Speaking Their Names

The day before traveling to the School of the Americas protest in Ft. Benning, Georgia, I was at the copy shop to pick up the materials that I would take with me for Fellowship of Reconciliation's workshops and tabling efforts over the weekend. The guy behind the counter asked me what my name was. I answered, "Liza." And then he asked, "what does it mean?" After a pause, I said that it comes from the name Elizabeth, and that it was a historical name, and that... my explanation tailed off. He said, "ahhhh... no one knows the meaning of their name these days."

A few days later, after the workshops and tabling, after talking to people from many different parts of the country, after handing out hundreds of pieces of paper to those interested in FOR's work and campaigns, we spent the morning of Sunday, November 18th, hearing names. Name after name after name. Two hours of names. These were the names of those who had been killed in Latin America at the hands of SOA graduates. Thousands of names, spoken, sung and chanted. After every single name, we responded with the simple word in Spanish "presente."

When you say presente in Spanish, it is like when your teacher called out your name in school. "Liza Smith?"

My hand would pop into the air.
"Here!"

This was the eighteenth time that the SOA movement had come to the gates of Ft. Benning and spoken the names. Names of people that most of us have never met, but names that have meaning, names that have stories, names that were human beings, the name of a person who had a favorite food, who had a story about the first kiss, the first fall, the first fight, who had a special grandmother, who had children, the name of a person who had lived through tragedy and joy, just like the rest of us.

As the list of names is read, I search for a familiar one. I want to hear a name from Colombia, that place and those people who have somehow become entwined with my days and weeks, with my own stories, joys and tragedies. I want to hear a name that has been mentioned to me before, a name that has been explained, the why and where of that person's death.

I wait for them to say the name of Luis Eduardo Guerra, leader of the peace community of San Jose de Apartadó, perhaps the only name of the thousands mentioned, who is a person that I actually met in life, en carne y hueso. A man who was at this protest himself, just four years ago, who spoke out on stage about the brutality of the war in Colombia, who heard the names sung, who walked in the procession. Now he was a name on our list.

I wanted to yell ­ does everyone here know that a person who stood here, right here at the gates of this military base, in solidarity with our struggle to close this school, became one of the names himself? Would they include the name of his compañera? Would they say the name of his ten year old child, Diener Guerra, also killed in that brutal massacre on February 21st of 2005?

As we say your names, our action is your memory
You have been Dis-membered
But we will Re-Member you
We will sew your sinews back together
And speak your name
Speaking memory to life
When the media tells us lies
When the state erases all the traces
We stand here to speak their names
And our own

My name is Liza Jean Maytok Smith-Bershen-Landau-Norris. Otherwise known as Magooza. Today, as the names of those who have struggled and died throughout Latin America are spoken to life; today because Luis Eduardo is no longer here to join our chorus, I will say: "Here, here we are." In death and in life, with a raised fist and thousands of white crosses, "presente."