Translated by: Joaquín Hernández Ibáñez - joaquinhernandezibanez[at]yahoo.es
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
Fear...
"The future has many names –
For the weak, what is unattainable.
For the fearful, the unknown.
For the brave, is an opportunity.”
Victor Hugo.
This quotation may be just a little the graphic reflection of what I feel now… A great fear of a new stage to discover, of a year work in a different place with different people and different boys and girls… And a great happiness at the same time by the great opportunity that this implies.
I’m a little mixed up, there are moments in which I freak out and I think about where the hell I am leading to… why do I change my, more or less, neat and calm life by a year of experiences, of sorting out my life, of not understanding much for some months… On the other hand, there are moments in which I’ve got a real rush and I think about all I’m going to know, the new people, all I’m going to learn, all this experience is going to help me to be a resourceful guy…
I don’t know… my departure is so close I think I’m becoming crazy… it should be a kind of pre-departure syndrome.
But let’s remember what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:
<<The only thing we have to fear is fear itself>>
Extracted from the Blog of Axier, EVS volunteer.
It is famous the so-called EVS curve, based on the cultural shock phases, with which it is attempted to explain the likely psycho-emotional phases that can be suffered by those who live an experience of this kind; human brains, facing certain stimuli, seem to react the same way.
Many of us have been surprised by these attitude changes, with the new energy that a new life gives you. Why is that? Brain drugs matter?
With no doubt the best drug producer is the brain. Every time more social stratum and individuals of all ages consume synthetic drugs without the permission of the brain, those which are everywhere, to feel super, to forget about the coward we have inside and hold on.
We live in a happy world of freed people, demanding the pleasure for the pleasure, sublimation of our daily bread in Europe: consumption. We run away from the reality we feel and we make it so painful, cheating the brain and its disco bouncers, who, the same as they don’t let you in wearing trainers in fashion places, don’t let you go too far with adrenalin, endorphins and that morphine which give us back the animal happiness. Could that be why some would prefer to be reptiles to human beings?
Withdrawal symptoms against detoxification. In present societies every time is more difficult to be aware of addictions to inhuman necessities and of the possibility of healing thanks to too-much-human treatments.
It is painful to go away from the known nest, it scares you, even if you have gone away to feed the twin of fear, curiosity, and become a super-whatever by conviction. Fear gives its brother a poisoned apple, the head fills with neurotransmitters with trainers and the bouncers are not able to cope with it. A new world, let’s conquer it! The quotation of Victor Hugo can be rewritten: the weak will become strong, the coward brave, the pessimistic optimistic… Long live the unknown!
The day after a drunkenness of neurotransmitters, the hangover… although it is not bad to try it and to feel another one, phoenix bird coming back to life from the ashes of unknown towards a new challenge.
Feeling strange, happy, glad, unfortunate…
Like in a Magritte´s surrealist painting the image of a pipe is not a pipe as well whatever was a person, a town, a country... In short, any label which tries to delimit and define what we are, is checked, with the modernity crisis, to be a human construction inside of what we call culture.
There are as many different shapes of real and possible labels as cultures. Among all the existing definitions, I choose to consider culture as the attempt to write the life instructions that God, or the Universe mishap, has forgotten writing in a common language for all of us; being we, little human beings, the ones who have to unravel and establish them, throughout experience and life reflection.
If cultural relativism means anything, it is not, as its detractors uphold, considering all cultural expression positive. It is considering that all attempts to understand life really are so if it reaches the goal of living in a better way. It will be History, practice and acceptance and rejection of the affected ones, which have to decide which cultural manifestation, no matter how exotic or meaningless it seems, deserves to be accepted or rejected. As an example I will use the young Muslim girls who in some Arab-Occidentalized countries have decided to recover the veil that their mothers stopped using, thinking maybe that the colonial European ethnocentrism, which considers it as a symbol of the women’s repression, is not legitimated to give them lessons of feminist liberation.
No culture is exempt of cruel and oppressive cultural manifestations, but the worst of them is not that they are so because other cultures’ fashion virtue states it, but in the tragedy of not realizing, due to lack of reference, that our customs are negative to individuals or society.
