First Prize Poetry in Spanish - Faculty & Staff

Noche

Author: Sergio Rodríguez Jiménez

Receptionist, Segovia Campus

 

NOCHE

Imaginamos siempre
que alguien nos salvará
en el último instante.
Pero nunca pensamos
que la vida no es nuestra,
que la muerte no surge
del vacío del mundo,
sino de la penumbra
cabal de nuestros ojos.
Nunca pensamos entre
surcos, entre racimos
de una misma raíz.
Y si nadie nos libra
de la inquietud del viento
es porque somos parte
de su tumulto ufano.
Somos tiernos relojes,
bestias civilizadas,
constelaciones rotas,
luz sin atardeceres,
voz a la que cercenan
su altar de aladas cruces,
abismos microscópicos,
acantilados zurdos.
Y no. Nadie lo hará.
Nadie nos salvará.
Tenemos que salvarnos
nosotros mismos. Nunca
ha estado tan vacía
nuestra íntima calle,
nuestra dulce manera
de descifrar el frío.
A menudo paseo
por jornadas inertes,
por trayectorias donde
la nieve no se inhibe,
donde la luz añora
su juventud sin nubes…
y no sé de otra alma
que no sea el relente.

Second Prize Poetry in Spanish - Faculty & Staff

San Marcos, Newton y yo

Author: Marqués Barrios

Senior Program Coordinator, Corporate and Special Programs

 

“San Marcos, Newton y yo”

IE FOUNDATION PRIZES IN HUMANITIES - POETRY

Te llamaron error

-Syntax error, puntualizó la calculadora-
No tenían ni idea
de lo que hablaban.
Y si lo fuiste
lo eras
lo eres
(o lo volverás a ser)
eras mi error
-yo introduje,
primero, dos pilas de botón,
las fórmulas, después-

Eres el determinante posesivo más bonito que
he escrito en mi vida.

___

Podría tirarme todo el día
mirando por la ventana
esperando
que lo poco que sé de física
y matemáticas
salpique
alguna referencia bíblica
y por efecto dominó
arroje algo de luz
a las fotos que me mandaste ayer
para así alumbrar un par de versos
sobre huesos,
derivadas
y Corintios 7,4.
Lo mismo de siempre,
pero ahora como nunca.
Volver a entender
la existencia del tiempo
y su importancia.

Antes daba igual
porque no había nada que esperar.

___

Las escaleras mecánicas
la elevaron poco a poco
y ella amaneció por detrás
de los tornos
(joder qué bonita eras)
Era el Sol
colándose sin billete en el metro.
Yo lo vi, idiotas.
Yo he sido testigo.
Que no lo viérais
no implica que no exista.
Yo no he visto París con
estos ojos
y sé que existe.
Del mismo modo que a ella
no había visto,
todavía,
pero sabía que
era
estaba
existía.
Y al final amaneció y la
vi.
Creed, imbéciles.
Creed,
porque creyendo se espera.
Y esperando se existe
y existe lo esperado.

___

Destápate un hombro en un congreso de topógrafos.
(y quizá consigas que revienten de alumnos
las facultades de filosofía)
El perro me mira,
me ladra una sola vez,
estoy acabado,
él también lo sabe.

___

Se lo pedí a Dios,
pero andaría escuchando a algún torero.
Porque no
sucedió
nada.

___

No puedes pretender
que me crea
que la Tierra es plana.
No a mí
que he dibujado
las cartas
de la mitad de tus
silencios.
Si nadie puede
traducirte
cuando callas
-ni religión, ni física,
ni matemáticas, ni
biología
y hemos quedado
que no es lengua
pero tampoco química-
solo me queda la
geografía
para entender.
¿Ves ese tintero?
Vuélcalo
Si llego a Ítaca
me quedo sin Odisea.

___

Empieza tu sombra
en tus pies
y da la vuelta al mundo.

___

Mover el azúcar del café con una cuchara,
no hace el mismo ruido que con una cucharilla.
Solo quien pueda entender esto
podrá entenderme ahora
y dentro de dos meses.
Puede que quien no lo entienda
no me haya entendido jamás
-he aquí la otra mitad de tus silencios-
hoy la luz de la ventana es de obturador de 125
con diafragma de 11,5.
Es perfecta,
como el nacimiento de una espiral
en el café
después de haberlo movido
con una cuchara sopera
en un plano circular.
-del plano
al espacio
y Planck y Dirac
entremedias
sin saber que están molestado-
Vivo en ese espacio
ahora mismo.
En el vacío entre la causa
-mover en un plano-
y el efecto
-modificar el espacio-
Aquí no llegan las llamadas de spam.

___

Cada vez creo más necesario emborracharnos
y cada vez veo los bares más cerrados.

___

Se llega a un punto
en el que el caviar te gusta,
distingues el champagne
del cava caro
y las ciudades de tu vida
se convierten
en ciudades
de una vida
pasada.
Se termina por no envidiar a los gatos,
no envidiar a los mayores
y envidiar a los niños,
sus ojos inexpertos,
su timidez ante el extraño,
su absoluto desconocimiento
del daño que hace conocer.
Bebo alcohol, fumo, me drogo,
cojo aviones solo,
sé nadar sin manguitos,
mi bici no tiene ruedines,
hablo 3 idiomas.
Aquí me han abandonado
las prisas que tenía.

___

A veces me encuentro
con el miedo
que tiene el diablo
amenazado por Jesús
empuñando un cuchillo de plástico;
que no teme el arma,
sino la mano que la empuña.

___

Creo que te conozco
y sin embargo
no sé ni cómo se llamaba tu colegio.

___

Y p m t c e estante t o e u o n ría o r z s n l d q c l l a o u l i o m e a b s i r r r m s e o í m r s o a s

Third Prize Poetry in Spanish - Faculty & Staff

Papaya y madera

Author: Ana Patricia Romay Febres

Program Coordinator, IE Impact

 

Papaya y madera

Yo no soy yo
y mi casa no es mi casa.

Mi país es humo
que se desvanece entre mis manos,
cenizas que intento retener en mi bolso.

Un avión es la caída de una montaña rusa,
salir es como una niña expulsada del parque a patadas.

A patadas dejo el cielo azul
y al extraño amable.

Después de ocho horas de travesía,
cruzando el humo
y el salitre de mis lágrimas,
llego sumisa,

mi cuerpo entrenado para el agotamiento,
mis brazos preparados para no abrazar a mi madre.

Apetito doblegado,
piernas temblorosas,
sienes palpitantes,

en mis tímpanos resuenan campanas
que nadie más oye.

Camino sola,
sin encontrar la montaña,
entre concretos interminables,
sin sentir el rocío,

sudando las cenizas de mis hermanos,
que se adhieren a mis ojos
y se niegan a salir.

Camino sola,
sabiendo que los transeúntes ignoran
las cacerolas que atormentan mis tímpanos.

Me despierto sudorosa
de un sueño ansioso
en el que abrazaba a mi madre
y lloraba por no estar con ella
en mi hogar de la infancia.

Busco pisos
que se asemejen a ese lugar
donde quedó mi niñez,
dulce con sabor a papaya
y olor a madera.

Me desespero por no encontrarme,
por no poder juntar piezas que no tengo,
porque no están aquí.

Hago un esfuerzo olímpico
por ser camaleónica

cuando de mi pecho sale un canto extranjero
y se me escapa un seseo,

porque no soy de aquí,
por más que lo intente.

Qué difícil es sentirme impostora,
y no he usurpado el poder
ni matado inocentes,

me duele en el alma fingir
y yo no he mentido a un pueblo.

A veces deseo sentirme intocable
como un tirano
para no sentirme tan pequeña,

pero son ellos
quienes nos han encogido.

Llegué escapando del humo
que llenaba mis pulmones

y vivo anhelando el ahogo,

no soy de aquí ni de allá,
porque de donde era
ya no existe,

es un humo negro y espeso
donde quedé por siempre atrapada.

First Prize (tied) Poetry in English - Faculty & Staff

Everyone Else Was in Line

Author: Ana Patricia Romay Febres

Program Coordinator, IE Impact

 

Everyone Else Was in Line

Everyone gathered in line
to pick up the strength to endure life

to be able to get up early,
get on the crowded, smelly metro
leave their sick mothers at home
forget about the miscarriage

to pick up the phone from 9 to 5
make coffee from the same old pot
eat oats for breakfast
listen to bad news on the radio

pretend the beggar on the metro does not exist
and stare at the emails on their phones
smile at all the others unpaid coworkers

remember the laundry
and the long-avoided talk with the boss

walk through streetlights and trash and bad ads
complain about headaches
and discuss the weather
and how slow the computers are lately

keep the loneliness
and the crippling fear quiet

then go back to work

no weekend plan,
the movies with a sibling if you’re lucky
call the plumber because you must

everyone else seems to have gathered in line
in a place unknown to me
and picked up the stoic mind to endure it

I must have been asleep as usual
because the anxiety makes my head hurt

I must have woken up with a fast heartbeat,
a scared cry,
knowing there was something I must have missed

while everyone else was in line

First Prize (tied) Poetry in English - Faculty & Staff

The Warehouse

Author: Ana Patricia Romay Febres

Program Coordinator, IE Impact

The Warehouse

My mind feels like a forced labor warehouse
that produces many goods daily:

cloth,
raw material,
clutter that might be useful if turned into something sellable,
something I can trade.

but it just produces clutter
and colorful textiles
and cloth
and paint

(something that could be a plastic cup or a sleeve or a that i cannot turn into a beautiful dress or a beautiful painting,

i want my mind to create something valuable,
something someone might pay me a thousand dollars for
so i can afford rent.

my mind is overworked.

the warehouse works on overproduction and cheap labor,
poor working conditions,
a lot of smoke,
no sleep,
terrible lighting,
rusty overheated machinery that makes a lot of sound
and smells like it may explode at any time.

people are angry about the poor working conditions,
the exploitation,
a rising agitation.

they stand outside with cardboard signs and megaphones.

but the noise of the gear and the clutter and the machinery
shuts them out.

sometimes the warehouse tries to shut the workers’ complaints
with loud music
and caffeine
and poems.

the warehouse wants to be a model of production.
it wants to be admired.
it wants to be the very mirror of productivity.

the warehouse wants to make everything at once
to be everything at once

the warehouse needs to produce,
it needs to make everything it can,
although I’m not quite sure what it is it produces.
no one is.

by people I mean my mother and my therapist,
they think I push myself too hard,
they can smell the smoke from overseas.

but I promise them that someday the clutter will turn into a masterpiece,
they just have to wait.

