It’s happening all across the map of Latin America: against the paralyzing nerve gas of fear, people reach out to one another, and together they learn to not bow down. As Old Antonio, Sub-commandante Marcos’s alter ego, says, “We are as small as the fear we feel, and as big as the enemy we choose.” Such people, unbowed, are having their say. There is no greater authority than one who rules by obeying. Marcos represents the sub, the under—the underdeveloped, the underfed, the underrated, the under-heard. The indigenous communities of Chiapas discuss and decide, and he is but the mouth that speaks with their voices. The voice of those who have no voice? People obliged to remain silent do have a voice, a voice that deserves to be heard. They speak by their words but also by their silence.
Official history, mutilated memory, is a long, self-serving ceremony for those who give the orders in this world. Their spotlights illuminate the heights and leave the grass roots in darkness. The always invisible are at best props on the stage of history, like Hollywood extras. But they are the ones—the actors of real history, the denied, lied about, hidden protagonists of past and present—who incarnate the splendid spectrum of another possible reality. Blinded by elitism, racism, sexism, and militarism, the Americas continue to ignore their own plenitude. And that’s twice as true for the South: Latin America has the most fabulous human and vegetal diversity on the planet. Therein lies its fecundity and its promise. As anthropologist Rodolfo Stavenhagen puts it, “Cultural diversity is to the human species what biological diversity is to the genetic wealth of the world.” If Latin America is to realize the marvels promised by our people and our the land, we’ll have to stop confusing identity with archeology and nature with scenery. Identity isn’t frozen in museums and ecology can’t be reduced to gardening.
Five centuries ago, the people and the land of the Americas were incorporated into the world market as things. A few of the conquistadors, those who were themselves conquered, managed to see America’s splendor and to revel in it. But the powers behind the Conquest, a blind and blinding enterprise like every other imperial invasion, could see Indians and nature only as objects of exploitation or as obstacles. In the name of the one and only God, the one and only language, and the one and only truth, cultural diversity was written off as ignorance and criminalized as heresy, while nature, that ferocious beast, was tamed and obliged to turn itself into money. The communion of indigenous peoples with the earth was the essential truth of American cultures, a sin of idolatry that merited punishment by lash, gallows, and the pyre.
* * *
Warning
The duly appointed authorities hereby warn the population that a number of lazy and bored young ne’er-do-wells are on the loose, wandering con men who carry the malevolent virus that spreads the plague of disobedience.
Fortunately for public health, these subjects are easy to spot, since they have the scandalous habit of thinking out loud, dreaming in color, and violating the norms of collective resignation that constitute the essence of democratic culture. They refuse to carry the mandatory old-age cards, even though, as everyone knows, these are dispensed free of charge on every street corner and in every village in the countryside thanks to the “Elderly Mind, Healthy Body” campaign, which has been such a great success for many years.
Ratifying the principle of authority and overlooking the provocations of this minority of upstarts, the Higher Government reiterates its irrevocable decision to keep a watchful eye on the development of our youth, who are our country’s principal export product and who constitute the foundation of our balance of trade and of payments.
* * *
We no longer speak of “taming” nature; now its executioners like to say it must be “protected.” Either way, nature was and still is viewed as outside us: civilization, which confuses clocks with time, also confuses postcards with nature. But the vitality of the world, which wriggles out of all classifications and is beyond explanation, never sits still. Nature realizes itself in movement and we, too, children of nature, exist in motion. We are who we are and at the same time are what we do to change who we are. As Paulo Freire, the educator who died learning, liked to say, “We become by walking.”
* * *
Kin
We are family of everything that buds, grows, matures, tires, dies, and sprouts again.
Every child has many parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, grandparents. The grandparents are the dead and the hills. Children of the earth and of the sun, watered by she-rains and he-rains, we are all related to the seeds, to the corn plants, to the rivers, and to the foxes that announce how the year will unfold. The stones are related to the snakes and to the lizards. Corn and beans, brothers to each other, grow up together without squabbling. Potatoes are the daughters and mothers of those who plant them, because he who creates is created.
Everything is sacred, and we are too. Sometimes we are gods and the gods, sometimes, are just little people.
That’s what is said, what is known, among the Indians of the Andes.
* * *
* * *
The Music
He was a magician with the harp. On the prairies of Colombia, no fiesta could take place without him. Mesé Figueredo had to be there with his dancing fingers that delighted the breeze and made legs go wild.
One night, on his way to a wedding, he was mugged on a lonely path. Mesé was on one mule, the harp on another, when the robbers jumped him and beat him to a pulp.
The next day someone found him lying in the road, a bloody bunch of rags more dead than alive. In what remained of his voice, that scrap of flesh said, “They took the mules.”
He said, “They took the harp.”
“But,” he breathed and laughed, “they didn’t take the music.”
