There are those who want to dedicate one day of the year to what takes lifelong struggles. There are those who want to wash their conscience with symbolic and isolated acts that generate commemorative postcards, easy to post on WhatsApp stories.
The word genocide is not enough to describe certain things, certain historical and tremendous traumas, from which most of us come from.
Genocide, according to the academy of language, is the systematic extermination or elimination of a human group because of race, ethnicity, religion, politics or nationality. But it has always had a little more behind it than it says, because race and ethnicity invented it, religion and politics manipulate it and nationality prostitute it.
We already know who they are, we know the smell of how they look and the dull spectrum their planes make when they launch themselves to break the sound barrier and a few other barriers.
We already know how they talk, that there are words that they repeat a lot and others that they never mention, that they love to throw around blame and responsibility, that they change the subject quickly, that they can do it, they have what they need.
Genocide… What do they think we mean by people being killed? A common crime that is erased with three days of crying, four months of pain and a hundred wakes?
We already know that it is not only our bodies that hinder them: they also have more than enough of the full, distinct and rich freedom of our sensibilities, the willingness to pledge our words and our lives in function of our words and our lives, the other ways of saying how a people is organized or where and for what or for whom wealth is placed, the “I don’t feel like it” similar to the priceless tantrum….
This December 9th, a day in which a large part of the world dedicates at least a moment to commemorate and dignify the victims of genocide, to “think” about how to prevent it, it seems better to us to invoke all those resistances that confront it.
The daily ones that even they themselves do not know they exist, the past ones, the high-flown ones, those who know how to cry, those who prefer to save their tears for later, the silent ones, the future ones, those who assume, as the poet said, “that all the words with which I sing to life come with death as well.”
