“I'm telling you this because I love you”

This essay follows the parenthetical opening of fieldwork confessional into spaces within our archives, in order to consider nature those parentheses and their complex claims on writing relating. Noticing an echo address across several fieldsites material traces, this a thread I find winding through archive narratives I've made with Uitoto interlocutors over 15 years being folded ambivalent relations adoptive kinship that have framed my migrant displaced families Colombia. That includes recordings images, notes transcriptions—the recognizable traces field research—that assemble migration childbirth, illness displacement, curing. It contains pages images are stowed numbered boxes shelves Iquitos London, these differently potent bundles constitute historical record colonization worlds by rubber traders, narcotraffickers, armed counter/insurgents past century. also only legible, like embossed verso text apparently blank page, oblique gaze (Desjarlais Habrih, 2021). Within space kin-making has been container engagement history, terms people who me kin, shared we tenacious memory tenuous ties, substantial ties person, entanglement as persons. In praxis, substances (including ancestral plant foods medicines, tears, sweat, smoke, etc.) time needed make processes gradually coming matter together essential part capacity build archives each other. Not factual record, building up colonization, world-curing work meant learning carry stories can hold world or undo it. be addressed particular ways. raised perpetual question conditions consequences forms address, one form is recurrent it insoluble. The tangle named love. hailing which found myself called witness carrier were precious (because curative), dangerous traumatic volatile), fragile, because they told context hard keep present lively. way both compels intimacies—the enables scene ethnographic knowledge-making exceeds habitual ethical gestures face disclosure. address—as confessional—both tells us we're inside something, gives something inscriptive powers representation containment. Being implied was not mine, might hurtful touch, for person sharing them. followed sometimes kin-curing ones, kind help someone back right fold sociality, world. Those belong travel along kin lines. They about beginning human life curing—the beginnings revisited every cure. curing practices punctuated; take continuous labor remake distributed bodies whose substance resonates susceptibility, well punctuated narrative ceremonial mark sudden transformations capacities. offered share turned able them; making could Living occupied borderland reserves Colombian Amazon settlements edges Bogotá, had lost violence narco-economies conflict, displacement disappearance, dehumanizing illnesses posttraumatic haunting. under substantiate, where depend lest slip inhuman, telling become one. But among opened door—through love—are others, curing, dangerous, kinship. These what happens when your line you them looking at else altogether. trust heart, require proof—along holding—that won't let out sight, shapes again attention wanders. love stories, teeth love, kinds undoings follow open door Offered warnings, confidences, complicated complicities, between women animals lived men loved, inhuman lives partners possessed—things carried things chose name. Te cuento esto porque te quiero. “I'm you.” I'm daughter me. Because granddaughter sister. Porque tu sí entiendes de esto, ¿cierto? understand this, right? collection reflecting ourselves confessional, ambivalence returning do organizes most central attachments—as subjects, fieldworkers, maybe discipline: grounds ethics holding takes discursive gesture threads archive, marking affinities moments relationships radically different affective contours consequences. appears starkly divergent exchanges, from invitation proprietary clan knowledge painful disclosures intrafamilial violence, memories healing anxious intimations uncanny spirit encounters lingering partial resolution. moved wildly genre modes, did work—as (Wortham, 2001). recognize witnessing: carrying difficult another, if all asking seen. unlike appeal witness, truth separate separable sympathy, forth complicity, entanglement, difficulty other (inseparable) faces fact conditioned is, prefaced marks them, reflection, think, entails (Figure 1). Indeed, Like axes turn point contact, centers gravity spinning disorder occupation drew show arc movement. ability tell string ruptures added center otherwise catastrophic contingency (Berlant, 2001; Van Alphen, 1999). A turning, gathered its telling, accretion becomes place live. Stories spun axis kinwork1 tools world-making. kinship, depending self-evidently resonance safe teller—safe untellable accounts, channels weren't bodily ones (the resonant, care, but immediately permanently). And kinship: activated already there, waiting. recognition ways kind. Tu You know We know. How hear anything than love? map turns story taken, bends life, wrinkles so constantly undone? sit call in? Let names didn't ours them? places we've been, too, wandered without knowing felt home compose recompose kindred. hunting dogs, provoked, remind almost-kin almost long way. cut bound threat unwind kinworld together. river bricoleur's boat, rounding bend no family's path touches steep banks. mud saturated rain step will swallow hip, drawing much deeper would guessed. He steering, little engine low, loud enough cover conversation become, suddenly, confession. What he river, war place. isn't recorded; it's stream speech amid milky water connects curve Heron River2 Putumayo Amazonas Atlantic. disappear quickly spoken. lodged then stone; sinks deep. It's moment leaky wooden boat living recorded occupation, drug trade counterinsurgency, loss loss. His confession engraved landscape, evanescent skim foam frothing current outward. starts scars his backward guerrilla killing buried five-day corpse cocal, ground below house lay unconscious father's furious blows. Backward, unconsciousness—the blackout drunk ditch deaths youth, fugitive rages adulthood, hiding forest soldiers guerrilleros, guerrilleros him. spills forward suspended more pours forth, further go. cauchero terror body son. lodging body, too. uninvited bond intimacy, another inscribe answers questions reason there. gift knowledge, though whether (whose should it?) impossible resolve. given himself. come myself. enacted inscribed disclosure complexly. tie intimacies violence. shifting live relation histories, whom am living, currents pull deeply. Disclosures magical speech. remake, Austinian sense, relationships, (Austin, [1955] 1975; Butler, 1993, 2005). change (can) precipitate resonant selves; participate choose intimate, terrain telling. action. (All hone it.) Animating animated substances,3 alien (like fieldworkers). illness, unhappiness, death, speaking names. Confessions, disclosures, fraught archives—these relationships. There existing there (even seem they've along). Confessional (be guilt enacting, shame surviving) unmake though. us, tied others unmade. don't relations. apart. too: apart waiting around parts grounding spaces, cannot allowed precipitate. Which woman close decided she letting lighter her? Or even me? During early (starting 25, naïve, well-intentioned, ill-equipped), intimate exchange idea with. “Fieldwork” alibi never having wonder hearing mean forever, decisions how it, later, obliquely, intelligibility narrate explicitly. longer spent own became scored folded, reoriented grief attachments trauma women, delicate heavy generous contents appeared, less obvious boundaries. Does contain friend's tears sliding down her round cheeks dust garden, mourning son, does? cousin's disclosure, hospital bed fog medications, suicide attempt two before met collection? To does belong? Who it? must not? vicarious, convert currency authority realism?4 remain make, negotiating “in field” beyond Of unmade, done undone us? demanded, especially tellers masculine makes so. often demanded abstain. parallel side limits Our archival fieldworker selves, composed twin traces—the records translate field, unsaid. Ethnographic habitually locate key dilemma (in translation, anonymized redacted form, secret) interlocutors. By suspension containment, confessionals lets broader field.5 doing discipline silence constitutive collective practice, determining many while yet remaining formally unknowable field? definition symptom—the coded kernel heart demand known refused knowing. tempo code calls endless repetition, appeals, appearing ever-new silence, including loud: jokes, rumors, gaps, performative shock reappearance. continues organize itself compulsively reenacting—compelling reenact—while disavowing attachments—the bonds bindings resonance—that shape condition transparency practice loved better? Where fewer sake too well?