Being surprised at oneself, suffering an identity crisis, is not bad, if that gives us the opportunity to observe the others and our surroundings, including observing other cultures and people as a way to understand ourselves better. This is the step that tries to take, for example, anthropology, science born from the colonial European necessity, later becoming part of the systematic attempt to understand Humankind.
*
Every time more, we, young people, don’t have clear where we go to, feeling that where we come from is not where we belong. Some people will justify this absence of vital compasses with the change of magnetic poles of occidental postmodernism. I am inclined to think that an argument would be the largest number of children in generations where frontiers, vicissitudes of war, post colonialism, emigration and mind narrowness of previous centuries, have forced to millions of parents to grow them up in cultures different from the ones they lived, and they try to hoard in the education of their offspring.
It is not my situation, I don’t come from emigration, I am a mixed-race Spanish. Mixed-race like almost all the Spanish people are, because in the diversity of the Iberian peninsula that saw my birth, the father family comes from a culturally speaking very different region from the mother one, creating some feeling mixtures and divisions not far from most of Europeans. Children of a pure culture, as it was followed in unfortunate past times, would be the exception, in case there were any, more than the standard. Almost all of us identify with the culture that saw us grow up, in spite of the visits we do to the parents’ lands on holiday, thinking barely twice, what it would be like if we had been grown up there instead of here.
The reality is not only that mixture is produced, today more than ever, but also that the distorted window to the world that mass media offer to us make us think about our little world, whether to reaffirm it or to criticize it, waiting to contemplate the sunset of other latitudes. There is no need now to have an exotic physical appearance or personality, a multicultural blood to feel strange.
*
Those of us who have lived vital experiences in different cultures use to coincide in considering ourselves not very conventional people. Many of us don’t use to adjust to the international stereotype that people have from our original cultures. Less cosmopolitan people do, accepting willingly those cultural issues. Some people could think this is nonsense, a very human attempt to justify all what happens to us, although I’ve always thought that we don’t even follow the physical appearance prototype according to the wrongly called race we would belong to. With no doubt, our behaviour is light or clearly different from what would be expected as born in a place or another, focusing myself, especially, in those of us who have received little or no multicultural education, although somehow have been looking for it long ago.
Europe, the world, is confronted not only to the titanic task of preserving cultural diversity, at the same time it treats to originate an own identity inside the cosmopolitanism. Feeling a world citizen is something some people have looked for and created beyond political handlings and fanaticism.
*
Something surprising about the European Union is that it is able to make agree, when thrusting a common initiative, more than two dozens of sovereign opinions, culturally different and maybe politically opposite. Some people would say that this is not difficult with politicians to the service of a same thinking and economical model over which most of their decisions are based; therefore their citizens’ diversity of opinions will not be represented in the monolithic thinking of their political representatives. Nevertheless, I prefer to think that, in those more civic than economical political initiatives, the effort must be Herculean and the background diversity of the real politicians of the old Europe can still illuminate useful and original initiatives.
The European model is not a federal one like that of the United States, but one of free adherence and decision about which each State hands over for the interest of regulating some community aspects, linked with the fact that the real application for the achievement of the aim of a lot of community norms depends on the form and substance of how each member country wishes to perform it. If it is decided, at European level, that we have to be more restrictive with tobacco use in public environments, not only the member countries have to decide in Council agreement that they want to implant that politic, but also they preserve the power to perform that rule, with the legal help of the Union, according to which each national sovereignty thinks more appropriate, without any Eurocrat imposing an ideal of preferred way.
This is a proof and laudable hope for dialogue among nations, because politicians have much to blame in the collision or coming together of towns.
*
Once upon a time, a never-ending story began about a country governed by an evil dictator which was going to be freed by a saviour-wizard who was not asked for help by any of their citizens. The wizard invaded that land and brought down that dictator. He was a past friend and allied because in spite of directing his subjects with authoritative cruelty, was not an Islamic radical; religion which the wizard barely knew that they adored another God and it was forbidden to eat pork, which was incomprehensible for him, who professed another religion and adored hot dogs.
In spite of the warnings from the Magic Council against this intervention, the wizard submerged the country in a horror war and occupation that it still suffers, with the false excuse, among others, of the fight against a terrorism that didn’t exist before his arrival. The wicked wizard got paid for his services with a black liquid he needed and there was in huge quantities over there, apart from granting his buddies licenses to open soft-drinks stalls which will calm the thirst caused by the desert hot in those latitudes.