I’m working on it.
I’m working on it.
I’m working on it.

Second Prize Poetry in English - Faculty & Staff

Untitled

Author: Lili Valentine

Associate Director - Instructional Designer, Digital Learning

 

Untitled

The tip of the tongue taking a trip

As I slide into Spanish,

Smooth, sin frenar ni pensar,

Then back

Yesterday I found myself

Unable to write

Or speak —

My native tongue hijacked

By my first one,

I pass you the photo

While she gets down from the car

False friends

Make for friendly foes

There are others like me,

Que les cuesta usar solo uno

Porque vivimos entre los dos

I try to Limit

Myself to only One —

While I Scorn

Those stuck in only one

The decadent,

The floundering —

Avert your eyes, Anglos,

From this tangle of thorns

Or are they lilies —

Genres are a funny little concept,

Aren’t they?

Where will you put this poem

After it kills me

First Prize Short Story in English - Faculty & Staff

Logbook 2222

Author: Shagun Tripathi

Assistant Professor, Information Systems, IE Business School 

 

LOGBOOK 2222

MOMBASA, KENYA

Logbook 22/22 – 05 JUNE 13:08H – Position 12⁰00’S 40⁰40’E – Course 009⁰ – Speed 0kn – Air 34⁰, haze. Sea 32.6⁰, moderate visibility.

 

Over the brass anchorage, the air felt sluggish. Thin rivulets trickled down her temples. The crisp white shirt stuck to her shoulder blades. A furnace in her chest spat waves of poisonous heat. Feverish eddies twisted upwards, shooting arrows of steam through her scalp. She pinched the back of her neck, willing the heat to pass.

A faint odor of machine oil and grease rode the wind.

Chief Officer Minali Ghorai scanned the bay plan on her clipboard. 11P to 15P, marked yellow for unloading at Mombasa. The discharge was brief: neatly coded HS 8548: electrical waste, HS 6309 – used clothing, mixed origin. Initialing the margins with a sweaty hand, she leaned on the bridge wing rail and exhaled. I feel like a marinated pig.

Above the MV Star Horizon, gantry cranes swung like iron metronomes keeping time with the harbour’s pulse. Down by the quay, a loud clang announced that a container had landed hard. Hot breath whistled through a tapering hole in the oxidized metal. A line of stevedores in neon vests watched the 28,000-kilogram soda can decompress and shrink in slow motion. At last, the mouth tore open; frothing cargo spattered onto the platform. One of the men trudged to the mess and plucked out a sequined blouse, holding it up as if it might explain itself. Rising onto his toes, he turned a small pirouette, waving the garment in slow swishes to a rousing coda only he could hear. “Eh, look! Wasungu wametuma hii glitter ati ni waste kutoka

Ulaya!”  (Hey look! They have sent this glitter, saying it is waste from Europe!) he called out to his laughing companions, before catapulting the ball of bling back to the shapeless vomit of undigested textile on the platform.

She noted the discharge time: 13:08 hours. Beside her, Arif’s molten face appeared cross-eyed from exhaustion. “Madam Chief,” he said, tilting his head towards the quay, “we buy these from the West all the time in Manila. Jackets, jeans – you name it. They sell cheap. People say surplus and second hand and circular economy and all. They think that makes them better somehow.” The chief officer’s eyes remained glued to the cranes.

Arif continued: “My cousin used to strip laptops for copper. It made decent money for a while.” His soft-edged English carried musically; often the tone rose at the end of his sentences – a particular Filipino habit that Minali had learned to recognize as respectfulness.

He spoke slowly this time. “Then one day, some people from Bantay Kalikasan turned up. Started protesting outside his shops. Told him, ‘You’re making money off harmful practices that hurt the environment!”

“Well, someone else made it first,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

Neither spoke for a while.

“It’s funny,” he said finally, “how we transport the stuff that ends up in our own countries. Renamed, second hand, resold…you know?”

Poor boy. Too sensitive for this.   

Back at the bridge console, the air conditioner brought mild relief. “Ballast okay. Trim 2 degrees. Draft okay.” She deployed the instructional tone she normally reserved for deck cadets. Arif wore a resigned expression, jotting in an illegible scrawl on his clipboard. He writes more than he understands.

They waited for clearance. Around the dock, trucks rolled in ant-like lines, containers groaning on their backs. Beyond a smudge of sky-blue sheds, pillars of smoke rose to the sky. Beneath them, low mounds of plastic and fabric burned like small, exhausted suns. Somewhere inland, soot rained down from a djinn-shaped cloud, settling on a waste-picker’s hands.

No person can inhale what another exhales.

The flames breathed bitter smoke into the lungs of Mombasa.

***

Captain Durai stepped out of the chartroom, a hot mug of coffee in hand. She reached for a bottle of water. “Thirty years!” he boomed, taking a large swig, “thirty years I’ve been sailing here, yevry year is hotter!” He gulped another large portion of his filter coffee, as if to quell the incredulity of the realization.

“Sea 32 degrees today,” she reported.

“You measure yeverything!” he said, flailing his hands in fake admonishment; a wide grin plastered on his face.

“I tell the same thing to the new cadets in Chennai,” he continued, “they simply don’t remember anything except their phones these days!” Durai’s roar smothered a clanging of boots on the ladder trunk as the Chief Engineer hauled himself up from the engine room.

“Clearance when?” he asked impatiently, the brisk tone directed at no one in particular. “Shortly,” she replied.  Serhiy Kovalenko’s face went from eager to a tightlipped grimace.

“Shortly,” Kovalenko repeated deliberately, exhaling hard; a bull deciding whether the gate was worth charging. “Short is not soon enough when the engine room feels like a sauna.” He spoke to her directly this time, eyes catching hers for a flickering moment.

“The ocean is a soup. Machines do not like soup. Pumps start sucking steam instead of water, then nothing saves us. Tell me when clearance comes,” he said, softening enough to offer a curt nod her way. “Then we run her hard. No mercy today,” he finished, before jabbing a thumb toward the stairwell and descending into the ship’s guts again.

Good soldier, hard man. With Kovalenko, blunt was affection.  Durai let out a booming laugh, “Always the poet, Serhiy!”

***

At 1700 hours, the pilot boarded. The ship’s anchors rose, glazed with mud. “Wind southwest, monsoon’s probably early,” he warned. His eyes darted back and forth from the tablet in his hands to the finely calibrated gyro compass on the navigation panel.

“It’s been this way for a while now.”  Her voice croaked.

I sound like a man.

“Dead slow ahead,” the pilot ordered.

Down in the engine room, Kovalenko calibrated the machines to a careful restraint as the ship turned achingly, etching its serpentine course on the water. They passed the buoys one by one – green, red, green. Fishing dhows with angular sails rocked on the swell as the vessel eased into the throat of the Kilindini channel. At the last turn, the Indian Ocean spread wide before them, a sheet of dark blue glass. The horizon hung richly brocaded: gold, crimson, deep purple.

Always beautiful. A reason to continue to hope. 

Behind them, Mombasa thinned to a strip of smoke and dust.

At midnight, Minali signed the log.

Underway east, course 092⁰.

 

INDIAN OCEAN

Logbook 22/22 --07 JUNE 02:00H – Position 02⁰ 40’S 59⁰10’E – Course 072⁰ --

Speed 13kn – Weather 30⁰. Sea 30⁰, moderate visibility. Remarks – Underway eastbound for Colombo. Barometer falling 1007 mb.

 

The sea had grown a thick dark skin. Where the bow cut the water, a dull fluorescence bloomed. As a girl, she had seen the phosphorescent glow ripple by the mangrove roots; little blue fires chasing the paddles of her father’s fishing dinghy.

Back at the senior secondary, the biology teacher had explained: “Bioluminescent plankton are also known as dinoflagellates. They make the sea sparkle. We see them here in the Sundarbans too. But increasing sea temperatures can reduce their abundance, bloom-likelihood, and bioluminescent intensity.” Twelve-year old Minali copied each word neatly into a bundle of loose pages held together by a string. Like Arif. Although I understood more, perhaps.

A few knots later, the bow churned an empty, dark froth.

The sea and I are hot. The sea and I are doomed. 

For twenty-two years, she had criss-crossed the oceans along the shipping arteries of the world – demand and supply curves etched on the sea in black and grey water. For forty-two, she had lived on the water – first, as a fishing girl on Baba’s nouka, then a deck cadet fresh out of the nautical institute. It had taken years to rise to officer of the watch.

She remembered the first time that a senior colleague, his erection pressed against her in the pantry room, had whispered sourly, his lips grazing her ears, “Don’t ruin your sea time taking notes.”  Weeks later, the company’s logbook scandal blew up: a whistle-blower leaked falsified oil entries to the media. Regulators descended – sharks drawn by churned water, eager to draw blood. The crew left swiftly. Someone in upper management gladly recommended her to a Singaporebased company.

