There are things that can be discussed almost forever, especially when someone has the nerve to do so from the sidelines, I mean, when they have the nerve to talk about something they have not experienced, even though the subject in question is, precisely, someone else’s experience.
I say this because, although it is not exactly the same as with the Cuban experience, most people have a preconceived opinion when a Venezuelan man or woman is about to talk about what his or her country (and he or she, in the first person) has experienced during the last few years, which are already a couple of decades: a good part of the left and right in the world have their mouths stuffed with slogans, mottos or, worse, prejudices or, even worse, dogmas that they do not seem to bother to launch, stupidly, against the one who is delivering something as valuable and unique as a testimony.
The testimony
“I always thought it would be temporary. Now that I think about it, I think that when we leave we all believe that it will be temporary, and in the end it ends up being a lifetime. Our exodus, massive and loud as it is, has been easily ignored and even condemned by almost all of our sovereign brothers of freedom despite being the largest that this hemisphere has experienced in the last fifty years,” he writes in The land is left behind Arianna de Sousa-García, a Venezuelan journalist and writer who was forced to leave her country with a very small son in order to enter a future in which that son and she herself could exist: “Yet they have the nerve to call us fascists with dazzling ease, to give us ideological speeches from their neighborhoods with water and electricity, from their full refrigerators, and of course, to tell these poor, vulgar banana boys what we should have done,” continues shortly after Sousa-García, in the prelude to the brutal testimony that she must have written with her jaw clenched and that one ends up reading in the same way.
There is nothing more important for those who know that their life has not had the value it should have, Enrique Álvarez Díaz tells us in The word that appears, that the persistence of his words, that the word reconverted into an inheritance; the testimony, then, placed in the hands of someone who is committed to keeping it alive. Perhaps for this reason, although de Sousa-García seems to have chosen the form of correspondence, a correspondence addressed to his son, what he writes is also a testament.
A testament that brilliantly, carefully and surgically turns the reader —who almost unwittingly takes the place of the son, when the narrator speaks to him informally— into another dwelling place of his memory, into another bearer of the fire of his word, a fire that, the reader then understands, must not cease to illuminate the path followed (and continues to follow, always) by the one who was expelled from his past, from his origin, from his life, from his intimate ties, from his home, from his family, from his country, from his work, from his daily life, from his plants, from his curtains, from his spoons.
A bundle of stories
In addition to her own (the testimony of the journalist and mother who suddenly leaves everything, a suddenness that, however, of course, is deep as a crack that divides continents and long as only memory and daydreaming can be), de Sousa-García, in another of the successes that becomes fundamental to understanding the strength and relevance of Atrás queda la tierra, gives us many other testimonies, so that we can also take care of them together. One of these, that of Leangel Gutiérrez, says: “Keiler Vargas was born in our city and died coming to the city where we live. He, his mother Alexandra and his four-month-old brother crossed the Venezuelan Andes, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru trying to reach Santiago. In Desaguadero, a place three thousand two hundred and eighty-seven meters above sea level on the border of Peru and Bolivia, Keiler began to have trouble breathing; minutes later he stopped breathing. It was January 28, 2022 and he was two years old. “His ashes arrived in Chile.”
Yet, there is another even more radical and intelligent success in Sousa-García’s book: giving space to the testimony of the other, of the one who is the exact counterpart of the narrator, who, in this case, to top it off, is that of her father: “We had no means, no way. We saw no solution or way out. And then Chávez appeared. When he did what he did… he won many followers, and many more when he laid down his arms. Those who did not agree with the first, agreed with the second, but we all agreed that he was the man. We, the youth of that time, the youth without a future, wanted to turn the situation around and yes, it was Chávez, but it could have been anyone… because it is true, we were just kids, but we had the strength of the river.”
Coordinates
The land is left behind It was published by Seix Barral.
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