Translated by: Rosa Mª Sanz - rosasanz[at]gmail.com
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
This is a story of a solar system compound by two apparently very similarly inhabited planets but whose inhabitants have very different views of their existence.
The first enjoyed a situation of privilege that made it a rich, sunny planet. It was inhabited by two different families of civilizations that ruled the planet, living throughout its extension in a flexible (intercultural) way, with no frontiers or political barriers. Most of the population from both families lived together in harmony with the planet. They were nomads and moved about in peace, criss-crossing the whole territory all through the year. The exception to these two families was formed by a minority that became sedentary, establishing their home in a particular place, being periodically surrounded by the migrating groups of each family, without conflict but also without assimilation (multiculturally).
All in all, a planet inhabited by two different families, where the existence of both is developed in an inclusive and complementary way: “nomads AND sedentary” instead of “nomads OR sedentary”. They shared one only symbol and flag, similar to that represented by the Chinese philosophical concept of yin and yang.
The other planet of this solar system was also inhabited by intelligent life, in this case, not by two families of the same race, but by two different sorts of individuals. Its peculiar rotation and displacement around its sun made one of the sides always sunny and bright, whereas the other was cool and gloomy, never facing the sun, making the planet known as “Contrasts”.
The inhabitants of the dark side of the planet, perhaps because of the harsh environment where they had been born and sub-developed, were terribly territorial and zealous of their traditions, rejecting all possible contact with the dwellers of the other side. As an exception to the behaviour of their elder, the young envied the little they knew of the prosperity and brightness of the other side of the planet, seeing its glow and dreaming of its progress and brilliance. Its flag was formed by a circle divided in two parts, one bright and the other dark.
The dwellers of the sunny side, feeling their prosperity threatened by the unusual arrival of a massive and illegal quantity of ever-growing youngsters from the other side, totally alien to the ways and customs of the new world they risked to travel to, built a great wall separating them forever from that other species with which they had no quarrel or communication whatsoever. While the wall was built, they got to an agreement with the government of the other side and created a planetary coordination to try and restrain the migration of the young and the loss of faith in the values of its dark side.
Both planets of this solar system, except the dark side of “Contrasts”, had in common the curiosity that every inhabitant felt about the inhabitants of the other; the mutual attraction by its natural and cultural beauties. They developed together the necessary technology to be able to make interplanetary flights, with the purpose of doing some tourism in the land of their neighbours and even acquire the residence and move to the society of the adjoining planet, if they found its way of life and social organization more convenient.
*
Cultural clichés or stereotypes are a necessary evil, sometimes dangerous, sometimes funny or absurd… Depending on the use one might give them, they will be a chance or an obstacle to consider (ourselves) our best cultural features, as opposed to those of other cultures or communities; or to define (ourselves) to other tribes and be able to discern what does and does not identify ourselves with the ideas of every country about themselves or others.
I think of a stereotype as a sphere from geometry class. You’ll never find a perfect sphere in nature, but that perfect sphere that only exists in the geometric imagination allows us to recognize certain forms as spherical.
You’ll never find two identical Spaniards, even in the same region or town, even if they all look like bullfighters or flamenco dancers through the eyes of the stereotypes, whether they’ve seen a bull in their lives or not or whether they can dance or not. Going deeper beyond what’s said about these perfect spheres of ourselves we may realize that all of us or none can be bailaores of flamenco or bullfighters, in spite of the rumours.
If we’re bold enough, we can make the effort to become relative to our own nature and help in the rare dialogue between cultures, which I consider a pompous way of calling the communication between the same people, beyond the differences of language and cultural coordinates, different but respectable, as long as they entail the respect for ourselves and others. Differences can be overcome, leading us to an integrating understanding of ourselves and others.
Chance for some or reincarnation for karma believers, is what makes us come to this world with an eye colour and a skin colour that a Southern Sun could tan. A way of being that your parents will promote by the diverse combination of genetic information fomented by their education and care. A filtered mixture combined with a background of rules of life and survival that we generically call society or culture, which a creator god forgot to give us all in an even manner, originating such different cultures around the planet, as are the multiple and many life forms that inhabit it.
