Mónica Ojeda entered the Finestres bookstore in Barcelona with a single purpose: to throw a party. Restful, quiet, but, at the end of the day, a party. What is it if not a packed literary presentation in times of virtuality? Readers who passed by there on Thursday afternoon can attest to the success of the call. The parties, furthermore, “are the way we reclaim youth,” the author herself confessed from the stage. In fact, that is the idea behind her new book, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun (Random House), in which she claims the need to have fun in order to cope better with life. It is something “very necessary,” especially if one lives “in a place where the body is in constant danger,” as is the case in her native Guayaquil, “whipped and amputated” by the violence of organized crime.
“I have not met a Guayaquil that has not been bad. “Ecuador was already shaking when I left and now it is worse, because it is becoming a narco-state,” lamented the author, who in her pages tries to express “what happens to bodies that are scared all the time. It is very difficult to be young in a place that does not allow you to be young, because it does not give you a future. And without a future, you cannot be young. I make a claim for that future hand in hand with the party.” And she does it with “two friends who decide to go to an experimental music festival held on the slopes of a volcano. At a certain point, one of them confesses that her trip is in part to look for a father who abandoned her.
In her talk with the Argentine journalist and writer Belén López Peiró, Ojeda recognizes that, although her father never abandoned her, there is between them “an unbridgeable void that is impossible to solve. As a teenager he felt an emotional distance that was the distance of masculinity. But growing up also means trying to understand that people do the best they can with the possibilities they have, even if, sometimes, that is not enough.”
A large number of reflections also emerged in Wednesday’s talk between journalists Oriol Andrés Gallart and Txell Feixas at the Altaïr bookstore, on the occasion of the presentation of the book Síria, els faces de la revolució (Ara Llibres). Both have covered the Syrian war and, as a result of this experience, Andrés decided to give voice to the non-violent voices that have been part of the conflict. The wave of hope that swept through several Arab countries in 2011 also reached Syria, where groups of men and women stood up to the Assad regime with non-violent protests.
“I remember activists dyeing the water of some fountains in Damascus red to symbolize the spilled blood. Women dressed as brides also went to the market with signs asking for the deaths to stop. Or people throwing ping-pong balls with messages of freedom from the top of the steepest street. It was very ridiculous to see how the soldiers tried to pick up those balls and they escaped. Authoritarian regimes are afraid of free thought and unarmed language. There is nothing more powerful,” said the reporter.
Many disappeared. Others were killed. At best, they had time to leave the territory. Assad and his entourage spread terror to put an end to pacifism, but, even so, many persisted “and still do so today,” so “I thought it was necessary to give them a voice. It is something that had not been done, at least not in a broad way, from the field of non-fiction.”
It would not have been necessary to ask anyone from that government, or from any other totalitarian system, to know that they would be in favor of cancellation. Political scientist Umut Özkirimli is an expert on this topic, as he demonstrated earlier this week at La Central del Raval, in an event accompanied by the philosopher and politician Manuel Cruz, and Blanca Garcés, researcher and research coordinator at the Barcelona Center for International Affairs (CIBOB).
The talk focused on Canceled (Paidós), the book in which Özkirimli reveals how “the left has been dragged into a spiral of toxic hatred and indignation,” moving away from the democratic ideals of freedom it purports to represent. The author explores the similarities between right-wing populism and radical identity politics and presents an alternative vision. “The left will only be able to find a constructive path away from the woke if it puts aside its differences,” he concluded.
