Venezuela: un invierno sin fin

 

Ilustración hecha por mi con imágenes propias, tomadas de Wikimedia Commons y de macedoniadelnorte.com.

Este artículo fue publicado originalmente en Global Voices en Español.

Una de las experiencias más extrañas que he vivido es sufrir del trastorno afectivo estacional (TAE), la famosa seasonal depression, habiendo crecido al norte del sur en la Venezuela donde el frío extremo es de 15 grados Celsius. Si de pequeño jamás imaginaría que el día podría acabar a las 4:27 p.m., mucho menos podría creer que dicha reducción de horas de sol haría que todo se vea tan gris. Literal y figurativamente, el paisaje post-yugoslavo de Mostar, en Bosnia y Herzegovina, pasa de un pintoresco color crema al más distópico gris en unas semanas.

Es 15 de septiembre y estás nadando entre agua y felicidad en un río con tus amigos. Pestañeas y estás refunfuñando bajo tres abrigos el 15 de octubre. La facilidad con la que el clima es capaz de cambiar vidas nunca deja de sorprenderme, pero tampoco de agradarme: después de todo — y a pesar del cambio climático — las certezas siempre se aprecian. Y es que, creciendo en Venezuela, jamás sufrí de TAE pero tampoco tuve ninguna certeza.

En Venezuela, un día estaba abriendo regalos de Navidad — a la medianoche, como debe ser — rodeado de los 25 familiares que asistían a nuestra cena familiar y, al siguiente, estaba intentando no llorar mientras llamaba a mi tía justo antes que ella entrase al chequeo del Aeropuerto Internacional de Maiquetía sabiendo que, probablemente, no la volvería a ver en muchos años. Sin importar cuánta incertidumbre me rodeaba mientras crecía, jamás me acostumbré.

Vivir sin saber qué va a pasar mañana es, hasta cierto punto, realizable. Vivir viendo cómo el mañana es cada vez peor no lo es. Sin importar cuán normal es ver la mesa de la cena navideña reducirse cada vez más ni cuántos amigos despedí, no creo que exista una forma de acostumbrarse al dolor que da ser venezolano. Cuando me mudé a Bosnia y Herzegovina, en 2023, pensé que las heridas empezarían a cicatrizar.

Y qué error.

Bosnia es un país destruido. Desde las ventanas de mi colegio, el Colegio del Mundo Unido en Mostar, puedo ver la redoma central de la ciudad y contar al menos mil orificios de bala en las paredes. La ciudad sigue dividida de facto entre católicos y musulmanes, es prácticamente imposible preguntar sobre política local siendo un estudiante internacional y, cuando hay un partido de fútbol, los conflictos étnicos explotan transfigurados en enfrentamientos violentos que provocan el colapso absoluto de la ciudad.

Obviamente, es imposible olvidar tu propio país destruido cuando estás en otro. Cambia católicos y musulmanes por chavistas y opositores para entender cómo funciona Los Teques, mi ciudad. Cuenta los orificios de bala en el centro de Mostar, multiplícalo por dos y tendrás una idea de la cantidad de bombas lacrimógenas que han entrado en el patio del edificio donde viví casi toda mi vida. No importa cuánto tiempo pase ni cuántas veces lo niegue, Venezuela no sale de mi.

El 10 de enero, el día que la Constitución de Venezuela fija como la investidura oficial de los nuevos presidentes, fue la mayor prueba de eso. Sí, estoy sufriendo de TAE, pero la noche que pasé sin dormir no fue exactamente por el viento que sonaba en mi ventana. Intentar explicar qué ocurrió el 10 de enero en Venezuela es tan simple que cuesta explicar el insomnio de treinta millones de almas alrededor del mundo: en términos literales, el 10 de enero fue un día más. En realidad, fue el día en que perdimos la ilusión. Otra vez.

Ese día, se supone que Edmundo González, el legítimo ganador de las elecciones del pasado 28 de julio, se iba a juramentar como presidente de Venezuela. Por mil razones, no pasó — y la voluntad de más de siete millones de nosotros quedó en nada. Pero, aun así, pasé toda la noche sin dormir.

Refrescando X (anteriormente Twitter), Telegram y WhatsApp, hablando con mis familiares y debatiendo con mis amigos, mi venezolanidad me impide dejar a un lado la incertidumbre y, con ella, la esperanza. Sí, lo admito: pasé todo el día esperando que algo pasase y la niebla que se cierne sobre mi país desde hace 25 años desapareciera súbitamente. Aun cuando no sea la primera vez que entramos en un período donde tendría sentido que seamos libres ni mucho menos la primera vez que tenemos a un presidente legítimo incapaz de acceder a su cargo, yo tenía esperanza.

Es una cuestión, casi, de temporada. Cada cierto tiempo, la plaga de la esperanza siempre termina contagiándose. No importa cuántas veces me haya querido rendir, haya desinstalado todo medio de comunicación e intentado olvidar que me importa mi país, al final siempre termino ansioso. Desde ver aviones en FlightRadar24 especulando qué cargará cada uno de los jets privados que sobrevolaron Caracas ese día hasta organizar eventos divulgativos en donde sea que esté, no puedo evitar dejarme llevar por la ansiedad de soñar con una Venezuela libre.

Se siente casi tan inevitable como el TAE: así como Mostar me deprime por temporadas y no puedo hacer nada contra ello, Venezuela me esperanza — y defrauda — con cada acontecimiento político que parece arrojar algo de luz al final del túnel. No lo puedo evitar: es una cuestión estacional.

