ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 34
Luisa Villa MeriƱo is an Afro-Colombian poet and activist.
Her life and work focus on land, freedom, women's rights, justice and equality in one of the most
unique and biodiverse countries on earth, a country which by any measure has experienced multifaceted internal conflict for the last three generations.
Her book of poems God Was Better When He Was a Tiger was published in 2020 to widespread
acclaim.
She lives and works in Bogota, Colombia.
The following is a selection of her published poems, interspersed with new prose written for Currents,
based on her experience of conflict, socio-environmentalism, reparations and the fledgling peace
process in Colombia.
Translation by Hannah McMichael.
Violence has devastated land and nature in Colombia, from legal and illegal actions, from armed
groups waging war, to groups that believe themselves to be the solution to that war, to those trying
to organize the territories according to a colonial view of development; ruthless tactics such as:
displacement, kidnapping, drug trafficking, bombings, landmines, spraying of glyphosate,
monocultures, logging, burning of forests, planting invasive species crop substitution, etc. But in the
end they all result in destruction of the territory, and are openly violent acts on this "great body" that
holds us and that we hold.
In the case of Colombia, a "colonized" and "recolonized" land, devastated by colonial, neo-colonial
and patriarchal violence exercised on the territories, especially in black, indigenous and rural
spaces; in disputes over their memories and their histories, in the face of the warmongering,
imperialist versions - disguised under the names of development and civilization, - have justified
slavery, wars, annulment and destruction
34