asthma. My sense is that people do tours like this not only for the thrill of it, but also because of the moral absolution it offers. For three hours, you experience the same life, the same brutal conditions, that the men do daily. This impulse shares some character, although not all, with the impulse we currently have, to keep looking at the photos streaming in on our phones. If you read some of the reviews of the mine tours, it seems as if the writer is fully convinced that, even if just for a half-day shift, he was a miner himself.
At a church across the city, we looked out at the majestic mountain in evening light. The woman giving us a tour of the church told us to pose; it was good lighting, a great backdrop. She was the one who told us that daily, a man died in there. We took a photo in front of the mountain. Everyone we had spoken to had mentioned how dangerous the mines were. And yet, daily, men went down there. Daily, they died. Daily, some of us climbed down with them to see precisely how they died, the mechanics and finer points of it. Daily, the world moved on.
(Cerro Rico, as seen from the tower of the Iglesia de la Compañia de Jesus in Potosi, Bolivia)
The next day, a Saturday, we boarded a bus that would take us into the Bolivian desert. Just as we were about to pull away from the curb, a harried-looking backpacker rushed in. She sat down across the aisle from us and began speaking urgently into her phone, in a language that was neither Spanish nor English. It sounded a little bit like Arabic, but not really. Then she called another friend, this time speaking in English. She was worried about her brother, who was in the army. She was worried about the rest of her family, and didn’t know what to do, sitting on another continent, far away from Israel. A surge of pain and resentment rose in me; I had very briefly seen something about the Hamas attack on my phone before we left the hotel. I reminded myself that here was someone who had much more at stake than I did. My framing was ideological; hers, personal.
For the next three days, we had almost no signals, except for sporadic Whatsapp updates and news check-ins. The people we know in Palestine are almost all in the West Bank. A friend’s apartment in Gaza had been destroyed by Israeli bombing; the family had escaped to the south, where they were sheltering in a house with many other people. By the time we were back in the US, the carnage and brutality Israel was unleashing was being live-streamed around the globe. Within days, we all went from outrage to disbelief. A meticulous extermination of a people, a systematic attempt to either kill them off or push them out of the already narrow prison they lived in, was underway. And we were all watching.
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The reason I said that the witnessing we are currently doing, the poring over photographs streaming in from Gaza, the reading of testimonies deep into the night, the hugging of our own children as we see the brutalized ones cradled by parents and journalists, is different from the mine tourists is that we genuinely believe that this act of witness might change something. For most of us, it is not voyeuristic, but instead an attempt to respect life, to mourn its cruel dispatch into darkness, to respect the memory of the deceased. Particularly for people in the US, there is also a sense of complicity, that we, of all people, taxpayers of the imperial state that uses Israel as its cherished colony, must, must, must look.
I became a US citizen three years ago. This has allowed me to say things, like above, that I might have thought twice about while on a precarious student visa or even on a green card. It also turns me complicit, I suppose, although I think we need to be careful about that concept. The fact that the US government has, for a long time, been a genocidal state held completely hostage by arms dealers and other nefarious lobbies should not be laid to rest on the collective shoulders of the citizenry, especially on the shoulders of progressive people in the country that have always believed in Palestinian self-determination. We shall not share that blame, because that blame belongs to war-hungry billionaires sitting at the top of the pyramid.
The complicity that gnaws at me is of a different texture. 12 years ago, I traded a country where history intervenes on the daily to a place where you can, with some amount of wealth and luck, get a full lobotomy for this particular pest. Of course, many might say I was lucky to do that; I myself believe on most days that I was lucky to do that. But the thing with history, hell of a bitch as it is, is that you can forget it, but it might refuse to return the favor. The complicity I feel now is in that act of forgetting, the tonic of turpor that we spend most of our days overdosing on. People have been throwing about the phrase “newborns to history” in light of the current situation, a term of contempt for those who think the Hamas attacks happened in a vacuum. But I genuinely believe that part of becoming an American, for many of us, is a baptism in amnesia. We can work against that, and we must, but it is certainly by structural design that the country that intervenes the most in the world insists on ahistoricity.
Over the past three weeks, I have seen many people I know, the people that I might call my milieu—young, educated, left-leaning people, some American immigrants or children of immigrants, some friends back home in Pakistan—have emotional breakdowns on social media. We are watching and sharing the news constantly. We are responding to events in real time, in the belief that something might change with one more Instagram story. To be clear, I believe that too, at least on my more hopeful days. I will quote from this fantastic interview with Dr Rashid Khalidi in Drift Magazine, where he recalls up the history of other resistance movements to show what shifting public opinion in the metropole can do:
“The Vietnamese were at a stalemate with the Americans. The Algerians were actually losing on the battlefield. The IRA was almost at the end of its tether, militarily, in 1921. They won, in part, because they won over the metropole. The English finally said, we just don’t want to fight this war. We can’t fight this war. Same thing happened with the French in Algeria…Same thing with South Africa. They did not win only in the townships; the ANC won because in the United States and Britain, they won over public opinion.”
I do think that some of this emotional breakdown is more existential. Friends in Pakistan are despondent, but mostly about the situation in Palestine itself; there is no question of where most Pakistanis stand on the issue of Palestinian liberation. In the US, however, an entire generation of young Americans is feeling isolated, lost, and deeply angry. There is a sense of shifting alliances, even a resurgence of old alliances, a feeling that perhaps we’re not that far from the rampant Islamophobia and paranoia that was the hallmark of the post 9/11 era. In real time, I’m seeing friends (alongside myself) come of age, realize how power and hegemony work, how money talks, how dehumanization occurs, how massacres are enabled. It has been a terrible education, one that sometimes takes a lifetime, and I’m seeing friends my age or younger gain it within days. I’ve quoted this here before, but it was Sontag who said that anyone who “continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.” I used to quite fervently believe what she said to be true, but now I see that this incredulity that she disdains is a critical part of us, a tenderness that must stay.
Throughout this post, I have considered, again and again, actually talking about what has been streaming in from the Gaza. The photographs and the stories. Sontag insisted on total clear-eyedness, but there are things that I do not wish to be clear-eyed about. There are things that live beyond language.