WHO AM I
Me
And my lips
And my tongue
And my jaws
And my mouth
Me and my sentence
Me
And my face
And my youth
And my bones
And my flesh
Me and my transgressions
Me
And my fingers
And my hands
And my right hand
And my feet
Me and my footsteps
Me
And my skin
And my loin
And my veins
And my heart
Me and my sin
Me
And my organs
And my blood
And my wound
And my illness
Me and my reflections.
Self-portrait in Paestum’s Archeological Museum 2017
Who am I?
I try again.
I
I respond to the name Juliana Canal Paternina and
I was born early on the month of December of 1990
I was born in Bogotá, monstrous capital city of Colombia
And I was born in a steady middle class family, who protected me with the help of this city’s fortress mountainous environment from the crude happenings of a very violent country.
Yet, even when in isolation, I still received the mediated input from the outside, and it spoke to me, to my childish imagination about a much volatile world in which every object animated or not could potentially bear the surname “Bomb”, about a reality always at risk of blowing and about the treacherous peril of accepting, and getting used to, and continue living under such igneous condition.
Against which I, 26 years later, am still fighting.
Who am I sides from the inherited vice of my own country?
Unable to trace out a legitimate family three
Unable to trace through an intelligible bloodline
I, half blood mongrel
Courier of a dissimilar European phenotype
Develop a
dark,
aqueous,
vague
sense
of i d e n t i t y
of b e l o n g i n g
Notions such as heritage or roots always come tinted whit strangeness
Who am I sides from the inherited vice of this country?
Who am I if not the ululating sound of the explosion, the corruption of our species, the evil of our kind, the disregard we feel amongst each other? I ask myself.
Should I be then the silence that breaks through the parámos 4000 meters above the sea level?
the calculated flight of the Andean condor still passing?
the constipated growl of the dormant snow volcanoes?
the indian song of the sirens hunting for men in the Guajirean desert?
the thunder piercing the Caribbean ocean?
the reflected light from the moon peaking through the thick crust of luminescent contamination?
the biblical floods from la niña’s phenomenon, the hellish aridness from el niño?
Who am I?
Should I try further?
Who am I?
Me
And my house
And my bed
And my hiding place
And myself
Who am I
Me and my being?
Who am I
A side from the one walking wounded?
Who am I beyond the puddle of vowels and vessels, the neurons and the receptors, the cells, the atoms, a side from being the one dreaming of cancer metastasizing it throughout this pages?
who am I if not the injury,
who am I if not the tear of the skin,
who am I if not the burn on the tissue,
who am I if not the crack on the head?