Y, sin embargo, cada estación se siente diferente. Cada vez que siento esperanza por una Venezuela mejor, se siente más absurda pero más necesaria. Con cada pequeño evento que parece romper las cadenas que han acorralado a mi país desde antes que naciese, no puedo evitar sino sentir un impulso de entregarme ciegamente a las rutas de la ilusión.

A diferencia del invierno, la temporada de esperanza no siempre es igual. El invierno es siempre frío: la esperanza nunca viene dos veces de la misma forma. A veces viene en forma de actas y a veces en tuits crípticos presagiando alguna solución que caería del cielo, pero siempre viene.

Mientras no pueda hacer nada contra ella, sigo la corriente. Sin importar cuántas veces me defraude, no lo puedo evitar: imaginar que mi país llegará a un desenlace es una oferta demasiado tentadora para alguna vez rechazarla. Y, mientras no la pueda rechazar, me preparo para el momento en que pueda hacer algo.

Así como en Mostar compro vitaminas y preparo abrigos para cuando el invierno llegue, no puedo evitar sino hacer lo que pueda para recibir el día en que nuestras esperanzas se hagan realidad. No puedo hacer mucho para que lleguemos a ese punto, pero hago lo que puedo para estar listo cuando las esperanzas sean ciertas.

Lo hago porque creo que, así como el invierno pasa, algún día llegará nuestra estación.

Let Bolívar die (194 years after his death)

When I went to the third year of high school — ninth grade in the Venezuelan system — there was nothing to raise any kind of alarm about the fact that I would spend an entire year studying the life and work of a single person. A person of my stature and, perhaps, my size. A person like any other who, by chance, happened to be in the perfect place at the perfect time to liberate a good part of Spanish-speaking America from the Spanish yoke. A character as great as Simón Bolívar.

At the moment, I live in Mostar. I am fortunate to study at the United World College located there, one of the few colleges in the world that exists with a mission — to help heal post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Walking through streets still riddled with bullet holes and hiding from the attacks of nationalist hooligans, I’m not quite clear whether my school has fully achieved that premise. However, I have no doubt learned valuable lessons about what can lead a country to its destruction.

And, if I know anything, it is that fanaticism plays a crucial role in it. In the Yugoslavia of the early 1990s, fanaticism about belonging to one or another nation very diffusely defined on the basis of geographical and religious boundaries led to the first genocide in post-1945 Europe and completely destroyed a once successful country. In Venezuela, the destruction is undoubted. But the reasons are not so clear.

While trying to understand Venezuela is a mission as complicated as it is useless, celebrating the anniversary of the Liberator’s death from Europe seems irresistibly paradoxical to me. Celebrating the one who liberated Venezuela from one dictatorship while I am out of the country because of another seems to me not only a bad joke. I find it disrespectful, both to my country and to the figure of Bolivar alone.

In Mostar, I study with people from more than a hundred countries. And there is not a single one of them who has managed to understand the fact that, in Venezuela, we dedicate a whole year of history classes to study a single person. The cult of Simón Bolívar not only has tints of a fanaticism that perhaps sheds light on our current darkness, but it also ignores the fact that he was also a person like us.

To generate a quasi-religious cult over a person, as the Venezuelan educational system and society do over Bolivar, not only elevates that person to a level of intangibility that turns his mistakes -read the Letter of Jamaica- into “strategic moves” and is capable of turning any criticism about his figure into a kind of betrayal typical of the logic of the Inquisition. But this is only a superficial problem.

The biggest problem with deifying Bolivar, and anyone else, is that it makes us forget that it is humans who liberate countries, not gods. If we wait for our hero to arrive on a white horse, we will spend our days looking at the mountains and never look for the hero in us.

Bolivar could have sat in his hacienda reading Rousseau and listening to his wife play some Boccherini. We would have no idea who he was because he decided to do something different. While we wait for a second Bolivar to arrive on his white horse, we let the opportunities to become him pass us by.

As long as we wait for Bolivar with his picture and holidays, we will be disrespecting him.

Five days, eleven countries, one playlist: a musical journey through Latin America

 

This article was originally published for The Mostarian Current, UWC Mostar's student newspaper. Feel free to listen to the playlist accompanying this article at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ZlcSYzjZwL4tLo6zQvJae?si=61e51e183b5d4524!

The Ibero-American Culture Week is not the one with the most members nor the best-funded one. It is not very old and, when it started, it was not even exclusive: footage from the late North American, Latin American and Nordic Culture Week 2013 exists as proof of it. To be fair, there is not much about the numbers of our Culture Week that make it particularly special.

Yet, it is. Every year, for one week, every room in our school gets filled with the joy and happiness of that uncharacterized essence of being Latino that we all can tell but no one can pinpoint. That beautiful thing that goes beyond the lyrics of Bad Bunny or the spice of tacos and, despite its apparent superficiality, truly means more than anything words can convey.

Thankfully, humankind has means of communication apart from words. Even if Latin America has many writers with the grandeur of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the glamour of Julio Cortazar, the one language our region has mastered is that of music. From protest anthems to club classics, the indescribable essence of being Latino fills pentagrams with more ease than paragraphs.

Although our music could fill history textbooks one after another and one of our favorite skills is the art of yapping, the Ibero-American Culture Week is also about explaining what Latino means in a condensed, week-long format. As so, here is a written playlist with five Latino songs for five Latino days.

