Andrea Rodés (Al Día) evaluations Cuando éramos felices pero no lo sabíamos [When we were happy but didn’t know it], the newest work by Colombian journalist Melba Escobar. Listed here are excerpts from the article “Melba Escobar: ‘Those that stay are all the time speaking about those that left, as if that they had died.’” [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]
Melba Escobar could be very clear about who her newest guide is devoted to: her mom. It was whereas her mom was dying of most cancers that this famend Colombian author and journalist determined to take a sequence of journeys to Venezuela to inform “the each day lifetime of Venezuelans who haven’t emigrated anyplace” in a guide.
“I needed to inform what occurs in individuals’s lives after they reside in a chronic state of emergency. What occurs when that emergency falls into oblivion, when life goes on, regardless of every thing, and folks resign themselves to residing it amidst the rubble,” she writes within the first chapter of Cuando éramos felices pero no lo sabíamos (When We Have been Pleased however We Didn’t Know It).
Narrated within the first individual, the guide compiles a sequence of chronicles and interviews performed by the creator throughout 4 journeys to Venezuela between 2019 and 2020 with the purpose of bringing readers nearer to the day-to-day lifetime of its residents and understanding the consequences of the state or its absence on each day life.
“It made me very offended to see how in Colombia the correct wing invented the specter of ‘Castro-Chavismo’ to win votes, that everlasting use of a human tragedy by politicians and the media. ‘We don’t need to find yourself like Venezuela,’ they repeat with out actually figuring out what we’re speaking about or what occurred,” Escobar defined by video name from her house in Barcelona, the place she has been residing together with her husband and two kids for a 12 months.
The transfer to Barcelona was no coincidence. Her mom, a Spanish nationwide, lived within the Catalan capital till she was in her 20s and Escobar has household there.
“I needed my kids to reside a day-to-day life very totally different from the one we reside in Bogotá. I needed to take them out of such a polarized and divided society, the place freedoms are fairly restricted,” she justified her choice to to migrate to Spain a 12 months after her mom died.
Sadly, her mom handed away between the third and fourth journey and he or she by no means bought her palms on the guide. In alternate, Escobar sneaks her into its pages, sharing with the reader the struggling and disappointment she feels being away from her when she is dying, in addition to placing to make use of one thing very invaluable she realized from her — her means to look at actuality from a sure distance.
“My mom by no means stopped feeling like a foreigner in Colombia and was all the time evaluating Colombian society with Spanish and French society, which had been those she knew greatest,” she recalled.
WANTING TO UNDERSTAND
Her standing as a Colombian allowed her to really feel “far sufficient away and shut sufficient to be intimate with the interviewees,” defined Escobar, who as a baby all the time heard about Venezuela as the “wealthy neighbor.” Now, the scenario is reversed. Colombia, a sister nation culturally, is now house to greater than 1.5 million Venezuelan migrants who’ve left their nation “as a result of they want drugs, as a result of they’re about to offer beginning in a place with out hospital providers, as a result of they’ve misplaced every thing, as a result of they are hungry,” Escobar writes within the guide.
However what Escobar is excited by telling in her guide just isn’t the story of those that depart, however of those that keep. The “left behind.”
“It is extremely spectacular to see that these who stay are all the time speaking about these who left, as if that they had died. It’s a bit like the concept of shared mourning,” she mentioned. In reality, she added, “to me all of it appears very painful, as a result of globally [Venezuela] has had a lot much less area than the Syrian battle, or Ukraine. Earlier than Ukraine, the biggest variety of refugees on this planet got here out of Venezuela. However, in fact, it’s a southern downside and it’s not going to be on the entrance web page. We lack a much less hierarchical conception of the world’s issues.”
Whereas the world forgets about Venezuelans, Maduro’s regime permits “various criminals and drug sellers with cash constructing big eating places and motels that no person can afford, as a result of they’re spent in {dollars}. They’re constructing a Miami inside Caracas,” Escobar commented sadly.
For unique article, see https://aldianews.com/en/tradition/books-and-authors/daily-life-venezuelan
Cuando éramos felices pero no lo sabíamos: Venezuela en tiempos apocalípticos
Melba Escobar
Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, June 2022
336 pages
ISBN 978-8434435445 (pb)
https://www.planetadelibros.com/libro-cuando-eramos-felices-y-no-lo-sabiamos/350968