Sarah Babiker (Madrid, 1979) states that it is dispersed in nature. However, he has achieved something within the reach of few people. Something that requires having things to say and the discipline to organize them. The journalist has published two books at the same time. Anyone who has recently walked among the literary news tables where every day of presence is a victory will have seen Babiker’s name in a novel, Abyss Coffee (The Red Sheep), and the narrative essay The fertile nothingness (Continue You Got Me). The first traces the history of a family, the Salvatierra, at specific moments in the year 2000, 2020 and 2040. The second uses life stages, from childhood to old age, to tell us about an anti-person world and explore what Use levers to open emancipatory windows.
The work on both works barely overlapped, since the rehearsal started when the novel, started before the pandemic, was already very advanced. The author avoids falling into the commonplace of describing the writing process as a torment. “It has been nice, like taking care of two daughters, two homes or two plants, recognizing that they come from the same world, but that each one has their identity, their needs and their path,” says Babiker.
The journalist recognizes that for The fertile nothingness He worked with long deadlines for what is customary in the profession. The mention of Babiker’s profession is pertinent, since the germ of the book is found in one of his columns for El Salto whose title, Ladies who fantasize about burning containers (metaphorical), It introduces us fully to the spirit of an essay full of powerful reflections. One of those first ideas is articulated thanks to the recurring spaces of the text: houses, offices or parks. Housing, work or a “decent” neighborhood are often demanded, but perhaps we forget that they already are, that it is the people who make them worthy. Who in the commercial basement where he lives folds his clothes with love before squeezing them into a drawer. Who in surly work environments remembers to bring croissants if someone has a birthday. Who makes the purchase from a neighbor in a district that the City Council does not consider cleaning a priority.
“Sometimes I have thought this while writing or editing articles, when we get these expressions that something steals or takes away our dignity. That idea makes me uncomfortable, because we people have dignity, you carry it inside even when you think you have nothing left, when the police search you for your appearance, when you fight to build an imitation of a home in an ATM, when the army Zionist destroys your city and your people, you are still worthy. The bodies at the bottom of the Mediterranean, they too are worthy. The one who lacks dignity is the system and its oppressive hand, whether it is a vulture fund reaping millionaire benefits from this feudal real estate regime to which we have been forced, or whether it is public vampires profiting unchecked from the needs of health, education or care that we have as a society. They are the unworthy ones,” maintains the author.
In Babiker we find a well-founded vindication of each stage of our life. Childhood, for example, is that phase of existence that requires care that continues to fall especially on women. But also something less verbalized: “A central dimension of humanity that comes with a full reserve of tenderness, which treasures a curiosity against which society conspires,” we read in The fertile nothingness. Adolescence, which capitalism reduces to a commercial target, is a territory of joy, power and rebellion. Would it be good for this society to be a little more teenager?
The adolescent urge to build new families with others, supportive friendships, the slightly senseless euphoria that blesses them at times, that allows them to forget the stresses of the present or the uncertainty of the future. Why not claim all that instead of looking at adolescence with that disapproving expression?
Sarah Babiker
— Writer
“Yes,” he answers, “but not in the way the market wants us: eager to build an identity based on consumption, thirsty for immediate satisfaction of our desires or intolerant of frustration. I want to claim exactly that teenager that bothers the system. The questioning of what is established, the rebellion. The passion with which causes are embraced when they are considered just, and, by the way, what a drama that this impulse is being hijacked in some cases by the extreme right. The adolescent urge to build new families with others, supportive friendships, the slightly senseless euphoria that blesses them at times, that allows them to forget the stresses of the present or the uncertainty of the future. Why not claim all that instead of looking at adolescence with that expression of disapproval or, at most, the concern with which adult society often looks at it?
