Who is my fellow man? (III)

1. The horror of the other in others: how can we protect ourselves from it? I can’t be the only person who woke up from election night feeling nauseous and numb. To a large extent, it cannot be explained without confronting the horror of the other in others, in our own. What can we do about it, if we believe, as I do, that together with others we are worth more and become better than apart from them? Transform numbness into vitality: persist in the increasingly unpopular idea that places flourish from omnivorous diversity; and that people flourish from places. Rediscover the joy in the faces of others: of our neighbors, of strangers, of foreigners. Find in this joy a form of resistance, as the song goes.

2. Do not think that the place where we live is “ours”. No place belongs to us, if we belong to it. It is in the nature of places, as well as of people, that they have no owner. Or rather: we can buy land and houses (those of us who have the means to do so), we can inherit ‘properties’, but we do not own the conditions of belonging. Understand, therefore, in confronting ourselves and our inner circumstances, that the place and the company we have been given, even the family we are born into, are purely arbitrary. To be a person is to be thrown into the sea of ​​the other. The joy of knowing that I am not alone does not come from belonging to a place but from that place, whichever one I find myself thrown into, being the location of the diversity that forms me.

3. Not feeling at home is perhaps the most underestimated minority experience in our time. It may not even be a minority. Those who were born and lived in between places, emigrants, immigrants, exiles, the persecuted, those who are in a minority due to some essential circumstance or condition, those who are between languages, between countries, between world views, between cultures, all know it. It is enough to change to a cosmopolitan scale to understand that the minority is today, perhaps, the majority. Horror of the other is almost always horror of the present. Horror of the present is often a bad conscience.

4. I lift my face and look at this vast crowd, to which I belong. Here and elsewhere, foreigners, Portuguese, emigrants, immigrants, exiles, those who live between borders, inhabit the gap that inhibits uncomplicated belonging, life has put them in the position of having forgotten what it is to be at home, if they ever knew it, if they ever felt safe. The multitude of displaced people, the anonymous masses that television channels film from a distance, mimicking the point of view of a guilty conscience, the subjects of injustice, war, violence, discrimination, distrust, fear, poverty, are they not, in a certain way, our grandparents, under attack or shipwrecked in a boat, are they not the ones from whom, in one way or another, we are descended, all of us who live on the rubble of their loss, of their attempt? Perhaps the plausible redemption of the essential sadness of displacement lies not so much in the empathy longed for by those who arrive, but in a desirable horizon of mutual curiosity.

5. On the street, in a queue, in Porto, hundreds of immigrants wait for a stamp required for the process of legalizing themselves. They need to confirm their criminal record. Some have been there for three days, spending the night on the street. There are mothers and fathers with children, people on sick leave, and sick people. A few days ago, I needed a criminal record certificate. It took me less than five minutes to request it and receive it digitally.

6. I read Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts again. Saidiya asks: “Can beauty be an antidote to dishonor, and love a way of ‘exhuming buried screams’ and reanimating the dead?” Then I think about what I’m doing here. What can stories be, for whom and whom do they serve? Writing to wake the dead, to not forget, to glue together the pieces of elections with beauty, to exercise the irreverence of thinking that it’s worth it, that there will be someone who cares, who won’t give up. Believing in the kindness of that anonymous ear to whom one speaks, imagining that one glues together the pieces by virtue of persisting in the face of the horror of the horror of the other, a persistence that consists in being one with others and because of them, and not against others: being one more — against no one.