Thereafter from Johor Bahru she cleared westbound, threading the oil-laden Strait of Malacca, before making Diamond harbour’s tea-stained tide. From the retreating shorelines of Suffolk, she ran south to Durban and Abidjan; from Gothenburg she sailed to Rotterdam’s unmanned ports, watching robots ferrying containers with algorithmic precision. The promotion to second officer came early.

She steered past bleaching reefs at Brisbane, then hauled across the Pacific to Nagoya and Yokohama, bracing for tsunamis year after year. Then there were transatlantic voyages: from vanishing wetlands in Houston to the scrap-strewn beaches of Lagos – two worlds as unlike as any other.

Less often, they contracted her for short passages: quick runs from an oily Arabian Gulf to the cluttered maritime traffic off Singapore’s coastline – the shape of an investment model’s long-term yield curve. At the headquarters overlooking reclaimed land bulwarked by giant caissons, the promotion to Chief Officer finally arrived. Thirteen years late.

Time had turned beneath the keel of her ships; its days, months, years dissolving into wake-like foam.

What had it been? Brute ambition? Money? Whatever it had been had long left her. The spark had been dying.

I should have been Captain already. How much longer? How much more of – this? The men will go back to waiting wives and children. Ships to ship-breaking yards. Where do unanchored, unhomely women go?

Habit drew her attention to the radars. The pixels painted a long green smear of interference.

Moisture? Static from a storm, perhaps. The smear stayed, then intensified.

This far east? This early? In June? 

The barometer fell fast. She did not like it. Out to the south, lightning flickered once or twice in a tangle of dark cumulonimbus clouds. Over the last few years, the sea had been changing faces.

The more you sail, the less you know.

Logbook 22/22 Remarks: 02:55 hours, weather unsettled – pattern irregular.

Wait and watch, wait and watch. 

***

The storm laboured through the night. Chief officer and Captain kept the bridge; Kovalenko held the engine room with his crew, propulsion on manual, an extra generator on for redundancy. “This is not normal!” Kovalenko had announced the obvious over the phone, surrounded by a circle of worried faces. The pilot at Mombasa had been right.

At dawn, the storm surrendered at last. When the first officer appeared for his watch, the bridge presented itself in disarray: chart tables lay scattered, rain damp jackets hung by the door. “Morning, Chief!” he said chirpily. “Bridge looks neater these days, must be a woman’s touch! Bit rough, last night, no? Ship looks fine though.” He smiled slickly.

She straightened, all six feet of her frame settling over Menon. “Yes?” she inquired, arching one eyebrow high. It was a practiced bearing, one that had taken her years to master. The performance had its desired effect. Menon fussed with a crumpled logbook page, the confidence behind his smile evaporating steadily.

“A school of flying fish found dead on the deck, Ma’am.” His tone had switched to overtly respectful.

He’s quick. And careful. Price of ambition.

“No one saw them jump. I asked the bosun to clear the decks,” he added.

Never liked a woman in command, that one.

 

Later during lunch, Durai was especially chatty. “These pre-monsoon seas are getting stranger yevery year. In my time, I remember how it used to be very nice southwest wind. Ship at ten knots yexact. Noww, yit spins like a drunk!” Laughter erupted around the table. She steadied a glass of orange juice as the ship pitched and rolled. The food was metal on her tongue. Using one foot to tug at the back of the shoes on the other, she freed swollen toes. I need bigger shoes. Did my feet grow by a whole size?

The dull ache in her groin called her back from her thoughts. Pushing an unfinished plate away, she hurried back to accommodations. Inside the cabin, she stripped damp bedsheets, stuffing the soggy mass into a laundry bag. Hers had been filling up faster than the others. “Two extra bedsheets, please,” she had asked the steward. “Of course, Madam,” he had replied, his soft face earnest and sympathetic.

The watch next night passed smoothly. By dawn, the sky had cleared up.

Wind steady, barometer reading regular, cruising at a comfortable 12 knots. Colombo in two days. On the starboard side, she studied a formation of dark grey clouds. The scent of rain and cloves came drifting in the breeze. Smells wrong. Should be clean salt here, anything else is an anomaly. The wind had changed, pushing the smell of the coast far ahead of itself, meeting them eagerly, too early.

 

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

Logbook 22/22 –10 JUNE 05:20H – Position 06⁰55’N 79⁰50’E – Course 000⁰ –

Speed 3kn – Weather 31.6⁰. Sea 28.8⁰, heavy rain earlier. Remarks – Discharge

3xTEU, load 22 empties for Chattogram

 

Brown water folded into green water, which folded into an oily sheen. Lateritic soil sediments floated next to algal blooms, which floated next to iridescent films of bilge.

The seamen dropped anchor into thick silt. She surveyed the opaline skyline of a Colombo morning – a mix of cranes, temple spires, and modern buildings.

The rain had let up. On the decks, the ship smelt of wet iron.

Familiar. The ferric smell of blood.

           “We’re loading empties again, Madam Chief?” Arif asked, watching pale blue empty containers suspended mid-air, metal claws clasped around them.

“Mostly. Some tea containers perhaps, but they’re awaiting customs clearance,” she replied.

“They’re being extra careful around here, it seems,” Arif remarked, “more customs inspections than usual, I feel. So, more ballast now?” he asked, his attention switching to the bridge console.

“Yes. Helps even out the weight when these containers are mostly empty.”

Outside, the rain returned in short, hard bursts.

Unpredictable weather. Unpredictable bodies. Little brown spots that arrive unannounced. Sometimes, ten months apart. Never a good thing.

She observed the seamen inspect container lashings, their loud voices carrying over the quiet of a city waking up from sleep. The ship spat out treated ballast, then hungrily chugged fresh water and fuel instead. The two tea boxes cleared customs at the last minute. She signed the manifest with a wet pen.

Their pilot on the way out from Colombo turned out friendly. Durai’s Tamizh probably had something to do with it.  “Neenga periya aalunga aagiteenga, ippo ellarukkum theriyum! You fellows are big news these days, yeveryone knows you guys!” Durai had begun in vernacular, switching to English half-way as he turned to her. “Something about waste and all – it’s all over the big channels!”

“They’ll want that story. So much goes on here, nobody knows,” said the pilot, flourishing a meaningful nod of the head.

“One of my batchmates from the maritime institute – Kumar, I think his name is. The fellow was carrying waste up west! Who would have thought? Never in my twenty-nine years career I heard yanything like it!” Durai offered.

“Illa, not exactly,” the pilot smiled, “that shipment came here from the west

first.”

Durai tilted his head, curiosity clouding his face.

“Apo? From West, ah? How come?”

“Ama. Declared as recyclable plastics, full two hundred and forty containers. It was sitting in the dock, then there was this bad smell. Customs guys opened one. Inside it was full hospital waste mixed up with plastics. Syringes. Bandages,” he said, pausing between the last two words as chief officer and captain exchanged a look of disbelief.

“Also, body parts. Rotting ones,” he added, letting the words hang.

Durai’s eyes darkened.

“That’s violation of international law,” he said in a thoughtful tone.

The pilot clicked his tongue. “It still happened. The dockworkers refused to clean all that sludge lying at the bottom of the containers. It even leaked out in the dock. No one could stand the smell,” he said, scrolling through his tablet.

“They got the paperwork to send it back?” she inquired, surprised.

“Perrrfect paperwork, Madam. Twenty-one boxes we sent already, some more will go in this month.”

Durai gave a dry laugh. “World is finally becoming perfect it seems. At least they’re taking it back.” The pilot glanced towards the quay and checked his watch.  “Clearance in ten minutes, draft same?”  “Same,” she said.

“Seri. Then we keep moving,” he said in a cheerful tone.

They eased out past the breakwater that curved around the harbour. Pontoons and dredgers moved slowly, scooping up the silt that had accumulated around the man-made barrier. Further up north, the water turned murky, a long muddy tongue pushing into the green. “Kelani’s mouth. Usually turns brown after rain. Some days, you can smell it even from the harbour – all the city drains into that river,” said the pilot, before handing over.

 

CHITTAGONG, BANGLADESH

Logbook 22/22 –15 JUNE 16:47H – Position 21⁰N 87⁰50’E – Course 052⁰ – Speed

5kn – Weather 33.6⁰. Sea 31.8⁰ – Remarks: Approaching Chittagong. Tar adhesion, portside.

 

She woke up to a wetness between her thighs. Her scalp prickled. The bed linen crumpled around her, suffused with sweat. Somewhere on the decks, a loose cable clicked rhythmically against metal, like a second-hand marking time. The smartwatch screen blinked 6:02 AM. She stood up, pressing the berth light on. A dark patch had bloomed on the sheet – dull, irregular, rusty.

In the cramped bathroom, she poured water into a small plastic basin. Dipping a corner of the sheet, she began to dab the mark. The water turned the color of tea left too long to steep, spinning in slow circles before draining. She didn’t want the steward to see. He would fold his face into politeness, or worse, sympathy. She rinsed the fabric till only clear water ran through. Doctor Ghoshal had warned: “Irregular bleeding can continue for years till the body adjusts and the hormones settle. Seven to ten, in some cases.”

***

Brackish brown water galloped in little waves beneath a warm afternoon. The Bay of Bengal stretched imposingly around the vessel.

Feels like forty-two degrees.

“Portside bridge wing, Madam,” the second officer called as he hurried up behind her, breath short with excitement. She followed him to where a handful of officers stood tight in a cluster, eyes fixed on the sea. She stepped among them and followed their gaze.

Dark black streaks drifted unevenly over the waves. Blobs of tar clung just above the waterline.

Spots, here too? 

“It’s sticking to the hull, Madam Chief,” Arif said, interrupting her thoughts.

“Could be drifting in from Sitakund,” Menon added, squinting.

“This will cling for days,” she said, “Get a note in the log.”

“We will need divers to clean this.”

“Company won’t be happy,” Durai rued, wiping sweat from his brow.