Monday – Nos Siguen Pegando Abajo, Charly García

Latin America is obsessed with life because it is constantly threatened with death. We are a region filled with art, but also were the escape vent for several Nazi leaders. Our lively music is a manifestation of happiness as much as it is a political statement, and if there is anyone who realized -and mastered- this it’s Charly García (Buenos Aires, 1951).

An absolute musical prodigy who had perfect pitch at age six, Garcia’s musical breakthrough came at age 21 with Canción para mi Muerte (Song for my Death), the first single of his band Sui Generis (1969-1975). Heavily influenced by tango and classical music, García could be considered the biggest rockstar our region has ever seen: a life of drugs, sex and rock’n’roll led him to jump from the balcony of a 9-story building in 2000 simply because “he felt like it”.

He survived. And this was not even the most life-threatening situation he put himself in: as part of the generation most affected by the Argentine dictatorship that put the country in a chokehold from 1976 to 1983, he had to exile himself in Brazil because of the heavy political undertone of his songs. Near the end of the dictatorship, when the Falkland/Malvinas war was at its peak, his song “No Bombardeen Buenos Aires” (Don’t Bomb Buenos Aires) became a hit that cost him another exile.

Now from New York, his album Clics Modernos (Modern Clix) was his definitive leap into history. Perhaps the most innovative album in the history of Latin American music, it introduced the concept of sampling into Spanish-speaking music as much as it defied the authoritarian shade that seems to wrap our countries so often.

Nos Siguen Pegando Abajo (They Keep Hitting Us Low) is all about being hit, but standing up and following. With its upbeat atmosphere and García’s raging vocals, there is nothing about this song that does not scream for life from a deeper concern for death. Whether under the Videla regime that destroyed Argentina or the Castro regime that still suffocates Cuba, we Latinos keep claiming for life.

Even if they keep hitting us low.

Tuesday – El Gran Varón, Willie Colón

My father can be considered an innocently homophobic character. As he puts it, “he does not have anything against LGBTQ+ people”, but he refuses to learn what LGBTQ+ means and would rather have me as a “true straight man”. On a calm Sunday afternoon, I was driving around my town with him and holding the grand post of changing the music when El Gran Varón played.

Despite him being a prime example of what can be described as a “rock dad”, he loves salsa. We all love salsa, whether or not we like to admit it. As this song played, we both happily sang along: as it came to an end, we proclaim the mandatory “temazo” that comes after any good track is played and I ask him how he feels about vibing to a song about a trans person that died during the HIV pandemic of the eighties.

-Wait, what? –he exclaimed. At his 58 years of age, he had never realized he spent most of his life dancing to El Gran Varón, a song published in 1989 narrating the story of Simón, a Panamanian boy whose dad called him “The Great Man” despite him transitioning after leaving his country in order to escape from homophobia.

Always critical, Willie Colón (New York, 1950) is an artist whose pieces are as danceable as they are masterful pieces of social commentary. Within the bigger picture of the salsa movement, the utmost Latino genre that was nonetheless born in the Bronx, his wittiness is not an exception: practically every single salsero has pieces like El Gran Varón, where censorship is avoided by camouflaging critique under trumpet beats.

After some discussion, my dad accepts it. For his whole life, this subtly homophobic character had been singing to a song about a trans woman dying away from his rejecting family. El Gran Varón is as much about dancing as it is about defending LGBTQ+ rights in an era where no one dared to. Latin America is as much about dancing as it is about standing up and fighting.

Wednesday – Aquarela do Brasil, Francisco Alves

Something often understated about Latin America is how huge it is. Most of the Latin Americans in our school have been in more European countries than in Latin American countries apart from their own: considering how inequitable the access to elite education institutions like UWC is in Latin America, it is no small thing. Not even middle to high-class people can afford to travel inside our continent because it is simply gigantic.

And one of the few songs that manage to catch this dimension is Aquarela do Brasil (Watercolor of Brazil), a classic samba looking to paint a full picture of Brazil through narrating the lives of characters typical of the country’s society. As sparkled with social consciousness as the previous two songs, a charming brunette (morena sestrosa) who looks beautifully careless is portrayed as Brazil to the same extent to which a recently freed Black mother is.

In its delightful calmness, Aquarela do Brasil shows a country of contrasts spread over a canvas of jungle and savannah. Legend has it that this song was written because its composer, Ary Barroso, could not leave his house due to a strong thunderstorm and, as so, he sat down and simply wrote one of the most important songs of Brazilian history.

Yet, importance does not always come for free. Ary Barroso (Ubá, 1903) is the creator of the Samba-exaltação movement, a musical wave started in 1939 aimed at the exaltation of the beauty of Brazil through a markedly jingoist perspective that sought to impulse listeners to ignore the horrors of the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship.

Vargas, the most influential Brazilian politician of the 20th century, is the root of many of the problems that today the country faces, ranging from the rise of the far right to the countless abuses committed by corporations. His two governing terms shaped Brazil as it is today and are now looked at as one of the worst moments in the country’s history.

Still, Aquarela do Brasil did not fail in its description of the country. Perhaps one of the main reasons why authoritarianism is so successful is precisely because it never fails to understand what it is ruling over.

Thursday – Dame un Break – Rawayana

Latinos are the tightest community ever once they fly out of the territory encompassed from the Rio Grande down to Patagonia: besides that, there is barely any sense of a Latino community save for the fact that we all listen to reggaetón –a musical genre born inside the United States. Yet, each country has a particular sense of belonging for certain regions, mostly ascribed to linguistic and geographical boundaries.