The ambition was not fulfilled with the black gold reserves of the conquered country. The wizard fixed his eyes in the neighbour country, planning to free them too, until he felt restrained by the deathly wands which the first country didn’t have but the second one had, forcing the brave wizard to wait bellowing a better moment.
This great wizard had enemies, among them, a smaller wizard who subdued his subjects to one of these tyrannies which the wizard always promised to get rid of. This small wizard, true enemy of democracy and freedom, real danger for the peace in the area and even for the world peace, was not threatened with being brought down, in the interest of saving the population from his cruel and absurd dictatorship. He owned several operative nuclear magic wands and his spells would be dangerous, so that the great wizard, frightened, asked for help to the Magical Council to deploy a real diplomacy machinery, which would have been claimed as useless if the country would have been weaker, in defence of the use of war and the huge benefit that all wars entail to the private initiative. The small wizard decided then to dismantle his nuclear wands in exchange for development helps. This is one more proof that dialogue, confronted honestly, is possible and effective, in spite of dealing with dictators who don’t use too much logical reasoning and much less the one which benefits his nation.
It is tragic that peaceful revolutions like the one who was leaded by the not-enough-cited Mahatma Gandhi in India, are not more studied, stimulated and above all, understood. Tragic, not to realize about the terrible power that words have to divide people, to be surprised, even with oneself, but especially by the power they also have to join them, even when in this case feelings beat reason, sometimes for the sake of ideas that become stronger than those who support them, becoming cyclopean monsters.
I think that it is something normal trying to recognize in the strange what is more familiar to ourselves. The initial feeling of contemplating landscapes similar to the ones I could see in certain regions in my home country didn’t surprise me. It did however human landscape and costumes, nearer to the Spanish taste than what I could have imagined in farther lands, which was one of the first reasons that guaranteed me when I decided to spend a time among those strangers.
I found myself in a very different place from the one many compatriots thought: <<Gypsies come from that place, don’t they? Sure they are cold, distant and poor; they suffered the misfortune of being communists>>. Ignorant reductionism, result of the stereotypes or adjectives we attribute to others and other cultures, always being easier, as the proverb says: “to see the straw in your brother’s eye and not the rafter in your own”. I couldn’t avoid falling in some of them; projecting in another culture features that maybe I didn’t want to accept in my own one. The belief I would find people surviving a past defeated regime, under the grey shadow of buildings like paralyzed in time, and of a hoped future that Europe has promised to them. Slavic people I thought would mark the distance...
Hungarian people watch themselves as Magyar, ethnically equal, whereas to me some of them looked physically more like Slavs, others like Turkeys, others Mediterranean in general.
*
One day, a project colleague reminded me how bloodthirsty Spanish people have been during America colonization. I admitted that, although there was some truth in his comment, we were not as bloodthirsty as the black legend tries to attribute to us and I shielded in statistics: <<Check the number of Indians left in South America, where settlers were Spanish and Portuguese, and how many are left in North America, where we were soon substituted by English settlers… according to the figures you could figure out which ones were more bloodthirsty>>. Comparing casualties is macabre, bad education´s fault which makes us defend compatriots more than real people.
As I didn’t convince my opponent with my argument of statistics, I tried to support it with the historical reason. I commented that Spanish were the ones who invented the International Law, ascribing its origin to the Castilian monk Francisco de Vitoria, setting up protection laws to the Latin-American natives which were sons of God due to the colour of their skin, turning Sub-Saharan Africans, which due to the colour of their skin weren’t, in slaves sent in mass for forced labour to the colonized America. This is an example paradox showing how human reasons are many times tragic and cruelly absurd.
At the end of the dispute I went to the argument only used as last resource in this kind of exaltations and that I will call “and you more”. Justifying the goodness of the actions of historical ancestors with regard to others, or which is worse, with regard to what some nations make to others, remembering recent historical sins like the Jews deportation in Hungary during World War II; becoming Budapest, where the largest synagogue in Europe was, forbidden land to Jews.
It is needless to say that I don’t feel proud of these rhetoric manoeuvres.