“Professional divers cost a lot.”

“Professional divers kill themselves doing this.” Her voice came out sharper than she intended. The crew looked away. The wind whistled louder between the containers. Someone cleared his throat.

“Let’s see what the office says,” Durai replied at last.

When she left, she thought she heard someone say something about being moody.

***

The watch at midnight felt surprisingly pleasant; the cool breeze on still waters betraying the afternoon’s predictions. She surveyed the deck, then pulled a chair and sat down. A few minutes, till my feet feel better.

The sky above hung pitch black; stars suspended lower than she had seen in a while. There’s the Big Dipper. Or Shoptorishi, as Baba used to say. Orion. The long-tailed hydra.The galactic centre. Nothing ever compares to the night sky over an open sea. 

She blinked her eyes once.

The hum of ship deepened into another sound. Bubbling, children shrieking, birds singing overhead. Time slipped away; a sepia haze fell over everything.

Shahidul’s voice echoed: “Amar moto parbi na di! (You cannot do it as well as me, sister!)” he shouted, eyes twinkling mischievously. Then they jumped into the river, two loud splashes in the Moyna.

At a few feet, her breath gave out, and she floated back, upwards. Shahidul did not surface. Five minutes. Seven. Then ten.

That is too long, he needs to come back. Now.

“Oi, tui manush, na maachh? Bero!” (Are you human or fish? Come back!) She counted to five, this time in Bangla. At six she gulped a large breath of air and dove back in.

Darkness pressed in. Her lungs clamped tight. The ship’s hull loomed above – a mountain of steel. She groped along its surface, slick with tar and barnacles. Then, a dim glimmer. She followed the faint streak of diffused light to discover Shahidul suspended beside the ship’s fins, his body taut with concentration as he scraped tar off the blades. He had grown up to be very tall, taller than her.

She noticed his fingers twitching uncontrollably – the nerves gone bad from years of soaking in ship poison in the harbour. He turned to look at her, eyes bright behind the goggles.

This boy can dive longer than anyone along the coast, all the way from Kakdwip to Chittagong. No one does it better than him. She raised a thumb, a gesture of encouragement. Says it pays well. He should see a doctor about the tremors. Will make him do it this time, no excuses. 

Then the sea shuddered. A metallic vibration emerged from the hull. The propeller stirred – slowly at first, and then in three swift rotations, before slowing to a halt. Someone must have pressed a button, why would they do that?

A current whipped past her. She reached out, shrieking, trying to clasp his hand. The soundless cry turned into bubbles. For a heartbeat she saw him framed against the hull, arms flung out. Then dark ribbons of blood spread into an equally dark sea. The pressure closed around her chest like a fist. She kicked upward, choking, clawing for light, as if trapped inside a mirror. It wouldn’t yield.

A blurred face, a map of criss-crossing fine lines pressed against the glass. Then it shattered, and she burst through, gasping. The piercing wail of navigation alarm systems resounded over the ship, indicating that the officer on watch had been stationary. Someone was shaking her hard. It was the steward. Durai’s gruff voice boomed above the engines- “Clear up! Clear deck, boys! Menon, reset the BNWAS, false alarm! The chief yis fine, stop panicking!” Strong lungs. 

Shahidul had strong lungs, too.

“Water, somebody!” Kovalenko’s deep voice bellowed over her, as he held her chair steady with both hands. She noticed the gnarly knots along the joints of his fingers. They reminded her of the mangroves.

Arif appeared within minutes, water bottle in hand, “Madam Chief is fine, she’s fine!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, his hands empty of clipboard and pen for the first time in months.

A biting shame rose from the bottom of her stomach and flushed her cheeks.

The steward tilted the bottle to her lips, gazing into her face kindly. Almost fatherly. “You okay, Madam Chief.” He wasn’t asking. Then, “You must rest.” It was, unquestionably, an order.

***

Back in her berth, sleep came in slices. A river of faces came streaming from memory – Shahidul, Rafiq kaku, Ma. Baba. Putul, a baby. Putul a little girl, her small hands weaving jute straws into a basket. Shahidul and Putul chasing after plastic bags that fluttered in the jhor, monsoon storm. Putul a bride in radiant red, Shahidul in his sherwani, gold threads interlaced with green. Among fishing folk, the river was religion enough. Putul shredding coconut leaves, gathering their spines into a broom, Babai and Shonai tugging at her sari. The mist above the river on winter mornings grew around her till she could see no more.

Shahidul’s voice came calling from the tide. He was planning to go to Bangladesh. “Less than three hours away, kakima!” he consoled Ma, as Putul’s lips pressed into a line of pretended patience.

Nazrul, his second cousin was already in the shipping business– a ship breaking yard in Sitakund had employed him for a grand sum of sixteen thousand taka a month. Shahidul would begin at eight, and the river gods willing, work his way to thirty. Two hundred and fifty dollars a year. For what? For the dumping grounds of the conscience of the world. A sea full of poison, frothing with chemicals. She had seen the signs and failed to turn the ship. Minali Ghorai wept in her sleep.

The distant sound of the bridge alarm chirped once, then died away. She slipped back into the mangrove, into Baba’s nouka. He rowed the small dinghy with practiced hands. Crabs scuttled where the courtyard used to be. The land around dissolved grain by grain, melting into the river. Then the water rose suddenly, higher and higher, till there was no courtyard; only the ribs of dead trees jutting from the current. A thatched roof floated past the dinghy like a memory, untethered. Baba’s large eyes filled with tears as he rowed steadily. There is nowhere to go.

Above the flooded forest came a soft tremulous whistle, broken midway. She hadn’t heard it in years. “Finfoot,” said baba, a grief reflecting in his eyes. “When this bird leaves, you know the water will claim everything.” Now it came again, the same call, stretched thin across the breeze. She turned, searching the mangrove canopy, rocking the little boat with her movements. “Oi dekh! (Look there!)” baba pointed out a flash of dull silver between two branches. Long neck, pale chest, slippered feet gliding over the tide. It hovered for a heartbeat; then vanished into the mist – as if the air itself had swallowed it.

A lurch of the vessel woke her. Her hair clung damp to her forehead, salt burned around the corners of her mouth. She poured herself a glass of water. Through the porthole, she watched the brown current of the Karnaphuli sliding into the ocean, thick with silt and waste.

A memory crept up. Torches of white-blue flames cutting through the bellies of ships. Young boys in torn shirts carrying steel over their shoulders. Steel that once carried online shopping packages on her ships– jeans, spices, tea, cashmere and cardamom; steel that once held industrial parts, pharmaceuticals, lubricants – the many needs of the world. Men in lungis bent over large chunks of metal, their backs gleaming with dust and sweat. Men holding makeshift goggles of welding glass against acetylene flames; men coughing over oil bleeding from ruptured hulls, the oil itself flowing down the banks to curdle in the shallows where children played in rainbow-coloured surf. A familiar hot wave rose through her chest, pulling her back into the present.

My body is closing its cycles. Some containers once emptied, do not fill again.

***

At noon, she returned to the bridge. Showered, fresh; uniform crisp, marching in long strides that showed no signs of weakness.

“You okay, Chief?” Durai spoke with uncharacteristic gentleness.

“Much better. Just a fever.” She thought she sounded surprisingly well. For the next few hours, she spoke in routines sentences that rolled easily off the tongue: seamen fall sick all the time; absolutely, the night watch can be dreadful; the weather isn’t doing us any favours; yes, I just heard from Chittagong, it is Chattogram now; sure, the pilot is onboard; perfect, discharge noted. Between the mundane sentences, the familiar hum of the ship returned beneath her feet: an anchoring of two decades at sea.

They approached the harbour in the evening light – gentle red suffused with gold. A rapid stream of Bangla floated around the docks, announcing homecoming. Over the ship, cranes moved again, no differently from those in Mombasa or Colombo or anywhere else in the world. When the discharge was signed, she closed her eyes briefly and smelt the fresh mud of low tide in the sea breeze. A pearly moon cast its forgiving glow over the harbour. The white flash of a bird’s wing appeared and disappeared, its twitter receding, as though in dream.

She thought of calling for tea. Then changed her mind.

Enough.

She picked up the pen instead.

One last time.

On the open page of the logbook, her hand trembled slightly.

Logbook 22/22 --16 JUNE 18:12H – Position: Chittagong Port – Course 000⁰ --

Speed 0kn – Weather 26.6⁰ – Remarks: Discharge operations completed 17:55H, pilot disembarked. Engines on standby. Vessel secure along berth C2.

Signed, 

CO M.Ghorai

Second Prize Short Story in English - Faculty & Staff

Last Will and Testament

Author: Michael John Suire García

Associate Director, Office of Full-Time Faculty

 

Last Will and Testament

 

 

“When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light?”

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow.

 

 

The men saw the two-story house in the darkened distance like a beacon in the night, so brightly shone its colonial pillars under the winter moonlight that, at first, they thought it some kind of spectral establishment erected by some errant entrepreneurial spirit for dealings best reserved for when the sun sets, though who would stake their business here in the middle of nowhere, they knew not. But days of running had them ready to submit to whatever fate was in store for them, as long as it included a warm bed, so they bolted straight through the fields and to that ghostly unknown, be it sanctuary or condemnation. They found neither, for the house appeared to have been abandoned for centuries. Thick branches, roots, and foliage covering every vestige of civilization within the edifice. The world exterior and the world interior one and the same.