Brazil is mostly understood as an outlier because they speak Portuguese. Argentina and Uruguay get confused not only because of the sun in their flags, but also because they receive about the same amount of sun each year, which is basically nothing compared to the Caribbean solecito we have in Venezuela and Central America. When a country’s population is dispersed across more than one geographic region, differences occur: in Colombia, for example, you should not dare mix up a costeño and a paisa because they live on different sides of the Panama Canal.

As a Venezuelan, I always saw myself as especially Caribbean. Even though I grew up in a mountainous area, I had never been more than 100km away from the Caribbean sea until I came to Mostar and a year without going to the beach was something totally unheard of for me. Venezuela’s football is also as terrible as that of the Caribbean countries, but our baseball pitchers are the world’s best. 

Rawayana (Caracas, 2007) is precisely about the inner conflict of the Venezuelan identity. Its name comes from the Hindu saga Ramayana, but most people think it sounds “indigenous” simply because the indigenous tribes that inhabit Venezuela are extremely removed from the population centers. Its members all speak fluent English and come from one of the country’s most prestigious schools, but every Venezuelan knows the lyrics to at least five of their songs. Because, in the end, we are all the same.

Dame un Break (Gimme a Break)’s Spanglish is all about that: we are all the same, so chill out. It is fair that Latin America is the world’s capital of beaches and stunning landscapes: we love to take little breaks. We might as well take them in front of a beautiful sea.

Well, Bolivia cannot. Chile took their seafront. And god, are they pissed about it: there is nothing worse for a Latino than not being able to go to the beach.

Friday – Voy a pasármelo bien – Hombres G

A matter of debate that arises every time one tries to list Latin American countries is whether Spain and Portugal count. The UWC Mostar community, de facto, has settled in favor of the Iberian peninsula being an honorary Latino non-American region: Voy a pasármelo bien (I am gonna have a good time) is a perfect piece of evidence that sustains the case.

Hombres G (Madrid, 1981) is a deeply Spaniard product. The members of the band met in the hallways of Spain’s national broadcasting company and their lyrics are filled with references to cultural phenomena absolutely non existent in Latin America “proper”: for instance, in Devuélveme a mi chica, their most popular song, a reference is made to a teenager owning a car -something impossible in most of our economies. However, geography is not determinant of being Latino or not.

And Voy a pasármelo bien could not exist in any other culture. A totally hedonistic song with a melody that could perfectly be signed by The Police, its main purpose is to narrate the drive one feels right before waking up on a day you know you will party. From jumping to have breakfast to rushfully calling each of your friends asking to go with you, there is hardly any way to describe how exciting it is to go to a Latino party better than Hombres G does in this song.

As a teenager in 2024, I cannot help but agree with their descriptions: yet, this is a 35 year old song. Since 1989, the entire way in which parties work has changed: the music is different, the drinks are stronger and the entertainment is, perhaps, more obscene. However, the drive is the same.

Latin American parties are all about a drive that stays the same from generation to generation. In each one of them, there is a certain seminal feeling that leads to unexplainable levels of energy: they start at 8:00 p.m. and finish at 6:00 a.m. the earliest, but one does not feel the need to sit down at any point in time.

And, yet, they are simply one of the aspects of our culture that are plagued with this vibrance and happiness only we have. That makes our Culture Week a memorable event for the entire school despite us living almost six thousand miles away. That helps us withstand the blows of authoritarian dictatorships and sharply criticize them.

Being Latino is something special. It is a feeling of contradiction, of constant worry and extreme happiness. A state of constant nervousness for whatever is happening around you that, nonetheless, makes you experience each moment with a different kind of amazement.

And I hope that, for a week, you can join us. Welcome to a week of awe, happiness, laughter and loudness.

Welcome to the Ibero-American Culture Week 2024.

 

This article was originally published for The Mostarian Current, UWC Mostar's student newspaper.

To travel is to choose. The sole decision of a place to visit constitutes an exercise of perfect discrimination, the apprehension of a single destination being a deliberate choice to ignore the nuances and ridges of all other fields one could know: as Autumn Break approaches, hundreds of friend-forming Split experiences will be left behind for story-writing Budapest trips or rakija-infused Sarajevo adventures. And, yet, we love to travel. There is nothing wrong about it, is there?

For sure not. In a school where the overall travel destinations of all its students most likely amounts to most of the countries in the world, reprobating travel would not only be a direct attack to the student body but also a deep critique of the sole idea of our school. However, the one day dedicated to embracing the values and ideas that bring together every single one of us seems like little more than that.

UWC Day, with its countless flags and its ever rumbling noise, is the spotlight of the year. Perhaps not in a metaphorical sense, but most definitely in a literal one: as per the Cambridge dictionary, a spotlight is “a lamp whose beam can be directed, or a circle of light produced by such a lamp”. To put something in the spotlight is like choosing a travel destination: an exercise of ignoring the rest of the realities and details of the scenario, another instance of the small discrimination acts we need to do in order to carry on with our lives.

And discrimination, per se, does not involve any negative connotations. When I choose to put pesto instead of ajvar on my toast, I am discriminating: after all, it is nothing but the practice of judging the quality of something based on similar things, to see the difference. Yet, the set of judgments and expectations that lead to one’s discriminatory choices has to be carefully chosen, plier-treated in order for it not to turn into the unfair discrimination that turns into pure mistreatment.

When I choose to travel to Istanbul instead of going to Amsterdam, I am making a choice based on a set of resources, realities and preferences that lead to a mostly fair decision -for myself. However, when we all collectively choose to reduce the mere essence of our national identities to flags and food, are we really being fair to our own identities and our collective essence as a school? 

