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    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?

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