FREAK AGUACERO

I

This is how I learned about the climate in Colombia: starting out with a plain template (didn’t our country look like a bloated starfish, perhaps one in stilettos?), we were instructed to populate a series of maps. These would later be bound and graded by our primary-school teacher. Each map began with the same contour, until the line could be traced almost without looking; each would serve as a face the motherland wore, a distinct way in which it was la nuestra — ours — as the advert for the Colombiana soft drink insisted that it was. Ours in what way, exactly? This was in 1996, in Bogotá, the city where my mother was born.

In January 2019, just under ten months after my mother died, my sister and I go to Bogotá together. We go together, for the first time as adults, but we’ve been adults for a good while already. Is this why everything feels so late in the day, so much past its use-by date? The nativity scene is still in our grandmother’s fireplace, replete with miniature holy men and sheep, a leftover from the latest major event we missed.

The whole of the first week is spent in our grandmother’s flat, occasionally taking her out for sun in the courtyard and, once, taking ourselves to a bakery across the street. When we want to go out for groceries, our aunt, our older uncle’s wife, asks if we can please wait until one of them takes us. We have two uncles on our mother’s side, and the younger has insisted on staying with a cousin, so that we can have his room. He’s left us an impossibly thick duvet, handmade by a former girlfriend. Either we are being looked after because we don’t know how to do it ourselves here, or here, this is how people look after each other. Although we used to come here at least once a year throughout our childhoods, and although my sister was born here, we only actually lived here for three years in the nineties. Our mother wanted us to know this as a home, to have this place sewn into us. The celador who guards the block where my grandmother lives says ‘hasta luego, niñas’ (‘niñas’ sounding so much younger than ‘girls’) every time we leave the building. We are both in our thirties.

This is how the climate in Colombia was taught to me: by proxy. Planning work, and estimating how long a certain piece of work will take, has never come easily to me, and the night before the map assignment was due, my mother and I sat up late. We watered the country with rivers, from thick blue ribbons to the hair-width of creeks: ‘El azul de la bandera es por los rios, niños’ (‘the blue of the flag is for the rivers, kids’). We planted vast areas of rainforest. I say ‘we’, but mostly I stood next to my mother, who sat hunched over the desk, a side view from on high of her working right hand, drawing what was supposed to be tiny cattle. At the end of it, we had a folder — you could flick through it quickly and see the nation unfurl into separate layers of skin, a multiplicity of threads and wires stitching the land. There’s no way anyone would have believed this was done by a child. The maps, in any case, would later be doodled over by a three-year-old, the son of a family acquaintance, who snuck into the room my sister and I shared, in search of who knows what.

On the first Sunday of our visit, my mother’s younger brother, who travelled around the country with my parents in the early eighties and introduced me to Celtic music when I was fourteen, takes us for a walk through La Candelaria, the colonial centre of town. It’s a touristy place, but also a heart of a kind; not knowing it leaves us heartless. The day begins with the usual smog lid on, the school buses exhaling like exasperated whales at every corner. My ears recognise this sound as the prelude to carsickness — mine and that of other uniformed schoolchildren in one of the world’s most congested cities. This is only good; in the business of recognition, nausea is an expert.

My uncle parks the car close to the Hotel Tequendama and we walk uphill to see the view from near the planetarium. When in a certain mood, the sun in Bogotá chomps down on your scalp and takes bites out of the thin skin under your eyes. ‘El sol aquí tambien quema,’ our mother used to say: ‘the sun burns here too’. No one thinks of sunbathing in Bogotá. The sun wants you to know that you’re edging in on its territory. Other than that, nothing about the explosion that is this city, all ochre and uneven roof tops, makes it tangible that it sits 2,640 metres above sea level. It’s a colossal basin filled with almost ten million people and still growing. It’s able to breathe but not feed itself. The capital’s dependency on neighbouring regions makes food scarcity one of its main vulnerabilities in the face of climate collapse.