Through the way that UWC Day currently works, as a flag-infused food feast, our national identities are not only recognized but also exacerbated. In the UWC Mostar Facts and Figures booklet available in the school’s website, there is a quote by Goran Batić that states that the school produces “citizens aware of the traps of the predominant nationalistic discourses in the country and across the globe”.

By standing in front of our flags, proudly wearing them as some sort of Roman wreath, we are not aware but, instead, victims of nationalistic discourses. UWC Day, in its atmosphere of union and fraternity, does nothing but put a veil under a dead bride. With every nationalistic hand sign thrown at flags crafted way before we were born, carrying meanings we can hardly grasp, we laugh at the very foundational ideas that are meant to make UWC Mostar the fabulous place it is meant to be.

If I was to base my impressions of the world on attending the 80 Minutes around the World event, I would not even understand the purpose of having something like a United World College. If every country is ajar with food and a haven of dance and happiness, why would I even travel for hours and hours to be in another one? Why unite our world at all, if we are doing so great by ourselves?

A summatory argument might be used to answer this question: we are so great by ourselves that we are even greater together. Following this argumentative line, the problems that arise with the idea of a united world are small next to the potential they bear. This is easily refuted by the essential failure of initiatives that are meant to bring people and nations together: yes, the fact that there is not a single UWC Day that goes without a flag dispute is an instance of it, but the abandonment ziggurats of every UN building are also a sad proof of it.

A reason why we should step forward and stop the idea of international integration as putting two flags next to each other. Imagining that the best we can do as a representation of the United World is to dance, eat and take pictures is reducing the years and years of history of this school to a questionable version of the infamous European Union barcode flag, but it is also an amazing sign of how much we can do right now.

First and foremost, we should stop ignoring the elephant in the room: politics. The opening paragraph of the very first document that led to the founding of UWC Mostar states that “The College will be a deeply political initiative”, and we seem to be drifting further and further away from an acknowledgement of it. Imagining international integration as a lot of dances is a political statement against a true implementation of it: if we all present our own, by ourselves, we are arguing against integration.

If being Latino, local, American or any other of the multitude of labels we seem to carry on our foreheads defines our engagement with the day that is meant to embrace the idea of our school, we are reducing the possibility of integration to a simple presentation. Not even a dialogue, just a joint statement. And, in reality, history shows that integration is an unpleasant process. For true integration to occur in the lightest of ways, at least years of dialogue need to take place: even within the European Union, for example, bitter disagreements are the order of the day in any of its organisms.

Yet, it works more or less well. But it does not work in spite of disagreements, but thanks to its public acknowledgement and proper channelling of them. For UWC Day to work, we have to stop smiling at flags and start questioning them: we have to zoom into each one of the stars that are in them and ask ourselves why they are there. When we look at foods, we have to ask ourselves why they are the way they are. The continuum of national identities and cultures is all about nuances, about the sharp edges of what we call ours and what we call theirs.

Asking ourselves why carrots are orange, why are Kebabs German or why do Colombians and Venezuelans call slightly different foods the same only to argue about who it belongs to does stir arguments, but it also allows us for an increased understanding of why our school is the way it is. Understanding Mostar, if such a mission can be achieved, is a rocky road.

And rocky roads cannot be just ignored. If one is to drive through them, we have to be mindful of the state of our tires and make sure that we are ready to go down and replace them if anything happens. If UWC Day is a solely pleasant experience, something is going wrong. Trying to make it so is what drives conflict.

Yes, we are different. Some of us want to travel to Dubrovnik, some of us want to go to Belgrade and some of us will just fly back home: that creates a sense of us and a sense of them, but it does not mean we have to abide by those labels as a guiding principle. I am Venezuelan, so my national identity is deeply connected to colonialism, but this does not mean I will cry at every single mention of a Spanish flag… because, oh well, I am also Portuguese. And my best friend is Brazilian.

We are not our countries, our dances or our food. Arguing for an idea of UWC Day that is based on individuality as the sole source of shared identity is ignoring the fact that our differences are not what brings us together and that we are not ambassadors of the places we come from. I am more than a Venezuelan flag or an Arepa filled with cheese from Travnik.

UWC is more than flags standing together and foodstuffs being actively stolen. It’s more about arguing and then hugging, about recognizing how much we can hate each other and actively choosing not to do so.

Education in Literature: can we really teach how to read?

A historically common notion is that a cult person is “well-read”. Someone being considered so holds such a strong cultural significant that even in the One Thousand and One Nights Scheherazade is described as “well read and well bred” in exactly that order in an era where descendance would be expected to be more important than women’s literature. Someone being considered well-read matters so much that we seem to center our entire educational system around achieving a student that complies with such qualities. And my theory is that we fail at doing so.

I have always loved reading. One of the few things that I always carry with myself, no matter where I am, are the copies of The Little Prince and the Silmarillion my mom had because the former was the first book I ever read and the latter was the first book that gave me goosebumps: in other words, I always carry them with myself because one introduced me to the beauty of life and the other made me truly experience it. For me, the pleasure I find in reading cannot be really described through any of the catch phrases on the walls of school libraries and book shops because reading is not a single dimensional experience.

Sometimes, I read to escape reality: yet, I also do so to submerge myself into it. Sometimes, I read because I want to write something good: yet, I have found myself more than once doing so because I did not want to write anything at all. Sometimes, I read because I am: but I also do it because I do not want to be. My main agreement with History classes is the placement of the beginning of History right at the moment when some ill-occupied guy in Mesopotamia decided to start writing solely because I cannot see myself as part of a non-reading humanity.

