La matrix del veoveo
Translator: Gisela Giardino
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Okay, sorry, you will have to excuse me,
but I’m not going
to be able to do the talk.
I cannot.
I see it wrong.
I see it unfair.
It would feel immoral.
Because according to
what they have taught us,
we can pity losers,
or think they are cute,
they can give us rating, fear
but, a talk?
No, ridiculous.
But nevertheless,
here you see me.
That’s why I came,
because you see me.
My partners, my neighbors,
the vast majority of them
aren’t that lucky,
they are still invisible.
And I don’t want to be
the target of any hypocrisy.
I haven’t wanted this for 16 years,
when we founded a base organization,
where every not-neighbor of the slums
was anonymous by statute,
to not plug the ones “without voice”,
not even with the voices
of their own spokesmen.
A movement for white men
to learn to lose our place,
between so many black women
who teach us how to share it.
Not from the slums to the public.
Not from the slums to the market.
Not from the slums to the thesis.
From the slums to the victory, yes.
But what victory?
Giving that talk
would represent our defeat
in that bid that gave us birth:
our own inability to share the power.
I think about it and I get ashamed,
but I’m going to make
an even worse infidence.
Another defeat,
even more absurd,
for a guy that was summoned to show
what others cannot see:
I come from playing “I-spy”,
and in that one too, I lost.
But beware, not against anyone,
I lost against my daughter,
who objectively plays really well.
And she is not such a little girl,
she’s already 4 years old!
Now look how intelligent
that little girl is.
Taking advantage that, usually,
we don’t see the slums,
we don’t see the prisoners,
we don’t see the native women,
I ask her “what color is it?”
and she answers, “black”.
And I, as a good white man,
don’t like losing to absolutely anything,
I searched in every last fluff,
but she kept saying no.
“You are robbing me”, I said,
“for sure I already guessed “.
“So, do you give up?”, she asked me.
There’s no freaking way I’m giving up.
And right there, almost indulging herself
in my own blindness,
she said to me:
“It was this, daddy, this.
Do you see?
This thing, when you close your eyes,
it was that black thing,
do you get it?”
Plenty of times in a minute,
for many minutes,
that black curtain unrolled
in front of me, with every blink,
but I couldn’t see it,
it took one little girl
to come and show me it.
And this good people
wanted me to give a talk,
a white talk about
the darkness we don’t see…
Obviously I’m not going to give that talk!
I couldn’t, even if I wanted.
So that’s it,
you can just fade to black.
Or close your eyes tight,
until you know what you are looking at.
But really close them.
There,
stay there,
There is the slum,
do you see it?
There are the jails,
do you see it?
There,
in the deepest darkness,
there are the slums,
the jails,
the ethnic groups
as they always showed us,
dark,
without faces,
without eyes,
without soul,
how can you not fear them!
How would you want to open a window!
Well, open it,
open it because we drown.
Open the window,
not the eyes –
Stay there.
And don’t look for
my neighborhood, Zavaleta,
look for your own neighborhood.
Don’t look for my godson,
look for your own godson.
Is he there?
Are you seeing him?
Well, now look at him shaking,
look at him shaking under the table,
at his home,
for more than three hours.
between 105 detonations
with lead bullets,
with firearms,
with war calibers,
literally peeing himself
and crying.
Until he doesn’t cry anymore.
Your comadre runs to pick him up,
but he is already asleep, losing blood.
She pick him up and run,
runs with all the feet
of the neighborhood,
because for 50 years
not one ambulance has entered.
Or because there is no way
that it could pass through those halls.
And you cry
and run,
an then you arrive.
But you don’t really make it.
You don’t.
Be careful, those responsible
for liberating the area will pay for it,
they will pay a fine.
12,500 Argentinean pesos they will pay,
6 years later, they will pay it.
And now
open up your eyes,
your throat,
your soul.
You don’t have a godson anymore.
Neither justice.
You have a talk,
a talk that your godson
won’t be able to give
because they didn’t see him.
The talk your comadre cannot give
because they don’t listen to her.
Are you all ready for that talk?
Well, me neither.
When the bullets or showers
go through your tin roof,
because you couldn’t even put
a water-repellant,
and the rain is music for the shit puddles
that sprout inside your house,
while sewers are clogged from below,
and your baby is uncovered, from above,
Who the hell is going to get diplomatic?
