NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE

By Leonardo Padura Reprint | | Print |

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HAVANA, Jun 17 2009 (IPS) - Chiasso is a small city in the Swiss Ticino blessed with a wonderful climate and splendid nature, lakes and mountains, and blessed as well with the historic fortune of being a part of the Helvetic Confederation and thus having Swiss political and social features, plus, given its proximity to Italy, its people not only speak the language of Dante but also enjoy his country’s splendid cuisine. As they say, it can’t get better than that.

For four years this city had held the Literary Chiasso festival, a modest but competitive assembly of authors from different areas, styles, and genres. At this years’ festival in late May, which I had the fortune of being invited to, the enigmatic and provocative theme set for discussions of the forum was: “nostalgia of the future”.

Musing on the “nostalgia of the future” in the city of Chiasso, where everything works like a Swiss clock, and the meals are accented with olive oil, basil, and rosemary, revealed with striking clarity the worries of thinking people today.

Nostalgia is associated with words like loss, sadness, melancholy, distance, and absence, and conceptually an orientation towards the past. The simple temporal redirection of nostalgia towards the future (and stripped of any religious colourings from various religions’ idea of a “beyond” for the chosen) involves a poetic redefinition of the term. It also, however, contains a very dramatic intellectual assertion: that there can be a nostalgia for a future that has not yes happened and may never happen, and this melancholy certainty can be understood only in terms of a dissatisfaction with a present that people want to escape from to reach this possible and better future for which they feel something as biting as nostalgia.

The only way of understanding or imagining this longed-for future is to observe with objectivity and detachment the unsatisfactory present that we have come to through errors (or sins, it could be said) committed in the past: a world assailed by poverty, inequality, xenophobia, religious, political, and economic fundamentalisms, war, terrorism, the infinite range of corruption and violence, the devastation of nature and its resources, the myriad forms of dictatorship, censorship, and marginalisation, and for two years now, an economic crisis that affects the five continents and the seven seas… Such a world could never be the product of mere chance or divine damnation.

If in the 1990s the capitalist system thought it had achieved a resounding victory after the disappearance of the communist threat in Europe, the end of the Cold War, and the furious introduction of neoliberal economic models, today it is all too easy to see how wrong the political calculation was that accompanied that victory. The disappearance of political and economic bipolarity can be seen less as the triumph of the capitalist model than as the lamentable and staggering failure of the socialist utopia, that society of equals dreamed of by man for centuries which, just as it seemed it could really be built, was perverted by Stalinism and related political machines, with massive oppression, the systematic generation of terror, economic inefficiency, expansionist ambitions, and the many crimes, or genocides, committed in the name of marxist faith – like those of the Khmer Rouge, still on trial in Cambodia, who, it has been revealed, would kill infants by swinging them against trees.

The fact that the 21st century opened with the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York was not a matter of chance either. It was the result of a storm that had been long building and has deluged the world even since in crisis, poverty, fear, surveillance, secret police powers, and wars with obscure goals and no conceivable end. Our planet, reeling from the effects of severe mistreatment, reminds us humans that we are not the lords of the skies and the earth.

What then would this future be like that we already feel such nostalgia for, when the crisis ends, when the fundamentalisms and terrorism are overcome, when the issue of hunger, the modest yet slandered millennium goals, and ecological devastation are finally taken seriously? Will we have time to build a better future, with real democracies free of demagogy, to save the planet and our place on it? I have no answers and prefer to simply leave these questions open, awakening perhaps in this way this strange nostalgia for something we have not yet achieved. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.