The men wondered if sleeping like they had in the wild to avoid capture, amongst the beasts and under the cloak of the infinite and indifferent stars, might not be safer than in this faded dwelling, where the remaining floor planks cracked and caved under their furtive steps and the ceiling hinted, through open gaps and holes where the wind swarmed with howling insistence, to tumble and fall irrevocably on them. But when they made their way up a dilapidated staircase to the second floor, their steps became more stable. They saw the original white plaster on the walls that had once adorned the entire abode, walls that extended relentlessly in a windowless hallway, at the end of which stood a door that gleamed robustly its dark oak provenance like a trophy or an icon. And the men approached it and saw that it was beautifully decorated with numerous bas-relief figures they could not identify but that seemed to call to be touched, to pass that test that unites the incredulous with the mad. To find truth only in the tangible.

The oldest of the two men rested his hand in the middle of the door and closed his eyes to better feel its robustness. As he did, he sensed a quiet darkness surround him like the embrace of the dead. He could not see anything though he knew his eyes opened. He thought himself blind and tried to scream, but could not. The terror too overwhelming, his sanity too precarious.

It was then that his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness and he noticed that it was not total, for there was, far away in the distance, a small speck of light that burned lambent, like the scorched core of a dead planet. He took a deep breath and began to walk towards it, but in the darkness in between his panic grew. He imagined hands emerging from that blackest of nights to grab him, to pull him back and force him to remain there in that obscurity. He quickly began to run.

As he made it closer to the source of light, he saw that it was a bonfire, and near it there was the outline of a person, half hidden by the shadows. The man was going to speak, but he noticed that the figure had been transformed, or that the shadows had concealed the true nature of the figure. What had seemed arms in that semi-darkness were now white wings, and its head, when turned, did not have the features of a human face but those of an ivory white owl, its pitch-black eyes silently fixed upon him, as if searching for some long-lost forgotten something.

And it seemed to find it, for it extended its arm-wings and began to move them slowly, and with each fluttering the man could feel the air shifting. Soon there were great gusts of wind hitting him, and the wind put out the bonfire, extinguishing the light, but the man could still see that oval face in the darkness. The owl screeched a soul-splitting cry that seemed to physically push him back, back from the embers of the dead fire and from the empty space he had traversed. Back in front of the door he could now see again.

His companion had grabbed him as he nearly collapsed from the shock, but neither of them could utter a word before the door that now lay open.

“Elder, are you okay?” his younger companion asked. “You touched the door and then collapsed, like it had zapped you.” The young man had a long face with smooth skin, though his intense eyes carried the menacing force of he who knows more than what his age should warrant. His blond hair reflected the light emanating from the room, so that the elder had to squint looking up at him from the floor. And in that blurriness of all that light, the young man appeared like a celestial being.

The elder tried to regain his composure and stood. His face was hard and aquiline behind round, wiry glasses, and he looked like as though he had been shot or attacked, his oversized gray prison jumpsuit rife with holes and tears. He did not know how to explain what had just happened and was too terrified to speak, lest the retelling transport him again to that mysterious place, so he could just watch as the young man entered the room cautiously.

The chamber they entered did not seem to have suffered any damage from the decay of man’s abandonment and, in fact, appeared to have been left unoccupied but momentarily, for there were candles and the candles were lit, and there was a bed and the bed was made with clean and spotless linen.

The first thing they did, conditioned by years of imprisonment, was to scour the room for any possible physical threats by their fellow men and blunt objects to be used against them, but all they could find were shelves upon shelves brimful with books. Shelves that occupied every inch of every wall of the chamber as support of the entire edifice or as a barricade against the outside world.

The younger man looked up to the ceiling, which hung so disproportionately high that its dimensions did not seem possible inside the edifice they had entered, and he saw that it was curved like a dome, and through the thin white candle haze he saw figures and forms painted in bright luminous colors stretching every inch of that vaulted height, figures he could not name but that he knew spoke of the world before and the history of man. So potent was this for him who had grown in a world no longer preoccupied by man’s artistry that, seeing this authenticity so filled him with the human spirit that he collapsed at the center of that otherworldly corner of the world. For it was as if God himself were staring down at him from the skies.

Dreamless dreams in a soundless nowhere, where time passes for those who can wake while the rest become eternal.

And the young man awoke and he found himself in the bed where his companion had laid him.

“You scared me there for a second,” he was sweating and, in his voice, the young man could hear a hint of worry.

“I feel very tired. I don’t think I can get up,” he finally said, his voice trembling.

“Rest, I will try to find help. Does anything hurt?”

“No,” came the weak response. “I just feel very sleepy,” he mumbled, and lost consciousness.

When he came to, the man was standing at the other end of the room, his back to the bed.

“How long have I been out?” The young man tried to raise his voice but was unable.

The older man turned around, panic emanating from him like a disease.

“The door doesn’t open,” his lips pursed so hard they had become white strips, like a dead man’s. “It doesn’t even have a handle. I pushed and pushed, but it doesn’t budge.” He was breathing heavily as he towered over the young man. “We are trapped,” he shouted, his dark hair smudged with sweat over his forehead in patches, like dried plaster. “There are no windows, there’s only these books, everywhere.”

The young man started to tremble. “How long have we been here?”

He had known his cellmate for many years. Ever since he had been imprisoned as a child, he had known this man who they called the elder, for, unlike the rest of the inmates, he knew how to read and write, and could speak to them about the past and about how things were before total autonomous judgement was mastered by a few. And he would tell them how, although he had been part of the elite, he fought against the rule of total autonomous judgement by speaking to his peers about ideas long held as core principles and tenets of man that had been forgotten. He showed them paper books that they had never seen and thought were myths, for all they knew were artificial reinventions. But so fixed were they in the way of the world that they did not believe him, so that he was informed upon and swiftly arrested. And when the young man was imprisoned for the crime of having luddite rebel parents, it had been the elder who had protected him in prison.

“I don’t know.” The elder sat next to the bed, in a chair he had found in a corner of the room. Next to him a small table stood with books piled on top and others spread around like debris from a fallen tower.

“There are no windows, no clocks. We have these candles,” he said, looking at the dirty yellow wax sliding down them and collecting at the base like forgotten thoughts, “but there are no other lights. Once these candles burn out, we will be in total darkness,” he stated, taking off his glasses and burying his face in his hands.

The young man, as if wanting to escape his fate by embracing it, closed his eyes and slipped again into oblivion.

Hours passed, though it could have been days or weeks, the elder knew not, for the candles did not seem to dwindle. He spent this time perusing the shelves, his want for knowledge superseding his fear of the situation, as not even in the opulent offices and vast homes he had inhabited and witnessed before his imprisonment had he seen such a plethora of knowledge.

He grabbed several books and perused them and saw that they were not written with autonomous judgement, for they were vibrant with originality. He stumbled upon a volume that piqued his interest, its cover and back blue like the water that they could not drink or the sky that they could not see.

He sat and began to read, seeking not so much a solution to the present circumstances, namely that they were trapped and the young man was gravely sick, but rather as a way to calm his mind. To see if, among those words strung together by a person at some point in time, there could be something that would offer an explanation. That would say, as an echo of his own inner voice from words that he himself could have written, as happens with great literature: “I have found the truth to life, I have found God. And since you are also seeking this truth, since you are also seeking Him in these words, we are connected, and we are therefore not alone.”

The elder did not know when his companion awoke, so absorbed was he in his thoughts that it was only as he stood up to return the book that he saw the young man’s eyes, once vibrant but now becoming distant and dim, fixed on him.

“What did you read?” he asked, staring at the blue book in the man’s hands.

The elder sat back down and rested a hand over the young man’s head. “I am going to tell you a story about what happens when the existing order collapses.”

He explained that the text told of a big explosion in the sun of such magnitude that the shockwave reached the Earth before anyone knew that it had happened. Suddenly, entire populations not protected by some solid structure, peacefully going about their daily lives, became, after seeing a blinding blaze, scorched in a shockwave that engulfed the entire planet. The few who survived were not only left in a devastated and chaotic world, but one where the blast had instantly dried the planet, so that no lakes, nor oceans, nor seas remained. Survivors fought for whatever drink they could find in abandoned and half-destroyed supermarkets but, once this ran out, they also began to drink the liquid that they themselves produced, until that too became depleted.

And the novel follows the story of this one family who survives the initial blast in their home and who manages to stay alive due to the resourcefulness of the parents, who swiftly escape the city with their two children, for they know that urban centers shall quickly become lawless jungles where murder, cannibalism, and even human sacrifices lurk behind every corner. They make it to the countryside and seek ways to feed themselves, while also shielding the children from the more devastating and gruesome images of a world descended into madness.

And although the story progresses in a manner that gives the reader no false hope as to the eventual end of this family, for it becomes clear that the world is coming to an end, the author makes a powerful example of them as beacons of a lost humanity, letting them die peacefully in a cabin filled with an intense light, like religious monuments to the whole of mankind.

Then, right above that dacha, clouds begin to form and spread throughout the skies, so that the entire Earth becomes obscured from the sun. A deluge finally falls and continues to fall for ages in a world that no longer holds any living creature until, in that quiet darkness, a solitary lotus flower sprouts from the ground at the top of the mountain where the family had perished, and, as if this most basic of life forms had given the order, the skies open up and the rain stops, and a new cycle begins.

The young man wanted to comment on the sadness of the story but could not find the strength to speak. The elder told him, sensing what his feelings were, that the story was actually an optimistic one. That yes there was death and there was the worst of the human condition, but that it also showed the good of humanity, for even when the conditions seem dire there are still those who will carry the flame of man, in life and in death. That there are still saviors even in the darkest of times.

Silence fell. The young man was examining the paintings on the distant ceiling, but they were darker and harder to see, making the figures dance in that dim above, like angels in reverie. He looked at the candles and noticed that they were consumed halfway, the light now dimmer and reduced to the area around them, like a weakening shell.

“Tell me another story,” the young man whispered, his eyes now desperate.

The elder no longer felt he had the energy to go to the shelves, so he looked among the pile of books on the small table near the bed and saw some that were sealed, though he didn’t know why. He was going to pick one up when a book near the edge of the table fell.

