The voids of memory

Abstract

This chapter examines the memorialization of the Putumayo Atrocities in the film Embrace of the Serpent (2015). Directed by Ciro Guerra and inspired from the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, this movie dramatizes the encounter between two Western ethnobotanists and a shaman called Karamakate. Intertwining the two tales of the white explorers, Embrace of the Serpent denounces how Western institutions such as the rubber industry, the Catholic Church, and the Colombian state brought the native peoples of the Northwestern Amazon to the verge of cultural and physical disappearance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing from Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory—according to which memory works productively through negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing between distinct historical traumas—this chapter discusses how the remembrance of the Putumayo Atrocities can contribute to reshaping the contemporary debates about truth and memory in Colombia after the 2016 peace agreement between the state and the FARC-EP. While the movie fails to embody the collective identity and the political projects of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, it insists on the irreparable voids left by the atrocities committed during the Rubber Boom. Such erasure, the film’s vexing resolution warns us, is a cautious reminder of the limits of historical memory in Colombia.