And, even though this Manifesto(ish) might sound as proper of that one guy in English class that has read every book in the curriculum five years before taking the class, that cannot be further away from reality. My experiences with Literature classes all throughout my education involve a lot of despair, frustration and uncomfortable meetings as much as it does count a lot of different teaching methods that range from the well-planned International Baccalaureate curriculum to whatever my seventh grade teacher in Venezuela had going on. Or, better put, whatever she hadn’t.

The main concern this has always created in my mind, besides the grades end aspect of not getting along with your teacher in the Venezuelan preference-based education system, is that I could never come up with a way of making fellow students love Literature as much as I do. As any other teenager in the digital era, I am placed at the point of the Dunning-Kruger curve where there are many problems I would be oddly confident about having a solution for: how bad does a problem need to be in order for me to be clueless about it?

Just like falling in love is a desperate situation since you don’t know how to preach the devotion you feel for your other half to the rest of the world, not having a clue on how to make people love a subject as much as you do burns you every time you hear someone say they hate reading and cuts your skin every time a SparkNotes document is able to summarize everything you need to know about a book for your class. With Literature in particular, I always found a strange overlap between books I despised and books I had to do for class: does correlation really not imply causality?

In this case, probably. The way I have been exposed to the books I love varies starkly with the standard method of discussing literature in a classroom setting, but also between themselves: if using the example of these two now crusty books I always carry with myself, I got into The Little Prince by reading it next to my mom before going to bed and I got into The Silmarillion by browsing my house’s small bookshelf during a boring summer afternoon. These two setting differences are small but significant in the way meaning for these books has built up throughout my life: could we really achieve meaningfulness for readers under a standardized classroom setting?

Many questions, not that many answers. As I once heard the philosopher David Finkelstein say, philosophy should not be a free fall: considering how commonly literature is associated with this field, I think this premise expands to it. Literature should always be about asking questions and actively seeking for answers to them: as so, while teaching it, we should keep doing so. And, in my opinion, the main reason why literature is not like any other subject to be taught is because there is truly no way of conventionally making someone be “well read”.

There can always be some common agreement on how to measure someone’s proficiency in math or chemistry: of course, an amazing topologist might be awful at number theory and an organic chemist might barely have a superficial idea of crystallography, but all of them definitely know differential calculus or Lewis structures. With Literature, two teenagers can be considered amazing at it within their contexts without having read a single work in common.

Even the definition of “classics” can be somewhat fuzzy at times: To Kill a Mockingbird is a must in all English-speaking frameworks, but I truly have no idea of the translation of that title to Spanish and most likely none of my non-Venezuelan friends knew what Doña Bárbara was before listening to any of my political rants about my country’s situation. Hence, how could we ever come to an agreement on how to teach literature?

Here comes my answer, and it is that it is impossible to come to such a compromise. There are so many books in the world that hold a similar level of essentiality that we could never expect someone to have read all of them and there are so many cultures equally reliant on Literature that it is impossible to have a true identity if opting for a certain stone-set curriculum. Yet, a full contract does not imply the lack of some sense of consensus.

In such consensus, I think we should all recognize, in and out of our classrooms, the essential idea of the freedom of the reader. I am as free to despise Doctor Zhivago as much as anyone can consider Harry Potter to be the best succession of characters ever written, and both of us will be as entitled to our opinions as anyone else is. And the freedom of the reader finds an important corollary in the fact that, since opinions exist, we cannot omit them.

Classrooms are full of diversity of views: why not take advantage of Literature classes to embrace them? If someone dislikes a book, a conversation about it with someone who loves it won’t probably change the views but open up new reflection horizons. And, if a classroom has a particular opinion matrix in book taste, why not take it into account when crafting reading lists for such class?

Here, the challenge of standardization comes into play. In a system where everything is stone-frozen like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, flexibility is basically a physical paradox: hence, it has to be accounted for in the sole design of the course. The starting point can always be the same, but I truly think that a classroom is too chaotical of a system to keep the same literary tendencies throughout the course of a year.

And, as more reflection is put in the question of learning how to make someone a well-read individual, a mathematically inductive reasoning can be useful. We all learn how to read in different settings, with different circumstances and even slightly different outcomes: yet, the point is that we all learn how to read.

Why don’t we recognize this diverse nature of the literature learning process in creating the systems that do nothing but build upon these fundamental pillars?

Education in literature can never be perfect. That’s why it’s worth the while to shoot a shot at always improving it further.

Crisis-hopping: a tale of worlds seeming to fall apart

The following text was written as I watched the news of my home country, Venezuela, two days before the presidential elections that will take place on Sunday, June 28th. Paranoia, anxiety and nerves are very present throughout its body. It is totally based on songs I listened to while writing it: however, the playlist is left as an exercise for the reader to enjoy.

On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt in a rally in Pennsylvania. On the same day, I was arriving at the Chicago O’Hare airport after some twelve hours of traveling from Caracas, Venezuela. There, the engines were starting for the presidential campaign of our first somewhat free election in more than a decade; however, I could not register for the electoral roll because I am currently studying in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country with the most complicated political system in the world. Five days later, I lost contact with one of my best friends because she is from Bangladesh and, due to the current wave of protests taking place in her country, the internet connection was shut down across the entire territory. Now I’m here (now I’m here) // Think I’ll stay around, around (think I’ll stay around, around)

Now, eleven days later, I am in a dormitory at Yale University, less than two hundred meters away from where the first arrests of the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses all across the United States happened, nervously texting my friends because it is the first time they will ever vote and, although we have some degree of hope in a change occurring on the elections set to take place on Sunday, we recognize deep within us the unlikelihood of such outcome. But if you close your eyes, // does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?