On the long flight here, I paid for on-board Wi-Fi for the first time ever, so that I could look up Spanish terms related to global heating. Cambio climatico, industria ganadera, puntos de inflexion; I didn’t have words for the end of my world, in the language in which it began. With a handful of terms, I then try to explain to my uncle, repeatedly over the course of two weeks, why I’ve gone vegan. ‘It makes sense, all those cows and the methane,’ he says, jokingly. Cows, I think, and try to make the jump from that to ‘urgent system change’, and the between-moments desperation that makes me want to block roads back home, even though I’m not at this point a UK citizen and could have that home revoked. My teeth desert me for the rest of the conversation. What do I want him to say? That he will be going vegan too, at the age of fifty-nine, in a country where vegan food costs a fortune or is non-existent? Or that he’ll be joining a protest to demand action on climate change? What is this ‘system’ that I want to change, anyway — the one which allowed me to grow up on two continents, or the one in which five people from three generations share a small flat? Both are part of the same system and it gave me my life. I’m the result of my father, who worked for a Swedish company, moving to Colombia for a few years and meeting my mother there. Regardless of how much my mother’s family is mine, that history, the imbalance of North and South, of coloniser and colonised, puts me on the other side of a global divide.

After spending an hour at the Botero Museum, we walk down Calle 11, toward Plaza de Bolívar. The sun has given way to a chalky pressure over the eyes. This is only one of hundreds of squares in Colombia named after Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, but the only one where the assassin of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán — a progressive politician and leader of the Liberal Party — was dragged by an angry mob in 1948, sparking the period known as La Violencia. As if by giving the name to a chunk of time, violence might have been confined to it. While he was still alive, our grandfather dropped hints that we may be related to Gaitán, but when I mention this now to our uncles, they laugh. There are too many Gaitáns in Colombia for this to be worth pursuing, and too few records for it to be possible. All of which sounds like an excuse not to dig into things. Received belonging can be alienating, as well as comfortable.

One of the maps was dedicated to mountains: three ranges born out of one, as if a giant hand at the border with Ecuador filters the Andes between its fingers: la cordillera occidental, la cordillera central, la cordillera oriental. At the very top, there’s la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, which I thought looked like a spot on someone’s forehead, snow at its peak. The thirty thousand Indigenous people living there, the guerrilla and paramilitary groups fighting over the mountain for decades, weren’t to be included on the map.

Our version of the ranges ended up looking more like slug trails, or the veins on the back of my grandfather’s hand. Luckily, I didn’t tell this to my mother, who must have been exhausted by this point. The maps had been my responsibility, not hers.

The main attraction on Plaza de Bolívar seems to be a pair of llamas wearing pink ribbons. One of them is being encouraged to dance. At some point between a quick look inside the cathedral and us finishing our corn on the cob, it begins to rain. Precisely because it comes out of nowhere, there’s nothing strange about this rain. Rain in Bogotá often behaves like this, pouncing on your day like a raiding party. My sister, my uncle, and I run to wait out the aguacero underneath the awning of a discount shop on Carrera 7, alongside at least twenty others, but soon decide that it’s too crowded and start walking toward the car. That word, aguacero, always puzzled me: it sounded like agua-cero, zero water, but refers to the opposite: a ferocious downpour. Aguaceros never remain aguaceros for long, which is what makes them aguaceros, as opposed to any other kind of rain, to be expected anywhere else.

Where Carrera 7 meets Calle 19, my uncle cuts a corner a few feet in front of me and is slapped over the chest by an open-handed wind. It throws me backward and makes him hold on tight to his jacket. My sister’s face stretches out to its edges, giving her a stranger’s grin. She was born with an ever-so-light line down her nose, a birthmark which our mother said was from the factory where they put dolls together, and now this line risks being cracked open. In Edinburgh, or Göteborg, a wind like this would be native. It would know its way around the city and understand its routines. Here, its shriek is incompatible with any other sound. We’ve been plucked up and deposited somewhere else, where winds such as these exist, and where downpours include such winds. The wind, being not of here, has made the weather itself alien — it’s even changed the aguacero, derailing it to the sides.

This is it. I look around to see if anyone else gets it, that this wind is a sign of certain collapse, of higher temperatures and changed currents. You freak, I think, I know what you are; at least I know this. I am, weirdly, comforted.

