3           through the hollows

​

Jumping back a decade and more to 2002, I return to circumstances in which I met Tina, owner and operator of river canoes during some of the worst stretches of the conflict. She tells me she is leaving her work on the river to reclaim the farm of her deceased father—an original settler of the Huallaga’s left bank—within an area under direct Shining Path control. Speaking about recent histories of political violence still demands enclosure and hushed tones. So our conversations that year all take place in private in a musty, cement room, the temporarily abandoned office of a local human rights committee. Sounding out regions of the past in what she and others share, I sketch some bare outlines of events from the conflict, whose weight and breadth feels massive. Far too much to digest, far too tangled to bestow any one definitive sense.