He collected it from the floor and looked at it. It had a pitch-black front and back that seemed to reject the light, as if in its lack of color it was trying to steal the features of the things placed next to it. And the man opened it and, with the exacting precision of someone accustomed to the task, began to read to the young man.

The story revolves around a middle-aged man who is respected and loved in his community. He had a wife and three children and a prominent position as the director of the local office of a life-insurance firm in his small town, and although he had always been good to himself and to others, he loses everything through a series of calamities, starting with his wife, who succumbs to a malignant tumor that spreads over her body and kills her within weeks, and shortly after two of his three children; one daughter to a plane crash in a flight that he had urged her to take for a position abroad that she did not want, and another daughter to suicide. For both deaths he is blamed by his son and now sole heir, who leaves the small town and swears that they shall never speak again.

And the man is stricken with grief and guilt and spends his days in the cemetery near their graves. Such is his despondency that he does not care anymore for his basic needs and sleeps there and forgets to eat, staying alive only through the charity of the villagers who bring him food.

One day, when the rainy season begins, he is suddenly hit with an idea so fierce that he is almost stricken senseless in that rain, and that mud, and that cold, and in his dirty and decaying wet clothes, runs out of the cemetery and into streets that he has not traversed for months.

He goes straight to the mayor’s office, frightening everyone in the process and almost giving the official’s sexagenarian secretary a heart attack from the sheer terror of seeing such a demonic figure running towards her. And the mayor, who recognizes the man, pleads with him to stop shouting and to sit down in his office and to explain what is going on, waving away the security guards who pile up at the door.

The mayor starts by noting that he is happy to see that the man has left the cemetery, “for we were really worried about you,” he adds, but the man cannot or does not seem to hear him for he just leans over the mayor’s desk and tells him that the cemetery should be covered, that a roof should be placed over the dead because it is an affront to them, and to their memory, that their remains should be there out in the open, their graves exposed to the rain, and the wind, and the sun.

Of course, the mayor does not know what to say to this while the man silently regards him with his intense eyes, water still falling down his long hair and beard so that all around him the floor has turned dark brown like urine. The silence becomes menacing and the man finally leans further towards the mayor, the stench now nauseating, and whispers something into his ear.

Here the narrator changes to that of the mayor’s secretary who, after regaining her strength and mental capabilities, also barges into the mayor’s office and shouts that the local police are coming, both as a threat to the man and also as proof to her boss that she has endeavored to remedy the situation, being sometimes confronted for her lack of initiative. But the crazy man, as he is now called from her perspective as narrator, runs out of the office, brushing against her and almost throwing her to the ground while, as she would later retell her neighbors and everyone from town who would care to listen, “Mr. Mayor just sat there behind his desk with his cow-like eyes looking at me like it was the first time he was seeing me, not raising a hand to protect me.”

And it was the following day that the mayor resigned from office to write a book about, and here the secretary takes out a note from her purse while apologizing, for she was never interested in these intellectual things and couldn’t remember what it was about, and reads that “it is about the epistemology of the spiritual. Whatever that means,” she adds.

“He said that he was going to write the story of the crazy man and his beliefs,” she continues slowly, looking again at the note that she managed to scribble down when she spoke with the mayor, now ex-mayor, on the phone, “because it was for these things that man had developed the ability to write and speak, to tell the story of the human spirit, which is eternal,” she said sighing as if she found the entire thing too burdensome.

“And what does that even mean?” her downstairs neighbor asked.

As if awaiting this question, the secretary continued, “the mayor found what the crazy man said to him so true that it was as if deep down he had always known it, but never awake.”

“Consciously, you mean?” interrupted a middle-aged woman who had also congregated there.

“Yes, that’s it, consciously. I see that having gone to the university really helped you, Maria, even if it’s just to end up working in your father’s bakery,” she added, placing the scrap of paper back in her purse. “Anyway,” the secretary continued, “he told me that the man whispered to him that being born is the biggest tragedy there is, but that once one is born, the biggest tragedy is to die.” Her face grew somber. “I believe that is what he said, anyways,” she declared, shrugging. “I forgot to write down exactly that part. He was frankly starting to bore me.”

“And, of course,” she continued, sensing that the crowd was losing interest, “as you all know, two days later the three graves appeared empty at the cemetery with no coffin nor nothing, just holes in the ground. Everyone knows the crazy man dug them and took them. But how could he have done that in one night and where could he have taken them? No one knows, though of course you have all heard the rumors that the son has returned.”

“I saw them both in the woods,” the street-sweeper added, who had left her broom and had joined the tumult.

“And I spoke to them once by the estuary and they told me that they had built a place there,” said another.

“Well, that’s all hearsay,” the secretary interrupted, seeing that the conversation was drifting away from the main topic, namely her retelling of it. “What is important is that we are without a mayor and I am retiring soon, so I don’t really care, for no one has really appreciated all the work that I have done for this town,” she added before turning around and walking away, leaving her fellow villagers confused and dazzled, which was of course what she wanted, as she would later explain to her husband at home while he sat on the couch watching television, grunting periodically so that she would think that he was listening.

The elder closed the book and gave a sudden, frightful cry when he noticed that he could barely see the young man’s face now, so dark the room had become. He turned around and saw the dwindled candles giving their last moments of light.

As the darkness approached, he thought about the books in that room and those outside of it, and he marveled at all the worlds they created in stories that man then retold one another. He thought about how this was only possible through the use of the word, and a phrase he had once read came to him, that first there was the word. He thought it true, for without it there would be no telling or retelling, no past, and no history. But he now realized that this was incomplete, for the word could not survive on its own. It dies in the air and in the mind of the listener. “First, there was the written word,” he whispered, “for it is only that which endures that can stake its claim. The voices of the dead are lost. Their written testimony perdures.”

The elder turned to the young man, his blonde hair now grey in the dimmed darkness. “There are entire peoples whose stories will never be known, for their stories died with them in the darkness of their razed civilization. Ene today, there are men, women, and children who died forgotten without anyone being able to tell their stories. That is why these books are here,” he said, standing up so that the young man could now barely see his outline in the darkness.

“I thought it strange that I had never heard of these books, many of them don’t even have titles!” He walked again into the light and grabbed several books from the small table. “They are testimony to legacies,” he finally said.

He noticed that some of the books were sealed. He grabbed one and tore it open. A brown book fell to the floor and the elder saw that the packet also contained a pen.

He bent over to pick both up and he opened the book. “Just like I thought, it is blank!” he exclaimed, holding it open as proof.

He grabbed the young man’s hand, which lay almost lifeless within his. “We are not alone. All of these books were written by people who were also trapped here. This is not fortuitous,” he was almost shouting, tears sliding down his cheeks. “We will write our stories, and they will be our witness,” he said. “And the readers will be the carriers of our memory.”

He sat down, cleared the table, and pressed the pen down on the paper. As he did so, he could hear noises coming from the other side of the door, a rhythmic tapping of a hammer and the drag of a chisel sliding through wood, and the elder knew that they were being carved in that door to accompany those who had written all those books in that room.

And in the last light of the dying candles, he began to write:

The men saw the two-story house in the darkened distance like a beacon in the night, so brightly shone its colonial pillars under the winter moonlight that, at first, they thought it some kind of spectral establishment erected by some errant entrepreneurial spirit for dealings best reserved for when the sun sets, though who would stake their business here in the middle of nowhere, they knew not…

 

To Javier del Monte Pérez – In memoriam.

First Prize Short Story in Spanish - Faculty & Staff

Alquiler

Author: Teresa Cantero García-Moncó

Adjunct Professor, IE School of Arts & Humanities

 

ALQUILER

Debía de llevar un buen rato esperando. Por allí apenas pasaban taxis. Con cara de alivio me indicó dónde iba. Asentí sonriendo. “En seguida estás en casa”. Apenas serían veinte minutos de carrera, lo justo para relajarse y descansar un poco, quizá el tiempo suficiente para empujar levemente los zapatos fuera del talón y poder apoyar los pies en el suelo. Con un poco de suerte, dormiría hasta llegar a su destino. No sería la primera en dar una cabezada. Dejó el bolso en el asiento de al lado, apoyó la cabeza en la ventanilla y cerró los ojos. Oí un suspiro y el destello de la correa del reloj me cegó levemente al reflejarse en el espejo retrovisor.

Conduje con cuidado a velocidad constante, evitando giros bruscos y baches en la carretera. Debía de estar dormida y no quería molestarla. En seguida llegaríamos a nuestro destino.

Tomé la primera salida hacia la autopista. Aceleré un poco y me concentré en recordar dónde estaba el desvío. Cerré con seguro las puertas. “Por aquí no es”, quiso explicarme. No había llegado a dormirse del todo. Aún no le temblaba la voz. Se acercó con cuidado al reposacabezas e insistió. “Por aquí no es, te has equivocado”.

“Ya lo sé”.

Giré la cara y le guiñé un ojo. “Ya no queda nada”. Quiso insistir, pero no le salía la voz. Supe que se estaba calzando de nuevo e intentaba manipular la manilla de la puerta. Apaciguó su intento cuando saqué el arma del bolsillo de la cazadora y la apoyé sobre el volante.

Me desvié por un camino y aparqué a pocos metros. La apunté con el arma mientras la obligaba a caminar sin girarse. Había dejado las luces del coche dadas.

Quedó sentada en el suelo, descalza. Le indiqué cómo llegar caminando a una gasolinera. Empeñé las joyas, el reloj y los zapatos de marca y me fui a casa. Guardé la pistola de juguete en el cuarto de juegos de mi hijo. Pagué el alquiler a tiempo. Esa noche dormí plácidamente.