That culture in which you were born will make you see the world in a certain way. If it doesn’t suit your inner needs it will lead you to a passive adaptation or to a revolution of values that with creativity will originate more culture…
Science states that sexual reproduction is guilty of all the enormous diversity existing in the planet since evolution, before which, there was a series of potentially immortal and oppressively alike clones; this uniformity is one that science fiction and the present globalized societies seemingly want to relive. ”The Return of the Amoebas. Now in theatres!”
*
If you’re born in a small village, one that your parents and grandparents hardly ever left in their lives, you’ll probably grow up content without identity issues, unless external elements show you the echoes from other worlds. A visit to the city can be like visiting another planet. Oh, the impression of the discovery or the impressive discovery, always unexpected, of visiting an unknown culture!
From the reading of Norwegian playwright Ibsen I remember up to what extent culture determines a person, being able to convert those destined to be strong and lively into weak and demented persons.
*
- Spányol vagyok!
The first phrase I learnt on my first trip to Hungary. What it meant to be Spanish? Here, it wasn’t much more than an easy way of showing one wasn’t Hungarian and therefore spoke no Hungarian. It is easier to differentiate yourself than to explain what one is.
- Nem bészelek magyarul.
I don’t speak Hungarian.
- Spanish? From Madrid or from Barcelona? What’s your football team?
No, guys, I didn’t come from Madrid or Barcelona and even though they wouldn’t believe it, I wasn’t a supporter of any football team!
- So you aren´t a real Spanish!
This is an example of the unavoidable generalizations, stereotypes bring about. According to this statement, I would have to believe that all Hungarians love water polo, given that it was considered the national sport, and think that whoever didn’t play it, or even worse, whoever didn’t enjoy swimming-pools and hot springs was a bad Hungarian or something like that.
I won’t deny that, even if born in the same land, those who attempt this kind of cultural adventure seem a bit alien, living in another country we hardly knew and one about which we’d have scarcely thought twice a few months earlier…
Taller than average and with a paler skin than most of my compatriots, and adding to that the colour of my eyes, typically Hungarian according to some, it was difficult for me to be considered a foreigner at first sight, in those faraway lands where many used to think of Spaniards as short, dark-skinned Latin Lovers from South American soap operas.
- Best for you! That way it will be easier for you to be unnoticed and integrate within the local community…
Maybe it was so… if it wasn’t because fate and boldness took you to a country whose language is inapprehensible, devilishly difficult, where people don’t speak any other languages that you know.
- What a fool! That’s what you get for doing things rashly.
Again, you may be right, the truth is that if I had stopped to think I wouldn’t have done anything, because that’s what thinking does: those who do not want to think wander and go with the flow and fashions; those who just make use of thoughts don’t act, absorbed in imaginary sand castles.
*
The aliens in my new country regarded me as one of their own, I didn’t like football, mandatory requirement to be a good Spaniard, but I adapted perfectly to the swimming-pools and hot springs. In the beginning I didn’t realize this and I even thought it was foolish, <<It’s normal that people think one comes from the place instead of abroad, and that they talk to you in their language, unless you’re so exotic that they start to doubt>>, told me Katell, a Breton volunteer in Budapest, about how annoyed I was about getting unnoticed in a city where everybody was a foreigner, as is in every cosmopolitan city worth the title.
I had to take comfort in the fact that not being treated as a tourist was good for me. In some street markets you could buy t-shirts with the legend “Magyar vagyok, nem turista” (I’m Hungarian, not a tourist). It seems they don´t like tourists, something normal in a country not accustomed to having hordes of tourists beyond the frontiers of its capital, and who, on the contrary, were pleasantly surprised to see someone who wanted to live among them and learn their extremely difficult language.
Time went by and I realized with amazement that, between me and them, there were many things in common. While I was trying to understand the ways and strategies of communication of my new fellow citizens, to understand their cultural and linguistic coordinates fluently, I realized that my own feelings weren’t as different from theirs’ as I first thought, in spite of coming from so far away.
*
I couldn’t help but having tangled thoughts, for not having followed the better judgement of leaving everything behind to go to a country that would offer me the chance to live, and having better professional opportunities than in my own, as many future volunteers considered when trying their luck in a different country from the richer Europe.