*
Coming back to what is really worthy, everyday life events, I was surprised for example by Hungarian women. Their exotic beauty didn’t consist of, to boys, not only the novelty of physical features, but also in those Mediterranean features that you wouldn’t expect to find in those latitudes. What did these characteristics of the South affectivity, between boys and girls mean? Those rounded happy mammas past the East of Italy where they use to be more traditional?
History would give me some clues to try to answer by amazement, and a guide of Hungary, the confirmation. That area of Europe had been crossed by Romans, leaving their footprint of affectivity and good wine which characterizes one of the essential cultural elements of this Empire. Turkish also took a two-century walk near there, which made the apparently monolithic and united Hungarian culture have exotic and unexpected details, like any culture which actually was like that, of their people and historical circumstances, and not of political laboratories.
*
Some of those Hungarian mothers would ask me when meeting me if I was happy living in their city and if I had already found any girl from there to live with. Being without a partner seemed a real disgrace; it was necessary to be accompanied as soon as possible to fight against life troubles. Hungarian boys seemed not knowing how to live without a compatriot girl next to them, they feel so bad when they break up! Like the snake from tales resting in its nest and not knowing what to do without the fakir who, with his flute, bewitched it and brought it to life.
Some girls told me that they preferred to find boys from other latitudes, Italian or Spanish, very fashionable the first ones because of the relative geographic proximity, and the second ones because of the holiday paradise that Spain is for Europeans. Promise, to my surprise, of a happier world for many young people of this new East Europe that were delighted with soap operas, of course not Spanish but Latin American, with which they learnt Spanish, especially in countries of linguistic neighbourhood like Romania. There will be the times we have to live, otherwise I don’t understand the longing of wanting to find in other cultures what the own affective compass doesn’t mark.
*
When Portugal and Spain entered in the European Union club we were considered like the new members ready to update. The rich and modern Europe began in The Pyrenees and finished in the entrance of the Berlin Wall, soon after demolished to welcome future members (markets) more than a decade later.
Comparing the Iberia where our parents and grandparents lived and speak about to the present one, developed and European, I couldn’t but have a bittersweet thought about the future of these new countries of the Union. They were being incorporated into a prosperity dream, after having survived to the absence of freedom and movement as losers of a huge and useless War that only postponed the problems that originated it.
One of the reasons by which I was happy to have taken advantage of an opportunity like the EVS to live in a transition country, was the opportunity of being able to compare and understand two past social regimes. Dictatorships of social truths and stifled freedoms from whose remains I tried to learn and draw conclusions throughout what I saw, felt and young people from here and there told me.
The reference of what is left and said about the Soviet system allowed me to appreciate that comparison among which people try to condemn equally entails more than a surprise. I realized it when seeing the amazing faces of youngsters from other countries, especially the ones who have lived dictatorships, while listening particular examples of a past society my country suffered in its recent history and I was lucky not to live in which it was shown total and self-satisfied absence of freedom and liberty, both social and individual, especially for women..I realized that dictatorship in my country had no reason to envy the famous present Taliban Theocracies, with which shared the submission of women to religion, parents and husbands and the systematic use of hypocrisy to follow compulsory moral rules, against nature, whose violation could mean the social ostracism or jail. A military, ignorant and clerical dictatorship in which my parents and grandparents lived, some of them delighted, some of them resigned, some of them exiled or assassinated.
I was born a few months after a frustrated coup which tried to resurrect the past regime in my country. Soon before, the representatives of the two Spains: the winners and the losers of the bloody civil war which founded it, showing a great courage and a exemplary dialogue ability, becoming an example for other countries in democratic transition, agreed on the return to freedoms. Those of us who have been born in democracy have been forced to suffer some educative consequences from the past. At the same time, we have been forced to fight against that schizophrenia that involves living in the European modernity, putting us up in an identity crises, when becoming adults, because we have to live in the society of capitalism of protestant morality, while we were brought up by parents and teachers instructed in a national Catholic ideology, opposite in form of life and morality to the one we have to live as globalized Europeans.
