Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Open letter to Europe

Dear Europe,

I write this in my flat in Hengelo, a small town in the Netherlands, the sunday after I learnt that Denmark decided to restore the passport checking in its borders with Germany and Sweden. I write this because today, someone else is fucking up my dreams: I had a dream of Europe which took me out the horrible Chile in which I was born, and brought me here after 8 years of study and once I proved I was smart enough to be accepted on (a PhD on) this country, since the fact of being a human being —born equal and free, as your human rights say— was not enough reason to let me live here.

I write because I have no other means to express my discontent; I cannot vote —despite of being totally eligible to pay taxes— and my visa obliges me to not to protest, otherwise I become a danger to society and they can kick me out (I should never forget my place —I am an immigrant here). I write because this little black marks on a white screen are the crumbles I found on the sleepless nights where books, and the dreams that those books talked about, were the only friends I had. I write, because as Luther, I cannot do otherwise.

My dream of Europe was of a place where you could simply walk into another country and where, up to a certain extent, one was part of an Idea bigger than your nation, disregard of the language you speak and the color of your skin. An Europe which gave me the dreams and doubts of Descartes, the sexual difference embedded in Kant’s antinomies, the letters of van Gogh to his brother Leo and his paintings: faces which talked of death and sorrow, of churches without exits or entrances, of crows flying away at the sound of the gun that will take his life; an Europe of poets —poetes maudits— and a multiplicity of languages: the french of Rimbaud and Cendars resonating on my teenager head; the English and the German of Wittgenstein whose books my faculty deemed necessary to hold and save for me to read uncountable times, understanding nothing, thinking to understand it all; the Spanish that was inflicted on me by Chilean poets who tried talking back to Europe from a burning house in the middle of the desert. An Europe of Berlin’s walls and ovens where Jews were burned; of colonial invasions and American genocides in the name of a God I never came to meet. An Europe of hope, where not only what is low in humanity could flourish, but also its angelical side (in the words of Cioran whose sadness graved them on my brain): “Ce n’est pas la connaissance qui nous rapproche de saints, mais le reveil de larmes qui dorment a plus profond de nous-mêmes.” (It is not knowledge which bring us close to saints, but the awakening of the tears that sleep in the most deep of ourselves.) “Le Paradis gémit au fond de la conscience, tandis que la mémoire pleure. Et c’est ainsi, qu’on songe au senses métaphysique de larmes et à la vie comme le déroulement d’un regret.” (The Paradise groans in the deeps of our consciousness, while memory cries. And so, we dream of a metaphysical meaning of tears and of life as the unfolding of a regret.)

And today, Denmark —the country where my imagination puts Hamlet, and his “Oh cursed spite, that ever I was born...”— destroys my dreams and makes me want to cry, to go back (but go back where?), to emigrate to Mars and work there in the construction a livable world. That which twenty years of common work made possible —a unified Europe, an example for the world— today the fear of the Other makes it unimaginable. The only other whom we can accept, it seems to me, is the dead other; someone who cannot harass us and whom we cannot harass. All of this because of fear.

As long as you keep watching TV, waiting for the next iPad, repeating the senseless ritual of studying, working, marrying and dying in the same world which saw you grow, my dreams will keep on dying; and so will I. Today, I want to kill myself; for the world in which I live flees from what so many women and men gave theirs lives for.

Someone will come, you tell to yourself, and will make things again as they used to be; someone will stop the anti-muslin hatred before it’s too late. But you are wrong; no one will come, we are alone on this. And we know pretty well where this is going: maybe the ovens won’t be in Auschwitz; or we won’t use ovens but the desert of Libya instead; and the devil word will not be “Jew” but “immigrant.” Keep the immigrants out so we can continue with our sacred life devoted to develop ourselves, our small garden, to our small problems and dreams —paint the living room red maybe, what kind of car I want next? I should lose those five pounds for summer— and live like if they do not matter, because they don’t.

Cannot you see Europe? You are destroying yourself; sooner than later a new wall will emerge, like the one in Mexico or in Palestine, if we don’t start now to work for a new future. Just like another America, afraid and fat, Europe walks directly into the abyss. You say “muslim terrorist,” I say “catholic terrorist,” “jewish terrorist,” “social democrat terrorist,” “Berlusconi and Sarkozy terrorists,” “Twente fan terrorist.” All of you who participate of this danse macabre which is today’s world, are guilty of mass murder; the history will judge us guilty.

Your duty was to keep our dreams alive, to tell us that there was a small chance for things to be different; that the market is not everything; that there is something as humanity which is worth fight for; that the 2000 years of philosophy are not just words typed by blind monkeys in a madhouse, but the only means we humans —disregarding sex, color, number of legs or arms— have to understand this big joke that we call world. And you failed, once again. You forgot your own dreams, your own values, your hopes and your certainties; you gave it all for a big TV in the living room and the lack of civil war on your streets; for the dreadful security of what is known, the desolate calmness of the same. You sent your factories to China and then complained about them polluting the only world in which we live, so you could eat biological fruits with a clean consciousness. You, every one of you who forgot what life was supposed to be —a constant struggle for liberation, for equality, for a fraternal solidarity between men— are guilty of destroying my dreams. What you don’t realize is that you are not able to dream anymore, that you are a continent without dreams; you need me to dream your future, you need the other to dream of you.

If we lost you, Europe, we will have lost humanity. Please don’t let that happen; not because my life is in danger, but because these are also your dreams, your hopes, your future. And they are fading away in silence.

Sebastian Gonzalez
PhD Student

University of Twente, Netherlands
CTW (Horstring)
P.O. Box 217
7500AE Enschede

No comments:

Post a Comment