Second Prize Short Story in Spanish - Faculty & Staff

El Tenedor

Author: Victoria Camporro González

Global Coordinator, Global Markets

 

EL TENEDOR

Abre el cajón y los tenedores le parecen soldados de plomo apilados en una fosa común, junto a las cucharas y los cuchillos. Ha habido tantas bajas entre ellos que solo quedan tres en la trinchera y hay que reclutar al pequeño, que estaba en la retaguardia del postre. Cubrirá a sus compañeros más veteranos con el plato principal. Primera línea de batalla. No sabe qué sentirá trinchando texturas más duras, a las que no está acostumbrado. No quiere que se le note el miedo.

Los vasos emiten ese ruido de cristal grueso y desafinado cuando los apilan. Querrían vibrar en la sintonía sutil en que lo hacen las copas, con voz de soprano. O simplemente parecer tan delicados. Solo para que creyeran que están a punto de romperse y los depositaran con mimo sobre una mesa con mantel. Encuentra triste el tacto de los platos.

Todos reunidos en el centro de la mesa del comedor, esperan a que el estratega les confirme su posición. Empieza entonces la guerra imperceptible que se desata al poner la mesa.

Su marido entra con pasos pesados y, sin saludar, apaga la luz y enciende el extractor. No puede soportar el olor a comida impregnado en su ropa. Se dispone a colocar la vajilla para los comensales. Se asigna el plato mejor conservado, el vaso más pequeño para el vino y uno de los tenedores grandes. Los otros dos los coloca en el sitio de las niñas y el pequeño ocupa el lugar de su mujer. Se sienta, satisfecho, a fumar un cigarro mientras le sirven la comida.

Los martes es la hija mayor la que llega primero. Se siente muy desgraciada por tener que colocar los cubiertos, pero como no hay nadie más, no tiene escapatoria. Escoge con cuidado el vaso, mirándolo al trasluz para comprobar que no tenga algún resto pegado que el friegaplatos no haya podido eliminar, y luego coloca el resto de los objetos sin fijarse mucho. Si hay un plato rajado, se lo asigna a su hermana menor, junto con el tenedor de postre. Es la pequeña, razona.

La hermana menor entra en la cocina protestando por algo. Ve la montaña de cubiertos colocada allí por su madre y decide desembarazarse rápido de la tarea. No presta atención a los detalles. Solo le devuelve el tenedor pequeño a su hermana. Ella me lo puso ayer a mí, piensa, por si tiene que alegar algo.

Ella sabe quién ha puesto la mesa solo con ver la disposición de cada elemento sobre el mantel, que está lleno de manchas pese a estar recién lavado y planchado.

Cuando se sienta a comer, después de servir los platos, el resto de la familia casi ha terminado y ya habla sobre qué postre tomarán.

Es un día de sol radiante. La cocina está inundada de claridad. Puede ver motas de polvo suspendidas en cada rayo que atraviesa el vidrio de la ventana. Como si ellas pudieran también atravesarlo cuando flotan envueltas en luz. Luego se fija en la capa de grasa que hay encima de la campana y en cómo el polvo queda atrapado y ya no volverá a flotar. Toma el postre sola. Ve salir moscas de la bolsa de basura que hay en la terraza y ve que ellas no pueden atravesar el cristal, aunque no dejan de intentarlo. No son polvo. Se alegra.

Por la noche, ya en la cama, oye a su esposo roncar de mal humor. Hasta dormido le pesa el alma. Ve, por las rendijas de la persiana, colarse un rayo limpio de luz de luna. Sin polvo. Piensa que ojalá estuviese la persiana subida para poder verla. Y luego piensa en aquel cianuro de la trastienda de la farmacia.

FIN

Third Prize Short Story in Spanish - Faculty & Staff

Cosas de Muchachos

Author: Ernesto Chévere

Adjunct Professor, Bachelor in Behavior and Social Sciences

 

Cosas de muchachos

Los pies descalzos se le hundían casi hasta el tobillo en el barro rojizo que marcaba la ruta de Tetuán a Mameyes. El camino no ofrecía alternativa. Debía seguir firme, paso a paso, hasta llegar. A su lado avanzaba su hermano que, a pesar de ser mayor, padecía la misma suerte sin que mediara la experiencia.

Cada mañana el rocío humedecía la vereda. Si había llovido —como la noche anterior— era peor: el sendero despertaba más pesado, y el dulce perfume del alba se volvía amargo, saturado de hojas trituradas sobre el fango.

Ambos llevaban los pantalones doblados hasta debajo de la rodilla. Las camisas, abotonadas hasta el último botón y bien metidas por dentro. A la espalda, las mochilas y los zapatos amarrados entre sí, colgando para no tener que cargarlos con las manos, balanceándose al ritmo de cada paso. Iban bien peinados, con partidura hacia la derecha. El cabello nítido enmarcaba rostros de unos de diez años.

—¡Avanza, que vamos tarde!
—Pérate, que si acelero salpica el fango y llego to’ embarrao’.
—No seas pendejo, nos limpiamos allá. Mejor llegar rápido; si llegamos tarde nos dan un mangue. Y si se entera mami… olvídate.
—Acho, sí, es verdad… vamos pa’lante.

Cerca de la escuela alcanzaron el punto que cada mañana los recibía como un pequeño santuario para un ritual: una piedra ancha junto a una zanja de agua clara. Allí se detenían a lavarse los pies con esmero antes de ponerse los zapatos. Así, pese a lo escabroso del trayecto, entraban limpios, brillaos’.

Pero los zapatos no estaban del todo impecables. Aunque limpios, conservaban la humedad de la tarde anterior.

Habían llegado a casa directo después de la escuela. Hicieron las tareas casí tirados de las orejas por su madre y, para su fortuna, no había que ir a la finca a trabajar. El viejo estaba en el pueblo y no había dejado instrucciones. Normalmente, al terminar los deberes, les tocaba trabajar: recoger café en temporada, cortar guineos, lo que hiciera falta. No ese día.

El menor entró sigiloso al cuarto de sus padres. Se acercó a una mesa de noche de madera rústica, con su espejo grande y arqueado en la parte superior que reflejaba su figura menuda. Se miró fijamente y se llevó el índice a los labios, haciendose la señal de silencio a si mismo. Abrió la segunda gaveta y tomó varios trapos que su madre guardaba para costura. La cerró con cuidado procurando que el chirrido fuera apenas un suspiro, y salió.

—¿Lo cogiste?
—Sí.
—¿Todo?
—Lo que pude sin que se note mucho.
—Dale, vamos.

Salieron de la casa con entusiasmo. Corrieron hasta que la casa desapareció tras la vegetación. No era lejos, pero el monte servía de cortina cómplice. Se adentraron en la finca hasta llegar a una pequeña explanada cercada por arbustos de café cargados de frutos rojos, brillantes como rubíes bajo la luz inclinada de la tarde.

Ya estaban allí los otros: Conejo, Skippy, Don Busy, Vampiro y Clarence, esperandoles impacientes para copmenzar la partida.

—¿Y la bola, Charro?
—Hay que hacerla. El brother tiene todo. La hacemos ahora. Vayan buscando bate.

Mientras iba poco a poco enredando los trapos dándole forma circular, amarraba con el hilo las partes sueltas para que quedara firme y no se rompiera con facilidad. Era un experto. Por ser el más pequeño, siempre le tocaba esa tarea.

Skippy encontró el mejor tronco de madera que algún arbusto de café podía ofrecer. Armaron los equipos sin mucha discusión y empezó el juego.

Las horas pasaron invisibles. La tarde comenzó a caer y el aire se volvió más fresco. Una llovizna fina comenzó a caer, pero nadie se movió. Reían, corrían, gritaban. No había más mundo que ese lugar y ese momento.

Desde la casa, la madre escuchaba el eco distante de las voces y sonreía. No era ingenua; sabía exactamente dónde estaban. Y aunque quizás alzaría la voz más tarde, les concedía esa tregua: esos momentos raros pero necesarios en que podían concentrarse solamente en ser niños.

Un batazo fuerte de Clarence hizo que la bola desapareciera en la menguante luz del ocaso.

—Déjala. La buscamos mañana; no se ve na’.
—Sí, y yo me tengo que ir ya. Si llego enchumbao’ a casa, mi mai me mata.
—¡Jajaja! ¡La mía también!

Así, se fueron despidiendo y esa tarde habría quedado para siempre grabada en sus memorias.

Habían llegado a tiempo a la escuela. La humedad en los zapatos era un asunto menor.

Entraron a una estructura grande con olor a granos y madera vieja. Era el almacén de Pino Biruet, un vecino que prestaba el espacio para que los niños del barrio estudiaran. En el interior, el salón estaba dividido para que la maestra atendiera dos grupos a la vez.

Entre gramática, ciencias y matemáticas llegó la hora del recreo. Salieron en manada a pasar el rato antes que tocara volver a entrar a tomar las clases de la tarde.

Las de la tarde no les gustaban tanto. Después de jugar y reír bajo el sol, la idea de regresar a clase se volvía inexistente.

—Wiso vámonos.
—¿Pa dónde Charro?
—Allí, a la hacienda de Pino.
—¿Pá qué? No, no, muchacho, deja eso.

Wiso sabía bien lo que se tramaba. No era la primera vez que Charro lo sonsacaba a la misma hora y con la misma cantaleta. Intentó interponer algo de mesura sin éxito.

—¿Y que vas a hacer con el brother? Mira que si nos vamos luego no volvemos. No lo vas a dejar a que se tenga que ir por ahí pa bajo solo pa’ la casa.
—Mijo, el viene con nosotros.

No hizo falta mucho convencimiento para que accediera. Así, se fueron los tres caminando lentamente hasta dejar atras la escuela y el murmullo del recreo.

Se desviaron del camino principal y se adentraron a la finca. Sabían bien donde estaban. Conocían los recovecos del barrio como la palma de su mano. Donde cualquier otro habría visto monte y maleza, ellos veían el sendero que les llevaba a su destino: la hacienda.

