Welcome back readers!
When we started reading Juliana Spahr’s “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs” in our ASTU class, this is the first image that came to mind. This picture is from an Argentinian comic strip called “Mafalda” that I used to read when I was a kid. In this frame, the girl with the blonde hair, Susanita, has just finished reading the paper with the news from all over the world, and she says: “Aaaah!… Luckily the world is far, far away!…” I was probably eight years old when I first read this, so I thought it was really funny but I also thought that it was very naive of her to think that way. Nowadays, however, I see it and I finally understand what she meant by that statement, I understand that none of us have the courage to say this but we definitely think about it. This is because we read the news everyday and we complain about the war in Syria, the child labor in Ivory Coast, the school shootings in the US, etc. but at the end of the day we know that we are safe, so we go to sleep thinking that as our day is over, everyone else’s day is over as well.
Juliana Spahr reflects on the idea of our beds and how their role as some sort of “safe haven” is challenged depending on where we are from and what we are dealing with. For someone like me, going to bed means comfort and safety, but more than anything it means that all of our problems are over, so we go to sleep with the certainty that everything is going to be okay. However, what is the case of a person who lives in a country at war? They go to sleep with anxiety and stress because the uncertainty of whether or not someone is going to break in their homes, drop a bomb on the house next door, or shoot at their windows in the middle of night is always there. The world is not “far, far away!” for them, the world is right there, haunting them from their own backyards because they do not know if they will make it to see the sun on the next day. How can we relate to this people? How can we look at them and tell them that we understand what they are going through? How can we tell them that everything is going to be alright when it’s not true? But more importantly, how do we know that we are not the next ones in line to experience all of that?
Have a great weekend everyone!