Mermaids’ songs and the historical circumstances that unleashed so much oppression date a century back. All the dictatorships shared the excuse of conservation of supposed national values they called freedom under the flag of safety against real or imaginary threatens, opposite to the real freedom practiced by their people. Nowadays, there are still heard arguments similar to the ones that justified that past, not only in my country but also in the whole world, not only in the pulpits and political forums but also in the academic and intellectual too, changing the communist threaten by the terrorism one or whatever which can be invented.
I can’t but paraphrase that wise sentence by Walter Scott that warns us against the forgetfulness of history that can condemn us to repeat it.
*
It is usually said that comparisons are odious. Comparing is searched in order to recognize and even understand what seems new to the eyes and the heart. I think that trying to understand is the logic step of trying to learn.
In my imagination, without knowing the reason, the land to which destiny was taking me was near to my heart. Strange of myself, I didn’t recognize myself belonging to any specific land, maybe because I was born on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea though I was brought up in a different city, made from the country exile of the extreme fields of Castilla, plains of cereal and sky. I was looking for a possible home that was just in my imagination but that belongs to the world without being a particular place in this... This illusion is affecting more often to young people nowadays.
<<I was thrilled by Spanish volunteers who lived with me, they wanted to do so many things and conquer the world!>> A Hungarian girl told me this, while narrating her living together with compatriots during her European Voluntary Service.
Conquer the world or being conquered by it: routine, education, -isms; in short, the safety of known places, four walls or retaining walls...
*
Young people have stopped living the yoke of the communist idealism: in exchange of opinion freedom you were fed for life, unless you were moral or political dissident, minority, lazy, crook, different… then, straight ahead to gulag. If you belonged to a free society of that era, even nowadays, your option as dissident was a psychiatric hospital, so as they are able to seize your democratic rights. Conditions that for more people than we imagine are truly ideal: life maintained in a planned scientific zoo.
Post-Soviet youngsters, worshippers of American hip hop, are now forced to capitalism without timetables or waits and, many of them, with no other option, without having lived the era they parents long or loath, hug to it believing that they will conquer the world and they will triumph, dream that in the television or cinema seems free of nightmares. Their parents support them, some of them relieved by the end of the foreigner control, while others long the past subsidies and comfort that now they have to earn, in turns, devouring each other in competitive concurrence, as in any European capitalist and self-respecting country.
This way, a lot of us idealize other countries. Arcadias where we believe people will be nicer, they will triumph and they are happily boastful. That idea is not heritage of the new Europeans, also, through international TV channels, of those other non-European who really need to conquer the world, not just as a teenager wish, trying to become someone in the future who marks the difference, but facing the Salomon dilemma of being they who conquer the world or the world conquers them. Before this necessity, many young people have to throw themselves towards a non-wished and uncertain adventure, in which they can even lose life and hope. Our elders, to avoid their dreams, raise walls and frontiers, as the good defenders of the Christian or secular humanism they are.
We dare to feed the extremism, with novel fantasies of Asian, Arabian or African emigrant ships coming in a mad rush to claim for what is theirs and invade us. They would be within their rights if we continue thinking in the freedom of goods circulation instead of people. It is said that their money, if they have, or their cheap labour force, if they don’t have money, is welcomed in Europe. Racism, both from the people born in one land in first or last generation, understands only about material value, fear and propaganda. I am surprised that this fiction of the ships doesn’t come true… that we can be so blind.
*
The Supervolunteer, I think, has little to help the others, to conquer the world of injustices. If you are lucky and have a good project your help will be needed. If you have initiative, intelligence and perseverance you will be able to be useful without others telling you how; so much personal and economic effort will be worth, both institutional and from the Utopian ones who make these opportunities come true. I’m afraid, however, that many of us do social tourism, where the ones who are helped are ourselves, not them.
I have to thank very much all those who were so kind as to accompany me in my adventures and arguments, even those who didn’t appreciate me or ignored me. Just contemplating and observing their attitude, their words, but above all their beliefs and actions, helped me to understand a little bit more the world that surrounds me and the reasons of a lot of things, which, in cases like the one who writes, is a previous step before acting, to help others if possible.
We should think about it and try to find the way to give back at least what we received. If we get used to receive without giving we will become a dust bin where rubbish is thrown away: all of which is not useful for others, because they already know it or because they have experimented it. That’s all and no more.