‘Witnessing’ — one of my notebooks insists — ‘is always oriented not toward the present, but towards its passing, and so justice remains incomplete’. These multiplying notebooks are not merely containers, a series of space-time reflections, but also parties in the ongoing documentation of a struggle against what liberation theologians decades ago termed ‘structural sin’. And there’s so much of it, capitalist sin, colonial sin, racist sin.
The various notebooks serve as sites of witnessing, punctuated by the three theological modalities of witnessing: ‘liturgy’, ‘confession’, and ‘prophecy’. Liturgy gathers and returns us in ritual; confession names what implicates us; prophecy sees and refuses the present as it is. But the notebooks also outdo me, they’re too much, each contributing to an ever-expanding incompleteness that no amount of self-discipline or will can control or overcome.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, the late Peruvian founder of liberation theology, writes of witnessing in his powerful La teología de la liberación (1971). In chapter ten, ‘Encountering God in History’, Gutiérrez writes that ‘we encounter him [God]’ — he puts it forward, as if it were the simplest of all things to say, we encounter him, God — ‘in the commitment to the historical process of mankind.’[1]
Too many hims in the English translation, though they’re not as obtrusive in the original Spanish. ‘If humanity’, as Gutiérrez says a few sentences earlier, ‘is the living temple of God, we meet God in our encounter with men.’[2] Too many men, but Gutiérrez, I feel, is much better than this blindness would suggest. God, whoever or whatever this God may be, we come to witness in our commitment to humanity’s historical process. God as an encountering of history, as our commitment to be historical through collective living.
The three modalities of witnessing materialise in different cuts of paper, ISO 216 standard, JIS A and B series, or through the ease of the digital — as Midori black leather, as Muji cream paper, as Leuchtturm gold or Italian red, and in the digital architectures that relay or mediate the physical original.
Within these notebooks, on the go or given to repose, my reading notes on Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire and Gary Foley come together with activist meeting minutes, strategies, and statements that steadily overwhelm us. A simultaneous preparing and undoing of prophecy.
Here is a note on work we do here, with Gaza as horizon; there is another on pro-Palestine framings; and there, not too far off, is Caracas; and further along, there is Venezuela. ‘All beauty is destroyed by the powerful’. I must have been thinking about the tens of thousands martyred in Gaza, and the imprisoned and tortured youth back home. It is now over a year ago that the Committee of Mothers in Defence of Truth was set up in Caracas.
Our commitment, mine too, is to humanity’s historical process: it is there that the encountering of God takes place, and this witnessing of God, is aided by the tracing of histories, of movements, on paper.
Against our commitment there is an anti-historical violence that settles the present as is. Over in Caracas, the violence of the government enacted in the name of socialism and liberation — how painful to see that, to say that — speaks of history too. There is little commitment to the ‘historical process of humanity’. Instead there is primarily an order that expands as it extracts oil, money, life, and love, from nature and people. Is colonialism much more than this attempt to destroy our deepening commitment to the histories that we witness? But witnessing will return us to history and to the making of histories in commitment. I want to add, for liberation, for love and for love of liberation.
The difference between witnessing and knowing feels poignant, too. Knowing recalls a whole series of epistemological positions and pseudo-problems. Knowing points to something that sits outside of who we are, something at the margins that we may be aware of or not fully know but which through appropriate technique we may come to know. While the slower path of witnessing, scattered throughout my notebooks (and so many others, yours?), coalescing beyond years and doubts, points to historical process and collective living. But maybe I shouldn’t carve the distinction so easily, as if it were fully tenable.
‘Gaza’ is a name now more powerful than any other I know. There is some empty space after this on the page, and on the following page, half a line on an action good friends I love are planning and I love them because they are planning it.
On another page, Martha Zechmeister, one of my teachers in San Salvador, reminds me that all ‘intellectual effort remains blind when not illuminated by the martyr’s praxis’[3].
Some may think that witnessing implies the pre-eminence of an a priori, of some truth there before us, pre-existing our notebook or the inscription itself. As if there were some truth prior to witnessing. But what I have come to think, against all possible love of the a priori, is that witnessing, in these modalities, as a committed collection, as the tracing on the page that beckons more political tracing, as the gathering god that heralds a future, as the reuniting of past threads in open and historical living; what has become more or less clear for me, is that witnessing holds collective life: Zoom meeting codes, snippets of speech, jottings made in order to intervene in an argument, political thought that strikes you then and there, and the movements lived with others, and which are now making their way through these pages into coming time. Life that opens its heart both ways, to the page and the collective, witnessing the collective on the page, as its lines hold, want, call, and love, and we write things we are willing to hurt for.
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[1]Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (ed. and trans.), SCM Press, London, 1974, p. 194.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Martha Zechmeister, ‘Hacer teología desde las víctimas’, in Óscar Elizalde Prada, Rosario Hermano, and Deysi Moreno García (eds.), Los clamores de los pobres y de la tierra nos interpelan: 50 años de la conferencia de Medellín. Amerindia, Montevideo, 2019, p. 320. My translation.