We often forget, but we invent time. We take it from where there is no place to see the people we love and who love us. We usually call it friendship. A type of relationship that cannot be measured in terms of profitability, but rather tells us about a love that is almost never made explicit with that word. A sabotage to the logic of the utilitarian. “Am friendly —Babiker defends—. I think that, in the same way that the system has been able to put both the family and romantic love at its service, friendly ties escape it a little more, since they are in principle freer, more horizontal, more creative. They enable alliances to get out of the alleys of the system such as the familiarization of care or the heterosexual couple as a human relationship at the culmination of the relational hierarchy. The latter are sometimes bonds that we seem obliged to maintain above all else, even if the desire disappears and resentment and violence arrive. This idea of a partner as a goal to aspire to sometimes results in an idea of contempt when it is not achieved, sometimes contempt towards oneself, but also towards women who do not choose you, as happens to men. incel.”
“I believe that friendship is anti-fascist,” he continues, “that much of the anger, of the drive against the other that fuels hate speech, has to do with the lack of friendly ties among many people who have been left alone in this neoliberalism.” cannibal. People who struggle in the emotional wilderness, who only know how to generate belonging and community, through hatred of others. Men who generate frateries around their great anger against women, migrants, environmentalists or whoever it touches. People who build their relationships based on the drive to prosper politically and economically. “Elegant people who call themselves friends and what they are is complicit in plunder.”
It is raised, both in the letters of Abyss Coffee as in those of The fertile nothingnessa “right not to live in survival mode.” “But of course,” he adds, “when what is called into question every day is the very right to life of so many people, of the Palestinian people, of those who migrate, of those who inhabit the increasingly extensive sacrifice zones that capital has designated to be able to continue with its orgy of infinite accumulation, while it begins to seem like extreme leftism or absolute naiveté to defend the right to life itself, well, to defend the right to calm, to shine, to extract joy and meaning of existence, it seems like a thing like freaks who have not understood what the world is about. Redistributing wealth with universal basic income, or time with a massive reduction in working hours, or guaranteeing the right to a roof so as not to have to spend a living paying rent and mortgages seems pretentious, illusory, postponeable indefinitely or downright impossible. . Enjoying life, having enough control over one’s time to allow oneself to shine: that could also be an antidote to fascism. But the inexhaustible greed of a few requires us to shipwreck in urgency and live in fear of losing what we have.”
Born in La Ventilla, a Madrid neighborhood with a slum past and ragpickers from whom she knew how to extract Baroja literature, with a pioneering neighborhood movement in the occupation of empty houses, Babiker assures that by making these books she has learned “that things take time and that that is okay.” ”. For her, writing is a space that she defines as safe, happy and vibrant, with meaning beyond publication. His grandfather Pablo bequeathed him an Olivetti and the urge to put words together lasts until today. The author’s gaze is oriented forward, so we ask if accepting that there is no future is falling into a trap set by those who enjoy a good present and want to make us throw in the towel in the fight for the future to take possession of it as well. If pessimism is a luxury that we cannot afford.
“Yeah. Because, if there is no future, why do they accumulate billions that they will not be able to spend on a thousand lives? That ‘there is no future’ is not a stimulus for the insurgency, but rather a kind of sedative so that we consume ourselves in the ultrapresent. It doesn’t work for us. Living without being able to imagine a better future, a horizon, is existing at half throttle, right? We don’t have the time to shine, but they let us acquire a lot of shit that shines, affordable with our insufficient salaries, built on the slavery of others that we will never see and to which we will never have to be accountable. Emancipate ourselves from that ultrapresent That forces us to be accomplices of those who accumulate endlessly to monopolize the future is a necessary and deeply human gesture of rebellion. And there are always those who are in it, from the neighborhoods to the indigenous peoples, from the feminists to the struggles for decent housing, fighting to change the present is nothing other than building futures.”
And where does a desirable tomorrow pass? “I don’t have the recipe,” he answers. But the elements that poison any possibility of a habitable future do come to mind. I believe that a future for all is an abolitionist future of borders, of wage labor as we understand it today, of capitalism in particular and of greed and accumulation as a principle that governs humanity under this regime that is destroying us. Neoliberalism has shaped subjectivities to the cry of there is no alternative! in a way that is difficult to reverse. But he has not managed, nor will he achieve, to conquer everything. In our affections and bonds, in tenderness and solidarity, in anger at injustice, there are reserves of resistance that will never be appropriated by the market or hatred. What we need is time, calm and guts to convince that not only are there alternatives, but that they are the only ones that offer a future worth living.”
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