Sergio Ramirez
Madrid Spain
When I have ever been asked about my identity, I have said that I imagine as a simile the concentric circles that open up on the water when a stone falls. In the first of those circles I am Nicaraguan, in the next Central American, in the other Caribbean, and finally, in the widest of all, the one that encompasses and protects the rest, I am a Hispanic American from both shores.
In other words, I have always felt part of one and all, and I have never seen myself as a foreigner anywhere from Tucumán to La Serena, from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to Arequipa, from Cartagena de Indias to Zacatecas, from Tenerife to San Sebastian. They are felt identities, and shared.
I walk the streets of these and many other cities with a familiar step, and in my phone book there are countless names of friends from all those countries; I enjoy the different accents, the local interludes of the language, which is still my own with seductive variants. My nose knows by heart the perfume of its stews, which I savor as if my palate had always known them.
The issue of borders and passports, border fences and visas are artifices that have grown over time, to the extent that mass migrations have become part of the economic and social crises, and also because of of political oppression, which forces people to exodus. Only last year, 170,000 Nicaraguans requested asylum at the land border posts in Texas, Arizona and California, after a more than hazardous journey through Mexican territory.
But even the border of the United States was at one time what we might call an innocent border. in his memoir Ulysses Creole, José Vasconcelos, whose father had a customs inspector position in Piedras Negras, remembers that, at Eagle Pass, on the other side of the invisible guardrail, one passed without any requirement, and he attended school there, just by crossing a bridge. The drama of migrants trying to clandestinely cross the walled borders and monitored with drones, or swim up the waters of the Rio Grande at night, at the risk of drowning, did not exist.
The great political cataclysms, which cause offensive phenomena for human dignity, are capable of erasing that concept of impregnable borders that has been petrifying in recent decades. We saw it with the 222 political prisoners, illegally imprisoned in Nicaragua, and also illegally expelled to the United States, under a treacherous trap, since they were provided with passports, and as soon as they landed in Washington, the dictatorship declared them stateless. Just as another 93 Nicaraguans were declared stateless shortly after, the vast majority already in exile.
Many of these prisoners had never traveled abroad before, nor had they been on a plane before. They arrived in their shirtsleeves in the winter chill, with no relatives or acquaintances waiting for them, not knowing a word of English. It is the great loneliness of exile. They received humanitarian refuge, and in need of shelter and forms of subsistence, a solidarity network of refugee organizations and human rights defenders was immediately deployed, which has taken them to live in different states, waiting to be able to find work or studies. .
Then the government of Spain, without delay, and with beautiful generosity, offered all the expatriates citizenship.and this example was followed by similar offers from the governments of Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, which have opened their doors to them, as it is very possible that the governments of Ecuador and Uruguay will also do so.
A common restitution in the face of an iniquitous dispossession, which brings me back to that idea of shared identity, a circle that opens after another circle, in an increasingly broader way. “I will pay you back what you lost to the aphid, the grasshopper, the locust, and the caterpillar.”says the Old Testament in the book of Joel. Isn’t this, ripping you off your land, decreeing that it be taken from you, the work of predators?
Upon being granted the Cervantes Prize for Literature in 2017, the council of ministers granted me spanish citizenship together with the great mexican film director Alexander Gonzalez Iñarritu; so that when the dictatorship in Nicaragua stripped me of my Nicaraguan status, according to their accounts, but not according to mine, that honorary decision, which I appreciated so much at the time, to become Spanish for literary merits, became my protective shield. The force of the first concentric circle.
Then, really, I have felt overwhelmed by so much solidarity. The offer of President Gustavo Petrowhich Foreign Minister Álvaro Leiva transmitted to me in Madrid, granting me Colombian citizenship, and the call made to me by President Guillermo Lasso, to offer me Ecuadorian citizenship. And the offer, equally generous, of the President of Chile, Gabriel Boric; from Argentina, Alberto Fernandez; and from Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to all the de-Nicaraguanized.
Only the silence of President Lula of Brazil is so strange. A president who is the fruit of democracy should not remain silent in the face of a dictatorship that denies democracy and denies the inalienable right of nationality, as an act of political revenge.
So, this thing about the mother country, and about the common American homeland, which in school books and history texts seems like a vain aspiration, or a rhetorical formulation, in the face of the Nicaraguan drama makes real sense. They deprive you of what is yours and no one can take it from you, but meanwhile I give you my country, my house is yours.
As in the gospel according to Saint Matthew “Everyone who has left houses, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or land, will receive a hundred times as much.” If your country is taken from you, you now have so many to choose from, and that brings me back to my idea of concentric circles.
We are from one place, from one country, but we are at the same time from all of them, and we have many.