Next, there was a map of major cities. Colombia’s capital is located smack in the middle of the Cordillera Oriental, in a valley called la Sabana de Bogotá. It was legally founded in 1539, having fulfilled the Spanish crown’s requirements for a city. The name derives from Bacatá, the capital of the zipas, the chiefs, of the Muisca Confederation, which was burned by the Spanish the year before. Its altitude places the city in the category of tierra fría, as opposed to the tierra caliente of the coast and of lower altitudes. You wear different clothes to tierra fría and to tierra caliente, but neither of them have anything to do with a deadly hot earth. Aged ten, the ‘savannah’ in Sabana de Bogotá only made me think of The Lion King, which was also something that happened in the mid-to-late-nineties, along with the expansion of guerrilla territory, increased regularity of paramilitary massacres, and Plan Colombia, the specific local strand of the US war on drugs.

II

Upon returning from our trip, my sister and I speak to our family in Colombia once a week. We take turns calling our grandmother, me to read her stories from a collection by Isabel Allende that we started when I was there (the raunchier — the more wooing there is — the better), and my sister to play traditional vallenatos (heavy on the accordion) over the phone. While my mother was alive, we spoke to our Colombian family almost exclusively through her. She isn’t here now, to keep the connections live. It’s on us to make sure they don’t drop.

On the phone, when my aunt asks what my partner and I are up to, I tell her that we’re busy, with ‘work and climate things’. I never go into too much detail. It’s not that I don’t want to tell her, but my willingness to explain, and to be questioned, doesn’t stretch far enough.

No map, as part of the exercise, was dedicated to the Indigenous inhabitants of the region we knew as Colombia, neither what they were before the sixteenth-century genocides, or what they are under the current era of colonialism.

There are openings, in the months that follow, chances to talk about the climate crisis with my family. My older uncle texts me to say that what my partner and I are doing — the protests, the meetings — is good. ‘Either we change or we all go extinct,’ he writes, and him using that word, extinct, makes me twitch. He’s used a secret code, meaning that he knows; our fears exist beyond the particular climate of activism we’ve ensconced ourselves in. Somehow, I must still be thinking that if certain people, people I trust, don’t take it seriously, it must not be that bad. My younger uncle texts me to say that I left behind a climate-protest flyer on his bedside table (I was using it as a bookmark); does he assume I left it there on purpose? I don’t ask. He says it looks interesting and that he’ll have a closer look.

The river map turned out quite well, I seem to remember — one blue stripe connected to another, nerves made terrestrial. ‘Los ríos de Colombia son muy importantes para el comercio,’ a teacher said, but I only remember walking into one actual river. It was during a visit to my mother’s aunt and uncle’s finca in Los Llanos, where it was so hot that our mother sat up through the night waving wet rags in our faces. There was a story about the son of a caretaker who almost got eaten by a snake on the banks of that river, and I imagined the size of such a snake when paddling in it. I didn’t consider the relationship between my family and the caretaker, his son, and the land, who owned it and who never had because the notion of owning had been forced down their throats. I drew some of the river map myself, but I don’t know the name of that river, or how it’s doing these days.

I begin to research the impact of climate collapse on Colombia, and on Bogotá specifically. Perhaps, knowing about local floods and areas prone to desertification, I will have a leg to stand on when talking to my family about climate collapse. Really, they never ask me about my legs, except when I’ve hurt them. They’ve never questioned what I’m doing, yet I seem to feel the need to defend myself. I learn that Colombia, being a country where the vast majority of the population lives either in the Andean region (with risks of water shortage and landslides) or along the coasts (where the water is rising), is described by the UN as ‘especially vulnerable to climate change’. The country’s infrastructure and ‘precarious settlements’ are part of what make it ‘especially vulnerable’; especially in relation to other countries, and especially for displaced and poor populations within the country itself. As for Bogotá, there’s the risk of dengue-carrying mosquitos making themselves at home as temperatures rise.

Most of this is accessible climate science, the kind that even I — a ‘book person’ — have come to deliver in lecture halls as part of this ‘doing something’. It isn’t really what I’m looking for. I spend hours searching for mentions of storms in January 2019: a particular wind that didn’t behave the way it was supposed to, and that must have been a sign, but none of the results are satisfying. None of them confirm my experience of an aguacero that no longer felt like one.

