The Emotional Geography of the World: A History of Trauma and Resilience

There is a map of the world that helps you understand it. There are no fixed borders, nor seas that bathe it, but there are walls and abysses of ocean that outline it. In the abysses, the feeling is desolation. In between the shipwreck there is an incessant search for dry land.

The social and economic exclusion of colonialism left a trail of resignation and anger that crept into people’s lives, sometimes as a drop by drop, other times as a torrent that destroys everything. The breaths of fresh air of joy for liberation were short-lived under the rubble of the assassination of Lumumbas or Sankaras. Other colonialisms were built from within, in newly exclusive states or with new frontiers of feelings, that of belonging, this land is ours, you are leaving. In recent decades, this emotional geography is what has broken down the barriers to migration; it is not just economic precariousness or political asphyxiation. People are looking for a horizon.

Feeling maps are very variable. They sometimes change in moments or situations. De Rivera talks about reactions and emotional climate and setting a trend over time from less to more, to a culture where emotions are installed and transmitted. There are streaks of fear and hatred, such as after the March 11 attack in Madrid, which represented a wave of stupor and generalized rejection but which showed that part of consciousness that we continue to need, and even greater solidarity, and pushed to bring before justice to the authors.

When fear lurks, the worst recipe is to stigmatize an entire group or people, be it Basque, Iraqi, Israeli or Palestinian. The response to fear becomes something larger than itself, a collective phobia as an extended version of the threat to life and coexistence, sometimes even suffocating them.

There is a before and after of wounds that mark history, and a multitude of other traumas even before and after. Martín Baró taught us that they have a psychosocial dimension, which weaves and sometimes knots people and societies. The Declaration of Human Rights, which is commemorated this year on its 75th anniversary, is an always unfinished plan, a map of positive feelings for humanity. It helps to analyze and claim, to feel part of a collective feeling of respect that makes it necessary to fight for it every day.

A party turned into the horror of people’s hunt. Bombings against the civilian population in which the distance button does not allow the responsibility of those who commit them to be felt. In his Refugee Dialogues, Bertolt Brecht speaks of the dignity of failed acts, when the pilot decides at the last moment to make a gesture of humanity that diverts the shot by a small line and the people who live under that building can breathe. Today, the merit is relentlessness.

The geography of feelings extends that of grievance throughout the world. It is not produced only by those who carry out evil on a large scale, but also by those who justify it or despise human dignity, minimizing pain while doubting the suffering that we all see, questioning the statistics.

On this 75th anniversary, not only are the items that inhabit it being buried, filling with blood, tears and rubble. It is the paper on which they were written that is being destroyed, the paper that, as Eduardo Galeano tells in his Memory of Fire, the Guaraní indigenous people called the skin of the gods. It is the founding act that is expressed in its preamble, where it says who it belongs to: “We the people…”

If the France of human rights prohibits demonstrations, the example for all will be taking power over our lives. Nothing that is said from now on will have that value that John Berger claims that naming the intolerable calls for action. Wole Soyinga, the Nigerian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, pointed out years ago that considering human rights as something from the West constitutes a vote in favor of Power against the community of Liberty.

As in Martin Niemöller’s poem, when they came for the communists I was not a communist, or when they came for the Jews I did not say anything because I was not Jewish, a verse about the Palestinians should be added to the end of when they came for There was no one to protest. Only social mobilization and ties between geographies of feelings can avoid the disaster that is already here. The fragile conquests of rights and coexistence now need to move from the dimension of the poem to a choral one. Lest we forget, the declaration of Human Rights is the only one that is called universal.

2023-11-13 18:49:15
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