* * *
Truth lies in the voyage, not the port. There is no greater truth than the search for truth. Are we condemned to crime? We all know that we human creatures are busy devouring our neighbors and devastating the planet, but we also know that we would not be here if our distant Paleolithic grandparents hadn’t learned to adapt to the natural world to which they belonged and hadn’t been capable of sharing what they hunted and gathered. Living wherever, living however, living whenever, each person contains many possible persons. Every day, the ruling system places our worst characteristics at center stage, condemning our best to languish behind the backdrop. The system of power is not in the least eternal. We may be badly made, but we’re not finished, and it’s the adventure of changing reality and changing ourselves that makes our blip in the history of the universe worthwhile, this fleeting warmth between two glaciers that is us.
THE RIGHT TO RAVE
The new millennium is upon us, though the matter shouldn’t be taken too seriously. After all, the year 2001 for Christians is 1379 for Moslems, 5114 for Mayans, and 5762 for Jews. The new millennium starts on January 1 only because one fine day the senate of imperial Rome decided to end the tradition of celebrating the new year at the beginning of spring. The number of years in the Christian Era is a matter of whim as well: another fine day the pope in Rome decided to assign a date to the birth of Jesus, even though nobody knows when he was born.
Time pays no attention to the borders we erect to fool ourselves into believing we control it. Even so, the millennium is a frontier the whole world both celebrates and fears.
AN INVITATION TO FLIGHT
The millennium is a good opportunity for orators of inflated eloquence to spout off on the destiny of humanity and for the agents of God’s ire to announce the end of the world and other assorted calamities, while time itself continues its long, tight-lipped march through eternity and mystery.
The truth is, who can resist? On such a date, arbitrary though it is, everyone is tempted to wonder about the time to come. And just how is anyone to know? Only one thing is certain: in the twenty-first century, we’ll all be people from the last century and, what’s worse, we’ll be from the last millennium.
If we can?
??t guess what’s coming, at least we have the right to imagine the future we want. In 1948 and again in 1976, the United Nations proclaimed long lists of human rights, but the immense majority of humanity enjoys only the rights to see, hear, and remain silent. Suppose we start by exercising the never-proclaimed right to dream? Suppose we rave a bit? Let’s set our sights beyond the abominations of today to divine another possible world:
• the air shall be cleansed of all poisons except those born of human fears and human passions;
• in the streets, cars shall be run over by dogs;
• people shall not be driven by cars, or programmed by computers, or bought by supermarkets, or watched by televisions;
• the TV set shall no longer be the most important member of the family and shall be treated like an iron or a washing machine;
• people shall work for a living instead of living for work;
• written into law shall be the crime of stupidity, committed by those who live to have or to win, instead of living just to live like the bird that sings without knowing it and the child who plays unaware that he or she is playing;
• in no country shall young men who refuse to go to war go to jail, rather only those who want to make war;
• economists shall not measure living standards by consumption levels or the quality of life by the quantity of things;
• cooks shall not believe that lobsters love to be boiled alive;
• historians shall not believe that countries love to be invaded;
• politicians shall not believe that the poor love to eat promises;
• earnestness shall no longer be a virtue, and no one shall be taken seriously who can’t make fun of himself;
• death and money shall lose their magical powers, and neither demise nor fortune shall make a virtuous gentleman of a rat;
• no one shall be considered a hero or a fool for doing what he believes is right instead of what serves him best;
• the world shall wage war not on the poor but rather on poverty, and the arms industry shall have no alternative but to declare bankruptcy;
• food shall not be a commodity nor shall communications be a business, because food and communication are human rights;
• no one shall die of hunger, because no one shall die from overeating;
• street children shall not be treated like garbage, because there shall be no street children;
• rich kids shall not be treated like gold, because there shall be no rich kids;
• education shall not be the privilege of those who can pay;
• the police shall not be the curse of those who cannot pay;
• justice and liberty, Siamese twins condemned to live apart, shall meet again and be reunited, back to back;
• a woman, a black woman, shall be president of Brazil, and another black woman shall be president of the United States; an Indian woman shall govern Guatemala and another Peru;
• in Argentina, the crazy women of the Plaza de Mayo shall be held up as examples of mental health because they refused to forget in a time of obligatory amnesia;
• the Church, holy mother, shall correct the typos on the tablets of Moses and the Sixth Commandment shall dictate the celebration of the body;
• the Church shall also proclaim another commandment, the one God forgot: You shall love nature, to which you belong;
• clothed with forests shall be the deserts of the world and of the soul;
• the despairing shall be paired and the lost shall be found, for they are the ones who despaired and lost their way from so much lonely seeking;
• we shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist;
• perfection shall remain the boring privilege of the gods, while in our bungling, messy world every night shall be lived as if it were the last and every day as if it were the first.
* * *
A Question
In the twelfth century, the official geographer of the kingdom of Sicily, al-Idrisi, drew a map of the world, the world that Europe knew about, with south on top and north on the bottom. That was common in mapmaking back then. And that’s how the map of South America was drawn eight centuries later, with south on top, by Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García. “Our north is south,” he said. “To go north, our ships go down, not up.”
If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?
* * *
This book was completed in August 1998. Check your local newspaper for an update.
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THE LOOKING-GLASS SCHOOL
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