In April, three months after our visit to Bogotá, my partner is arrested in London for refusing to leave a protest site. On the train home after his release, my younger uncle happens to text to ask how we’re doing. I tell him what’s happened, because I’m still high on adrenaline, and, probably, admittedly, a little proud. ‘Are you sure this hasn’t gone too far,’ my uncle replies. ‘Lo cortés no quita lo valiente,’ he writes, a saying my mother also used which literally means ‘the polite doesn’t take away the bold’, and I reply that this isn’t about being bold, but about what’s necessary. Sometimes, impoliteness is more than necessary, and he should have seen the protesters. I wish they’d been less polite.

Although of course it has to do with boldness, why else would I feel pride? Although a brown person, I was surrounded by mostly middle-class, able-bodied white people during that protest, and this brings with it a certain, more restrained, police response — a safety which cannot ever be taken for granted in Bogotá. Where does this leave my politeness, or my pride? It’s a different climate here, I add, to reassure him that as far as the protests go, I’m not in any immediate danger.

We also had to memorise the names of each region. Most of them, by the way, were only familiar from the televised Miss Colombia beauty pageant. I knew that my grandmother was born in Santander, and I recognised the department of Huila because my parents had pictures from San Agustín, a pre-Columbian archaeological park. Eso está lleno de guerrilleros, my mother said, which meant it wasn’t a place we could go anymore, in the mid-nineties. What these guerrilla soldiers did there, or why they did it, wasn’t part of the formal education about the climate in Colombia. My sister and I knew of the region of Guajira as the setting of the telenovela named after it, but were oblivious to the opencast coal mine which, along with droughts, would come to make life nearly impossible for the Indigenous Wayuu population.

I ask my aunt over text: what kind of changes has she noticed in the climate over the last, say, five or ten years, and she tells me about the birds. Some have disappeared from Bogotá, whilst others, which you never saw at this altitude before, have started frequenting the city. What about the weather? I ask. The wind, specifically, and what about the rain? I send the same request to both my uncles, and instead of a reply, my younger uncle calls me. We talk about his love of hot weather and my uneasiness with it. His dream is to build himself a house with a small pool close to one of the villages about three hours down the mountain. Isn’t he worried about it getting too hot? His answer is neither a yes nor a no. He talks about designing a cool-enough house (he’s an architect by trade), with a wall around it. ‘Donde me dejen tranquilo,’ he says. Someone can throw food at him over the wall, he says. This would be his life, and it would be fine, as long as no one bothered him.

Talking to my family about climate collapse, I realise that it’s not that they don’t agree with me on how bad it is, but that they — like me — don’t know how to respond. A response to future threats always depends on historical and present dangers, and living your whole life in a country with over fifty years of civil war makes mundane tranquillity — simply to be left in peace — a priority. It’s not just geography that separates us, but time, a generational shift. Because of all of the above, I’ve had peace, which afforded me the space to worry about the future. This seems obvious, but when it’s your own family, how do you best care?

I mention the aguacero with the strange wind. Oh no, my uncle says, you get that kind of wind every year in Bogotá around that time. It’s because it’s surrounded by mountains. ‘Eso aquí es así,’ he says, which is what he’s always said about the insecurity, about not being able to trust people, about always calling taxis instead of grabbing one off the streets, and about government corruption. When he refers to people taking the piss as soon as you turn your back to them, he says ‘eso aquí es así’, as if he’s given up on things ever being otherwise. What’s more, I don’t know enough about the way things are here to be able to tell him it’s not too late. It sounds vaguely like when people say ‘it is what it is’, which Adam dislikes so much he’s made me promise never to say it.

Possibly, this is what I wanted: for someone to tell me ‘you were right.’ Which would mean: ‘You know this place. You know it well enough to see it change.’

If someone we didn’t know asked us for our names, my mother said, we should always give our Colombian surname. The worry was that if they knew our father’s Swedish surname, we’d be at risk of kidnapping. ‘They’ were the guerrilleros, but it could also be someone spiking your drink then leaving you in a ditch, which happened to a colleague of my father. One day at school, we were all ushered to a classroom and shown a documentary about the drug trade. It presented us with a clinically sparse room and a dead body in the middle, opened like a tamale, being emptied of packs of cocaine. I asked the teacher if I could leave, knowing I’d have nightmares, and the teacher said I couldn’t, because this was very important. I could hold my hands over my eyes, if I wanted, but I had to stay in the room, she explained. That way, at least in theory, I would know what was going on.

