At first glance, publishing a book of opinion columns, all available in the world of the web, “does not seem like something very sexy, very attractive,” says the director of the UAM-EL PAÍS School of Journalism cautiously, when he begins to discuss the novelist’s new work. However, he continues more assertively, reviewing what we said three, four or five years ago “is a way of reviewing our myopia or our clairvoyance.” In that last one he paraphrases the Colombian writer, who has decided to publish, within the framework of the Hay Festival of Cartagena, This has happened: columns from the last five years, mixed with some speeches and conference papers. “It is built with great care to try to provide tools that allow us to understand what has happened to us to understand what is happening to us,” explains the writer.
It is a book that wants to be more like a diary, he adds, and is divided into three parts: the progressive disconnection of citizens with a single common reality; that haunts Colombia like a ghost for decades; and literature that, with a little more optimism, “makes us feel less alone, accompanies us in this exciting task of living.”.
The title of the book It is also a phrase from what is perhaps the most famous novel by the Frenchman Albert Camus, and with it the narrator warned the reader that some things in the story will seem implausible, scandalous, but his only mission, in the end, is to tell what happened. “We have had a very special and strange time,” Vásquez returns to the title of his new book. “Because today there is nothing more difficult than saying that: ‘this has happened.”
Examples abound. The most recent, says the author, are the United States authorities stating that the nurse threatened the public forces in Minnesota, and that is why they shot him, despite the fact that there are videos that prove otherwise. Another example, from five years ago, was the Republicans who did not call what happened on January 6 at the United States Capitol a violent insurrection, but rather a day of “love and happiness,” the novelist recalls.
Their main concern, which is triggered by the polarization of social networks, is to live in that part of the English novel, in which the official party says “you have not seen what you have seen, you have not heard what you have already heard.” “Today a number of forces tell us the same thing, that what has happened has not happened,” continues Vásquez.
For the novelist, common reality began to break down around 2016, the terrible year of Brexit, the first election of Donald Trump, and the victory of the ‘no’ to a referendum to approve the peace agreement in Colombia. “Before, our political convictions were more political positions than football fans. But politics began to resemble a confrontation between fans,” says Vásquez. Then, empowered by social networks and populism like Trump’s, an era began “of fanaticism, of small fundamentalisms, which has collaborated with the destruction of that common reality.”
And what is the role of citizens in all this?, asks Moreno, citing in which Vásquez says that “a part of the citizens has the right to demand a certain degree of responsibility. I am not referring to all of them, as I say: I consider a large part lost.”
He was referring to the most fanatical, says Vásquez, but for the vast majority, on the other hand, it would require a greater capacity for imagination to recover empathy towards others. “It becomes increasingly difficult for us to imagine the lives of others, and to understand why they do not think with us,” says the writer. Remember that Milan Kundera said that the novel is “where we suspend moral judgment,” and it is that power that enhances literature, of listening without judgment, to which the Colombian would like to appeal.
Javier Moreno says that the most painful part of the book comes when Colombia and its circular violence appear. One column talks about the children of violence, whose parents were murdered, and dedicated themselves to politics. The next one, painfully, is about the murder of , a senator and pre-candidate who died last year after a hitman shot him in the middle of a rally in Bogotá. His mother, when he was four years old, had also been murdered.
“Living in Colombia is accepting that the worst possible scenario is as acceptable as the best,” says Vásquez in one of the columns that Moreno recovers. That was probably written in one of many moments of disappointment, the writer remembers. And yet, he adds, “Colombia has always been my obsession, since 2004 I have not written a single page of fiction that is not obsessively Colombian.” More than the country, it is an obsession with the question if this place is capable of dialogue. In the midst of social networks, the threats of artificial intelligence, and the violence that has been repeated for decades.
“Will we be able to remember that the perfect society is not a destination and neither is democracy? Democracy is the path, not the destination,” the writer asks. He seeks his answers in Chekov, in Orlando Fals Borda, in Salman Rushdie. Literature, Moreno replies, in the end is what keeps him going in dark times, what spreads “the desire to live.”