Maybe, that’s why
my neighbor Mabel screams.
She screams and cries
every time that rains.
Mabel has cried every time
it rains, for 52 years.
Look if she isn’t part
of the universe, Mabel!
But treatment for this chronic condition
is still very expensive,
that complex of variable cloudiness,
that the specialists of the specialism
would call “eyes showers”.
Well,
“they cry, but people in the slums
don’t want to leave their homes.”
And you?
Would you?
Would you leave your neighborhoods,
its squares,
the memories that nest there?
All the women and men
from the slum that I know,
want to leave from there.
What not everyone wants is to move.
What not everyone wants
is to save themselves only.
I want to leave the slum too,
but I don’t want to leave Zavaleta,
I want us to finally crack down
on the poverty of Zavaleta.
Because I learned
almost everything I know there.
Or why do you think
I was invited to give a talk?
Or where did you think
my kid discovered the “I-spy” matrix?
My friend Fidel
was 9 years old when La Poderosa started,
he was the goalie of the team
that turned a football paddock
into an assembly.
And a few days ago
he told me, in tears:
“I have more dead friends than years.”
25 years.
27 dead friends.
All of them victims
of the same invisible enemy
that still doesn’t get visibility.
The pandemic of inequality.
Well,
but the rest, the rest of us,
what do we have to do with it?
What do we have to see?
Good question.
That’s a good question,
because what we see
when we see the slum culture,
observing, without speaking,
without learning, without listening,
that’s not the culture, nor the slum,
that is precariousness.
Updated, like our eyelids
or like naturalness.
And there the problem of our minds,
when they close up.
That’s where inequality is trapped,
in our own corset.
Some screaming from the shit
and others pontificating from a bidet?
No,
when comfort matches our strategy,
it is well worth suspecting
from our strategy.
Now, then, let’s go,
let’s open,
There must be a real window
somewhere on the wall.
This wall that we raise
so that the lack of light, of water,
the lack of opportunities don’t enter,
this wall full of fake windows,
like these ones,
this cell phone,
this computer,
in which you may be watching.
Well, be careful!
Beware, because sometimes
the means are not means,
they are ends.
And they are never a window
that can be traversed.
They are always a square painted
on your wall, on my wall.
Another obstacle that cannot be seen,
because there are many
boys and girls from the slums,
who get to the media.
But generally, they arrive late,
they arrive when they have just moved…
to the cemetery.
We have to be able and want
to see that double rod,
that horizontal crack, hidden behind
so much undergrowth,
and let an “I-spy” finally reach
the poverty line.
Because in the slum as on TV,
time is still tyrant, shows no mercy,
and to be able to lucubrate a talk
you need to have that availability.
There are no poor people in the media.
There are no poor people in Justice.
There are no poor people
at the Parliament.
Neither there are poor people
in the coordination of TED talks.
Where are the boys then?
Where are they hiding?
In jail.
They are there!
Gamblers? Hide and seek fans too?!
And then,
what use would this white man
standing there be for?
No chance.
There is no way I could make that talk,
because that reality, still clandestine,
you have to go find it.
But not to feel Gandhi
or go and take a selfie among
the most vulnerable ones.
Not to feel responsible, or guilty,
for our very great fault.
Neither to feel like a jerk,
because nothing makes sense
so, it doesn’t matter,
and abandon.
To see. Just to be able to see.
Or are we going to continue
allowing four-year-olds
to humiliate us by playing “I-spy”?
We’re screwed.
We are monochromatically fucked.
And now it’s our turn
to light up a new normality.
A better normality,
not a black quota.
A multi-colored reality.
Because my neighborhood,
your neighborhood,
my baby, you and me,
we all deserve to see it.
But to be able to tell another reality
we have to make it real first.
And making it will not only be difficult,
it will also feel uncomfortable.
Because otherwise,
we should be suspicious.
Faced with a battle so full of violence,
competition, convenience, indifference,
it will no longer be enough
to wave a white flag.
Rather we will have to lower a curtain
and surrender our own surrender.
So no one ever thinks again
that white people need to listen
to another white person,
talking to us about respect and diversity.
Because as long as everything is white,
there will be no talk
that will lead us to victory
neither from the right nor from the left.
So excuse me,
but I’m going to fuck off!