III

When I’ve stood in front of a group of people talking about three, five degrees of warming, or stared at a camera during a protest, willing it to see enough fear, I know that, inevitably, I’m speaking from a distance. It’s a gap similar to the one between me and the maps, me and the drug-trade documentary. Privilege filters climate fear; inequality makes it a warning rather than an experience, theory as opposed to lived reality. This doesn’t void or lessen anyone’s fear, but it does make a difference, and that difference carries through into our reactions to a crisis which is global, but always felt locally, and in endlessly different ways. Writer Sarah Jaquette Ray has asked if so-called ‘climate anxiety’ is really just ‘code for white people wishing to hold on to their way of life or get “back to normal”’. Each of our ‘normals’ is characterised by vulnerabilities, by what may or may not happen to shatter the sky above us and ours. My ‘normal’ never had the same everyday risks and volatile days built into it. Although a global crisis, climate collapse can never be the same crisis globally. When we talk about our most existential fears across class, generational, or geographic differences, we’re expressing very different wounds, and different abilities to tend to them.

It wasn’t a lack of vocabulary keeping me from speaking to my family in Bogotá; it was guilt. When I think of the Colombian part of my childhood, I feel guilt because of its privileges — the private, bilingual school it happened inside, the Swedish passport that framed it, the shelter from violence — but there’s also a guilt because of everything I missed when I didn’t live there: a war, a peace process, what comes after. Finally, there is guilt because now I’m here and they are there, and because I don’t know enough about their life to say what’s best for all of us, even when this thing, this many-headed horror-show, will come for us all.

The map representing Colombia’s climatic zones looked like someone had splashed five kinds of oil paint on the country’s chubby body, then smeared them with a finger. Mine, my mother’s finger. It was difficult to get to grips with. I stared and stared at it for a long time, trying to imagine what it felt like to live your life in each, to be me in each of those places.

A popular way of explaining the difference between weather and climate is through the allegory of personalities. If weather is a mood, then climate is a personality, it is said. This makes me think of the years when we lived in Colombia and my father suffered from chronic stress and road rage. Anyone who met him, for the first time, coming out of another six pm traffic jam, would have made certain assumptions about him as a person. We knew he wasn’t like that, not normally, because we’d known him all our lives. When I ask my family about the weather, I say, ‘que tale el tiempo?’ which makes the word for weather the same as the word for time. Rather than confusing things further, this may work as a reminder, that in order to truly understand its climate, you need to give a place your time.

In late April 2021, protests break out all over Colombia. They started in 2019, but were interrupted by the pandemic. They are connected to the government’s handling of the Covid-19 outbreak, but also to the broken promises of the 2016 peace accord (a watershed event I watched from afar, without understanding its metabolism), and to so much of what went before — at least half a decade of armed conflict. Between April and early June, sixty-eight deaths are documented by Human Rights Watch, many of them at the hands of the ESMAD, the police anti-riot squad. If I lived there, would I be part of the protests? If I was me, but there, would I develop entirely different ways to respond?

Instead of asking my family about what’s happening, I’ve been trying to make contact with Colombians in the UK. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive, not only because I always resisted connections that are solely based on shared origin, but because I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t know anyone, outside of my family, who is Colombian. In response to the government repression, groups of Colombians in the UK have come together in solidarity with the protesters, lobbying the government and raising awareness about disappeared activists. Speaking to one of them, in Edinburgh, I ask her about her own conversations with family back home. ‘It does usually end with that,’ she says. ‘You know, the you’re not here, you don’t know what it’s like.’ But she lived there until her early twenties, which suggests that it’s the leaving itself that cuts us off, more than the time spent away. Meanwhile, in connecting with others who worry about their country from afar, and feel responsible for it, she says she’s found a place from which to act. It’s a relief.

We don’t know what it’s like to be there. The distance creates a longing and a different, wilful belonging, one which may have its own part to play when those most affected by, and least responsible for, a global crisis are also the least heard. My connection to this place — the country it became, and is, in spite of itself — is a narrow stretch, liable to flooding.