Venezuela, the Present as Struggle by Cira Pascual Marquina & Chris Gilbert

Author:Cira Pascual Marquina & Chris Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2020-10-29T04:00:00+00:00

Everyday Life in Besieged Venezuela: A Conversation with Jessica Dos Santos

Jessica Dos Santos, who grew up with the Bolivarian Revolution, is a university professor and journalist. However, she is best known as a chronicler of everyday life in Venezuela. Whether focused on the weekly struggle to get running water, celebrating Christmas in the crisis, or the wild side of using improvised public transport in Caracas, her stories are always honest, heartfelt, and revealing. They show another side of Chavismo, far from the high-toned official discourse, but just as important because it is there—in the details of everyday life—that much of the future of the revolutionary process will be decided.

Much has been written in a very general sense about Venezuela’s current situation. For example, we hear a great deal about the economic war, sanctions, imperialist meddling, and even communal organization and building popular power. But very little is said about daily life: for example, about the difficulties we face every day in a city like Caracas. Would you say that being a chronicler of everyday life is a political act? What happens to politics when it doesn’t connect with concrete reality and when daily life is not taken into account?

I am one of those people who believe that absolutely everything in life is a political act, from the way we feed ourselves to our way of speaking. And that is perhaps the key to understanding why politics goes beyond and must go beyond party politics. Therefore, I agree with you.

I think that being a chronicler of everyday life is a political act that seeks to record the day-to-day and to lay out, in some way or other, the main episodes of the story we are living. It is an attempt to leave traces that will later allow us to reconstruct a scene. It helps us know what was happening moment by moment leading up to this or that event.

For that reason, when politics does not connect with concrete reality or does not take daily life into account, it ends up becoming an endless number of speeches that do not connect with anything. It can be empty and so contradictory as to be shameless. This inevitably generates discontent in the population or leads to a failure to see themselves reflected [in the political discourse].

For example, many parts of President Nicolás Maduro’s speech during his annual address have nothing to do with what the Venezuelan people experience on a daily basis. In the same way, Juan Guaidó doesn’t win people over saying that among his first political projects is the return of the RCTV channel. These are things that don’t make any sense in a country with problems as serious as ours.

Alejo Carpentier said that the work of Latin American writers was different from that of writers elsewhere. Writers from our continent have to describe things (such as the bizarre and huge ceiba tree or the noisy macaw) with a lot of attention to detail, because they have not previously figured in narratives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.