Fragile young people, too fragile – Infobae

Today I’m going to tell you something that I’m going to publish in a few days. A little bit of what will be a longer note. It’s about this: I read a book that made me feel the passage of time—again. A book so young that while I read it it made me a little angry, I felt distant and alien to that sensitivity and that way of approaching things. But when I finished it and a few days passed, well, things began to settle. And when I spoke with its author we already spoke the same language.

Is about Electric shamans at the sun festivalfrom the Ecuadorian Monica Ojeda. The book tells what the title says: there is an electronic party in a volcano. There is a lot of Andean spirituality. Drugs, a lot. Sensitive, fragile young people, too fragile. And behind, the tremendous violence of every day in Ecuador.

I will know later that Ojeda —born in Guayaquil in 1988— left her country a few years ago precisely because of that violence. Because everyone has someone killed by hitmen. “Ecuador has become a narco-state,” Ojeda will tell me, bluntly, one morning in a café in Buenos Aires. Nothing less.

For those of us who read writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Augusto Roa Bastosthe book of Ojeda It may be something like a step closer to Latin American literature, a Latin American literature of the 21st century. If before there was magical realism, misery, dictators, here there is electronic music, indigenous rites, a lot of music, drugs. Some absent father. And, as before, pain: that did not change.

There is also an idea that has its tradition: the party as a place of liberation, of mixture, of a certain elevation. I think about the idea of ​​the Dionysian of Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, and in the carnivalization of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin: the place where conventional norms and hierarchies are subverted and liberated through laughter, humor and parody. What place does that have in the present? How is music different now, when we have it anytime, anywhere?

“Don’t love people, love music, all the time we are killing those we love a little, but you can’t kill her so love her, I told her, love her and protect the pain that comes with beauty, protect the distance” says one of the characters.

People die, music doesn’t. An idea for the characters to defend themselves from pain. There are many characters, many first-person stories. One of the girls is there to dance but also to meet her father who abandoned her. We will have—he highlights in the book, the only one from her generation—that father’s voice.

In the talk, in that cafe, Ojeda will say it clearly:

“The characters of Electric shamans… They are young guys who leave Guayaquil to go to an experimental music festival in the Andes to try to temporarily forget that They live in a situation almost of warto escape, in quotes, with music.”

Works?

And more or less. He says Ojeda: “In the end it is a story about young people who are dispossessed, uprooted and helpless and who are searching in art, in music, in poetry, a kind of vital awakening. But that vital awakening with all the assimilation of the nightmare, the trauma, the place, the pain, the restlessness.”

Fragility. You can see that and that’s what I tell you, and it was part of what irritated me: why are they so fragile, so glass?

“They are characters that have experienced loss up close, they have seen people die, family members, friends, these young boys have all been through it.” That, he says, changes everyone’s life: “Young people do not struggle to imagine a future in a territory that is amputating their imagination of the future, because what violence does is that it flatly ages you, it ages you because it takes away your the future, the idea of ​​the future.”

That’s an idea. Violence takes away your idea of ​​the future and without a future it’s like you’re older. She tells me, calm, soft, this girl more than twenty years younger than me.

What surprises me, however, is the lack of an idea of endurance. Damaged, yes, but without response plans? Without trying to organize and win?

Ojeda understands the question: “It’s just that I feel that the characters are not seeking to solve the problem, especially because it is very difficult to articulate an answer to the problem.” narcostate. It is a place of maximum fragility knowing that those you love most are exposed to constant disappearance. Of course we are always exposed to disappearance, but having that feeling that it is constantly about to happen is another story.”

There will be much more in the interview, take it as an appetizer.