No, it does not. We tend to yearn for the past because its doors are all traversed and its paths all fixed, the graphs of its misadventures are all complete, and the metaphors of its misdoings are already well understood. Yet, for me the past houses nothing but the same dissatisfaction I feel for the present. As Mick Jagger put it back in 1964 and whose never-ending tours might express nothing but a continued commitment to such an idea, I can’t get no satisfaction // ’Cause I try and I try and I try and I try…

And here I am, a grateful product of my continual trying but just a simple residual of my own irrelevance. Even though eight years ago I might have dressed up as Trump for Halloween and watched the electoral college map of the United States change colors without really understanding what did each of these numbers mean and now I am at the very country where it all happened, do I really understand anything better now? As most of my blog posts refer to in some way, I feel as if I was a magnet of political despair and a victim of a constant sense of impending doom. Anyway, I don’t wanna be an American Idiot // don’t want a nation under the new media.

Why would I be? I am not American, anyways. I am, of course, not from Bosnia and Herzegovina either: in paper, all that associates me with such country is a sticker on my passport. My Portuguese passport, because there is no reason why I should travel with my Venezuelan one: we are negatively labeled all over the world, the names of my fellow nationals covering the streets of all major metropoles (and the documents of migration agencies) in search for a better future. So, maybe, I am not so Venezuelan either. I’d love to change the world, // but I don’t know what to do.

And, even if I did, would I be able to put this potentially unbearable knowledge into true practice? Probably not. The way things feel right now, nothing seems to be in place. Even though I cannot write about the political situation of my home country because its sheer simplicity makes it too dangerous to openly discuss, it is not hard to realize that the world is not at its highest point right now. Indeed, everything points at it being at its worst. Oh, has the world changed, or have I changed?

Wait, when was the song of the last paragraph published? According to Wikipedia, “”The Queen Is Dead” is a 1986 song by English alternative rock band the Smiths, appearing on their third studio album of the same name.”. This piece, which I am quoting now in what my literary self-esteem would love to call a very context-aware manner, was published 38 years ago -and 36 years before the Queen actually died! Has the world really changed that much? I do not think so. Even though everything seems to be about to tip over, hasn’t it always seemed like that? Haven’t we always been trying to cope by setting ourselves to be comfortably numb?

Yes, we definitely have. Yes, we definitely have. In 2019, when Venezuela seemed to be falling apart due to various reasons, including a couple of presidents, there were Euromaidan-like raging protests two blocks to the north of my house and queues to buy cauliflowers two blocks south. Two seemingly entirely different realities happening one right next to the other, less than a mile away. However, while their physical manifestation might have been totally different, I see them as two equally valid coping mechanisms of getting through the same struggles. As the Venezuelan band Sentimiento Muerto put it back long before we knew what chavismo was, it was all the magic of an absent sensation.

A sensation of having control over something we, as individuals, lack almost any kind of saying. Here I am, in the United States, a Venezuelan who lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina and can do nothing about any of these countries while, at the same time, feeling strongly connected to the struggles they all currently face. And not due to personal links, but because of simple exposure: if I was associated with other countries in any way, I would definitely be as concerned as I am right now due to different reasons. As it seems to be, the natural human state is one of worry, even though anyway the wind blows.

And, as I unnerve myself trying to contact my friend in Bangladesh, reading the news about Biden dropping out of the American presidential race, and trying to figure out what is going on in my very own home country,, I try to think that everything will be fine. And, if it won’t be so by itself, there are always small things we can make to slowly turn them that way. True care, truth brings.

I am often considered someone extremely pessimistic. Indeed, amongst my WhatsApp friend groups, many audios of me engaging in the strongest kind of complaining have made it to the pinned message pantheon. Yet, I do not see it that way: if there is something to complain about, why not point it out to the same extent that good things are enshrined? If you want it, here it is, come and get it // But you’d better hurry ’cause it’s goin’ fast

How can we get them if we don’t know where they are? As worlds seem to fall apart and I feel as if I am hopping between crises, I can’t choose but to try and make my best. For us to take, it’s all too much // Floating down the stream of time, of life to life with me

It certainly is all too much, but don’t you know it’s gonna be all right?

Venezuela’s Nutrition Facts Label

On November 8, 1990, George H.W. Bush signed into law the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act that mandated, from then on, for every single nutritional product sold in the United States to have a label specifying the amounts of certain nutrients present in sold food produce. Ever since this historical act was passed, most food products available in the Western hemisphere contain some sort of label explaining what is what in our food, making possible a quantitative understanding of our diets.

It is quite commonly understood that food cannot be solely described in kilocalories or mineral amounts. I hate broccoli with a passion that no number could ever describe, but I also love chocolate to an equally unfathomable degree. Numbers might say that Monster Energy cans have 160 mg of caffeine, but there is very likely not enough data available to the public about how many exams have been passed solely thanks to their effects. Trust me on that one.

Food is more than the nutrients it has. Food is the weaving fabric of our cultures, the tie that holds nations together and one of those things we long the most when we are away from where we come from. Wondering about this while I enjoyed a cachapa, one of the beloved maize products of Venezuelan gastronomy, after ten months away from home, I started to think how could I describe the complex mess of a country I come from solely through food.