I chose or was chosen by an unknown, unsettling country, inconvenient decision for a too unsettled heart like mine, presenting me later with unexpected surprises like these already mentioned.
Who were the Magyar, those descendants from the mythical Asian who, maybe bored of too much eastern mysticism, chose to come back to the fragmented Europe, settling in a plain crossed by the Danube? Who are the Hungarians today; in the midst of the cultural globalization that threatens them; with the American English their youngsters learn; the tourists for cultural or hunting reasons from the rest of Europe and the phenomenon of the Global Village?
The strong Hungarian village can influence and be known on a world level or, on the contrary, be annihilated under the cultural competition of the new millennium; just like every other, as is already happening with much of the best of the Spanish culture, and not so much with the worst of it. It will happen the same with Europe if we keep on understanding it just in Euros.
*
Months after my arrival, I found myself in Hungary, a proud country, sometimes too much; passionately contradictory, making its richer neighbours mad in its way of being and working, but not trying to bury their head underground like an ostrich, placing their hopes in their work capacity and authenticity; conscious and pessimistic, but seen by many as arrogant, proud of their unique and diabolical language, believing that all important people are and have Hungarian ascendancy… In truth, tortured by a historical feeling of loss and low self-esteem, making suicide a cultural theme; wide features I could identify myself with, and even be moved by them… prominent melancholy under the influx of Franz Liszt’s romantic sonatas.
I remember a funny story I read surfing the internet shortly before my departure:
Enrico Fermi, reflecting about the immeasurability of the universe, concluded that intelligent entities from other planets had to have visited our beautiful planet Earth already, because of which he wondered: <<Where are they?>> His Hungarian colleague answered: <<They are among us, but they call themselves Hungarians>> To argue his case, he explained the rumours about it: <<Millions of years ago, the Martians were forced to leave their planet and arrived to what we know as Hungary today. They adapted to the appearance of the apes (sic) they found, but in them there were three characteristics that were difficult to hide: their wanderlust (that is why there are Hungarians all over the world), their language (unique and different from any around) and their intelligence>>.
This story was the funniest and most peculiar of all the opinions and true stories I could find in Internet forums about my new aliens, revealing new unexpected data opposed to my first intuitions about my future hosting culture, making me wonder whether what I expected from them was a mere illusion.
I began feeling unsettled about the unexpected idea of living in a country inhabited by aliens.
At that time, I didn’t know I was one of them too…
*
Facts are the most important, and not what is said about them. Even if the story about the aliens may look like a simple joke, its conclusion follows a common triad that sums everything up: exile, language and feeling of superiority.
This triad repeats itself when it comes to understanding the psychological dynamics of the concept of national identity of certain nations, “doing whatever they like” in the face of loss or disgrace, instead of hiding away, taking the tribal concept of “us, the real humans” to its paroxysm. They take refuge in the need to believe themselves a chosen people where the juncture of having to live among people of a different condition from their own is part of the divine project and not a loss of their land in the migrating partition of History…
Reflecting about this funny story about Hungarians I came to realise that it could also be applied as a stereotype to other historical peoples… e.g. the Jews, who also shared that triad of chosen people. I thought of their vast community and their expulsion from Budapest during the Second World War, to conclude, beyond the particular differences, whether we hated with more intensity and wanted to take away from ourselves that or those which most strongly remind us of ourselves.
This necessary ideas may be plausible, having some hints of truth to those who have lived in historically troubled societies, making their citizens, perhaps, more creative than in more stable, quieter societies. In this regard some take neutral and stable Switzerland’s case as the opposite example of this, considering their famous precision watches as their only contribution to humanity…
*
Finally I thought of this story, of this antidote against the loss of cultural identity of some nations applied to individuals and their behaviour, and concluded that this sort of thought has become the sancta sanctorum of the individual identity.
However it may be, it seems obvious that many rootless nouveaux riches, forgetting their origins or not willing to remember, like to think of themselves as important people, exiled from a superior planet where their word is law and their intelligence and way of life better than the others. As they say in the Spanish province of Castile, “whoever doesn’t find consolation, doesn’t want to be consoled”. Who I was and what I was doing in another planet was another story.