Sometimes a writer would like the words to go far, to be words-spears, but always tolerant of the different. A writer, as Susan Sontag reminded us, lives involved in her time and in the society she lives in and feels, and therefore has the need to express the fight against injustices.
Yesterday we learned that the PP, Vox and Junts, overturned the Immigration Law. I am not going to talk about politics here. Or maybe yes? Shouldn't politics and democracy be that space - already forgotten - where the other, the people, are looked at, and the common is thought of? Aren't we immigrants ourselves? Weren't our great-grandparents and grandparents immigrants? Don't we share roots with Spinoza, Averroes and Ibn Tufail? Aren't our distant surnames also theirs? Aren't our words - like al-mohada something to share?
The sociologist Edgar Morin has been warning for some time of the need to look south. As much as some would like to avoid the inevitable, poverty and climate change exist, and immigration - like all the great problems of our time - are a consequence of something greater.
In "The Merchant of Venice, III", Shakespeare reminds us: "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"
What differentiates us from the brothers of the south? The economy, poverty, hunger, inequality. Not the human condition.
I live in a neighborhood whose brothers are, Maghrebi, Senegalese, Muslim, English, German.
I live in a neighborhood where there are wonderful social centers that treat everyone equally, try to avoid ghettos, give hands and arms to their brothers from the south. But I also live on an island where those arms and hands are overwhelmed. Where I myself do not know how to help being a writer and philosopher... more than launching these words that can create some kind of solidarity.
A country like Spain, which does not want to show solidarity with immigration in each autonomous community, runs the risk of being an even poorer country - however paradoxical this phrase may seem to some - and which is unaware of its own history. A country that does not look at that tolerant Toledo where different religions and peoples coexisted, a country that leaves its abandoned minors, is a country that does not attend to social reality, but neither looks at other countries, and of course does not look at the "Atlas of the South".
From the island where the Moroccan director of a social services center, with an affable, delicate and cultured smile, extended - to me, to this Spanish woman - his hand to get out of a situation of vulnerability, I write.
We better learn to be brothers. It is not a present, it was our past, and it will be our future.