When Bush signed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Louis W. Sullivan magnanimously stated that “The Tower of Babel in food labels has come down”. Let me only hope that this Nutrition Facts Label will help slowly tear down the Babel’s Towers currently trying to create an understanding of what Venezuela is.

If such a mission could ever be accomplished.

Nutrition Facts — Venezuela

Arepa -or disputes and showbiz-

If you have ever met any self-respecting Venezuelan, it is not a likelihood that you have heard about arepas: it is an absolute certainty. Although the dispute with Colombia over its ownership is our most meaningful ongoing international trouble -including the claims held over the Essequibo-, arepas occupy an undoubtedly important place in our national identity. It is, indeed, the only national dish of ours that has made a meaningful international breakthrough, appearing several times in media of the likes of the New York Times or the BBC.

This popularity makes up for a pivotal, if unfortunate, feature of what Venezuela’s society is like: showbiz. As a whole, it could be argued that we don’t love, live or laugh for anything with as much intensity as we do for showbiz. It is so deeply engrained within our societal DNA that the Spanish word for it, farándula, is used in our dialect as an adverb, an adjective and a noun.

As far as Venezuelan Spanish goes, you can do more than read showbiz: you can embody it yourself. And this is, perhaps, we voted for 15 years for a candidate whose main political merit was having an affair with Courtney Love.

Tequeños, the industrial life

In this entry, I sin of bias. And how could I not? Tequeños, a dish composed fried breaded cheese sticks, are pretty much the only noteworthy thing of my hometown of Los Teques, the city where they were created “a block away from where the plaque about it is”, if you are to ask my dad or any of his bakery-enthusiast friends.

Los Teques is a relatively small suburb located some 25 kilometers southwest of Caracas, the country’s capital. Although its origins date back to colonial times, the main reason of the post-1900 growth that shaped the city the way it is now is its strategic location close enough to the highly centralized capital for workers to commute there every day but not too close as to be affected by decentralization policies of the few democracies that managed to seize power during the 20th century.

As such, Los Teques is a coincidence, and so are Tequeños: the legend says that they were created out of dough leftovers from dishes prepared by the handmaids of one of the wealthiest families in the town. And, to some extent, this is the history of Venezuela. The reason of many of our sufferings and successes.

We are one of the most urbanized countries of Latin America solely because we happened to discover the largest oil reserves in the world in an age where everyone was craving for it. We are named Venezuela solely because the first sailors to spot the country were Italian and were reminded of the Venetian channels by the indigenous architecture of the particular zone of the country they sailed to. We are a coincidence.

Sex and giggles, or just cachapas

One of the main rendezvous I had with my strong Venezuelan Spanish while speaking to fellow Spanish speakers was when I tried to explain the word cachapera, which is a slang term for a homosexual woman derived from cachapa, a kind of maize tortilla usually eaten with cheese. The metaphor arises, presumably, from an analogy someone made between the cooking process of cachapas and sexual acts between women.

And, of course, we would turn it into a day-to-day term because there are few things we love more than dirty jokes. I was making dirty jokes way before I knew what made them dirty, and we have chinazo, a term describing that moment of nationalist harmony when someone makes an inadvertently sexual claim and everyone around exclaims “aaaay”, even if the association is extremely vague.

The term for cachapa is also associated with the popular expression cachapear el hierro, which is an extremely specific idiom used to employ the act of getting with a close acquaintance’s significant other. For our culture, sex and relationships are everywhere, and our vocabulary and customs are deeply shaped by it.

Yet, lo and behold if someone dares to implement mandatory sexual education as part of our national curriculum. Venezuelan sex is only interesting and funny as long as it remains forbidden and taboo.

Our diversity: pabellón

I am Spanish. I am Lebanese. I am Portuguese. But, above all, I am Venezuelan. The extreme levels of racial diversity in my country made it quite unseemly for me to ever identify as anything but Venezuelan, even though both my parents are descendants of migrants and my lineage has never stayed in a single country for more than one generation. And pabellón (Spanish for pavilion), a dish composed uniquely of other dishes, reflects this in such a sharp way that the association feels too cheap to be true.

Composed primarily out of rice, black beans and shredded meat, some versions add eggs, avocados, plantain and whatever the chef feels like to it. Like some sort of tropical Theseus ship, each and every single one of its components might be modified and a pabellón will not stop being one as long as it stays composite and diverse.

There is no such thing as an ethnically Venezuelan person. The seven Miss Universe winners that we pride ourselves on are definitely not true representatives of the average phenotype of the country, but they are as Venezuelan as any other person because the only thing that ties us ethnically is this almost deliberate melting pot.

My Portuguese grandmother came to the country under the bleakest conditions in 1960, when Portugal was traversing through its darkest times under the fascist Estado Novo and it was not even considered a Western country. She never faced any kind of ethnic discrimination until chavismo, our current regime, came to power and claimed to “protect diversity”.

Mondongo. Or the thing that only insane people like.

And, at last, we arrive to that dish most people claim they dislike yet, somehow, it still seems to be popular. This diced tripe takes about six hours to cook and ends up in a disgusting soup that is almost impossible to swallow, just like some political realities my country is currently facing.

Venezuela is currently going through its harshest moment in history, but I do not have the courage nor the standing to write extensively about it because, after all, my family is still in the country. We are a culture with amazing traits and enviable qualities found nowhere else, but our current state is far away from how an arepa tastes and the political panorama is basically mondongo: hopelessly awful.

But some still like it.