Apenas llegaron, se toparon con un tumulto de gallinas ponedoras. Sus huevos alimentaban al barrio y, de paso, daban sustento a Piro.

—Diablo, ¡hoy si que hay un montón!

Caminaron con delicadeza para no asustarlas. Además, si las gallinas armaban un escándalo, les descubrirían. Había que tener cuidado, moverse con sigilo. Wiso sacó de la mochila una lata vacía. En ella fueron colocando los huevos que recogían con manos cuidadosas; tomándolos… robándolos.

Por sus venas iban la sangre y la adrenalina en armonía, con complicidad. Les recorría una extráña sensación de euforia por su haceres: cortar clase y robar huevos. Eran tonterías, cosas de muchachos, que sin embargo les embriagaban. Se sentían como aventureros descubriendo, forjando paso, creciendo al filo del peligro.

Cuando la lata ya no admitía un huevo más, decidieron retirarse con su botín. Siguieron el sendero hasta llegar al río que dividía los barrios: el Limón. Allí se desviaron hasta encontrar un rincón discreto y adecuado, escondido entre piedras y matorrales.

Se sentaron en el suelo. Reunieron troncos secos, tostados por el sol del mediodía, y los acomodaron como un pequeño bohío. Charro sacó unos fósforos de la mochila y encendió la fogata.

Colocaron todos los huevos en el suelo y dejaron la lata vacía. Escogieron algunos, los rompieron con cuidado y vertieron el contenido en la lata. El resto lo repartieron entre ellos para llevarlo a casa.

Al calor de la pequeña fogata improvisada, los aventureros del barrio prepararon su almuerzo, con el humo elevándose tímidamente hacia el cielo y la sensación de que, por un instante, el mundo les pertenecía.

—¿Vas a querer más Wiso?
—No, no, estoy bien ya. ¿Tú?
—No. ¿Y tu chamaquito?
—No, vamos a dejar para mami.
—Sí, hay sufiuciente ahí pa’ dividirnos y llevarnos.

Apagaron el fuego con cuidado y recogieron la poca huella que habían dejado allí para no dejar rastro. Emprendieron el camino de regreso a su casa y el monte volvía a cerrarse detrás de ellos, como si guardara silencio sobre lo ocurrido mientras el humo y el momento se disipaban en la tarde menguante.

First Prize Short Essay in Spanish - Faculty & Staff

Las Humanidades como “ilusión de ignorancia”

Author: Pablo Sanguinetti

Adjunct Professor, IE School of Arts & Humanities

 

Las Humanidades como “ilusión de ignorancia”

 

Cuando la duda cesa,
la acción mental del sujeto termina.

Charles Peirce

 

Si en el principio fue la palabra, esa palabra tuvo que expresar una idea a la vez lacónica y explosiva: “No sé”. La humanidad entera se ha levantado sobre esa frase. Una frase tan reveladora de lo humano, tan recurrente en su historia, tan unida a sus momentos más luminosos, que parece natural el hecho de que a un sistema como ChatGPT, diseñado para imitar el lenguaje humano pero carente de toda humanidad, le resulte casi imposible pronunciarla: “No sé”.

En contra de lo que sugiere, “no sé” es la afirmación de algo que sabemos: el no saber. Es también la revelación escandalosa de que podemos observar nuestro pensamiento. Y de que sabemos hacerlo, además, de forma crítica, humilde, abierta, heroica.

“No sé” es un impulso al saber. O mejor: el primer impulso al saber. Platón considera que la esencia de la filosofía es la perplejidad o sorpresa (thaumazein) y articula el pensamiento socrático en torno a la idea de aporía: la sensación inaugural de no entender, un “saber que no sabemos” que abre camino al pensar. Más de 100 años antes, Lao Tse resume la misma idea en una sentencia: “Saber no saber es excelencia”. John Dewey ofrece una de las primeras definiciones del pensamiento crítico al describir su esencia como “juicio suspendido”. Y en un retrato especialmente feliz, Karl Jaspers apunta que “San Agustín piensa en interrogantes”. ¿Pero es que acaso hay otra forma de pensar?

El impulso inaugural del no saber va más allá de la cognición. Cuando Borges dedica un soneto al mundo algorítmico del I Ching, el rígido oráculo chino que recorre el universo avanzando por 64 hexagramas binarios, anima al lector a confiar en que, incluso en esa visión fatalista del destino ya codificado, hay un margen de libertad. Es decir, de humanidad:

 

la firme trama es de incesante hierro,

pero en algún recodo de tu encierro

puede haber un descuido, una hendidura.

 

“No sé” es la hendidura. La trampilla inesperada que descubrimos en el encierro y que promete una forma de felicidad esencialmente humana: la felicidad de la exploración, el aprendizaje y el conocimiento final. Es la puerta a una aventura.

No sorprende por eso que los comienzos más famosos en la historia de la literatura puedan interpretarse como variaciones estilizadas de un “no sé” en la primera línea del texto. El “extranjero” de Camus ignora cuándo murió su madre. Dickens no sabe si era el mejor o el peor de los tiempos. Murasaki Shikibu desconoce la época en que vivió Genji. Ismael enmascara su propio nombre y el adolescente de Salinger ni siquiera se molesta en hacerlo. Cervantes esconde, como en un juego de cajas chinas, el nombre de un lugar dentro de su olvido, y el olvido dentro de las razones para desear el olvido. Borges difumina sus comienzos con referencias que no remiten a nada: “Ni aquella tarde ni la otra…”

“No sé” es el principio. Pero un principio solo inaugurado al final de un largo periplo espiritual. “No sé” es la culminación de una escalada de saber que no todo el mundo quiere ascender. Con todo lo que tiene de humano, de provocador, de estimulante, el no saber se presenta como un espacio incómodo, lleno de incertidumbre e inestabilidad. Solo un entrenamiento lento y por momentos frustrante puede llevarnos hasta ese lugar y convertirlo en nuestra casa.

Ese entrenamiento, el entrenamiento de las Humanidades, va en contra de la tendencia natural del mundo hacia la entropía, la distribución uniforme e igual, el ruido blanco eterno. La digitalización es una fuerza entrópica. Y ha encontrado ahora en algunos usos tóxicos de la inteligencia artificial generativa su mayor catalizador, la antítesis perfecta al “no sé”: un saber constante y automático, un flujo de “conocimiento” que lo inunda todo y no deja siquiera margen a buscar hendiduras.

 

La “ilusión de conocimiento”

 

Delegar tareas cognitivas en herramientas digitales ofrece el beneficio obvio de reducir nuestra carga mental. Pero ese beneficio tiene un costo bien identificado en la literatura sobre el tema. El llamado “efecto Google”, por ejemplo, muestra que, cuando las personas recurren al popular buscador para encontrar un dato, en lugar del dato en sí tienden a memorizar cómo y dónde encontrarlo. Lo que se retiene no es la información, sino los “marcadores” que nos guiarán hasta ella cuando la necesitemos.

El mecanismo resulta claramente eficaz, pero también engañoso. Nos lleva a confiar en que hemos aprendido algo, pero sin haber realizado los procesos cognitivos necesarios para un aprendizaje genuino y persistente. Los investigadores lo llaman “ilusión de conocimiento”: la falsa sensación de saber o entender algo que en realidad se ignora.

En el caso de los chatbots con inteligencia artificial, la “ilusión de conocimiento” se ve agravada por un segundo problema: las respuestas no se apoyan en comprensión y razonamiento, sino en meros patrones de texto probable. Hay gestión de lenguaje, no de conocimiento y desde luego no de inteligencia. Un tipo de “saber” aparente que expertos como Walter Quattrociocchi han bautizado como “epistemia”.

El problema no es que el aprendizaje no se haya producido, o que el contenido probabilístico se disfrace de conocimiento, sino que la persona ni siquiera percibe su ignorancia, en una suerte de demostración del llamado efecto “Dunning-Kruger”. Al contrario, la impresión de haber incorporado conocimiento invita a cesar en su búsqueda. Platón, una vez más, ofrece una definición para esta trampa: ignorar que se ignora es “la gran fuente de todos los errores del intelecto”, escribe en El Sofista, y “merece especialmente el nombre de estupidez”.

Si esta teoría es cierta, el uso incorrecto de la inteligencia artificial generativa como herramienta para aprender puede actuar en determinadas ocasiones como la comida basura: un falso alimento que sacia de manera sencilla, inmediata y adictiva, pero que no nutre de verdad. Una recompensa rápida seguida de vacío y acumulación de problemas a medio plazo, como propone un comentado estudio del MIT sobre la “deuda cognitiva” amasada con el uso de chatbots. Eso que los investigadores llaman con elegancia “ilusión de conocimiento” bien podría recibir el nombre menos cordial de “pensamiento basura”.

 

La “ilusión de ignorancia”

 

El concepto de “ilusión de conocimiento” puede definir, por oposición, en qué consiste la educación humanística: una forma de saber profundo y transformador que, sin embargo, se nos presenta en un primer momento como desconcierto, inutilidad y duda.

Aquí el proceso es inverso. Al "consumir” pensamiento complejo y real, es posible que no entendamos bien para qué sirve. Salimos de la clase, el libro, la exposición o el teatro preguntándonos cómo se relaciona esa experiencia con nuestros problemas inmediatos, por qué debería interesarnos, si lo usaremos alguna vez. Pero cuando pasa el tiempo y miramos atrás, vemos que nos ha transformado. Y lo ha hecho de manera profunda, alterando la raíz de nuestra identidad. Ya no podemos volver a ver las cosas del mismo modo. Somos el resultado de ese conjunto de experiencias que en un primer momento parecían accesorias.

Propongo llamar “ilusión de ignorancia” a ese proceso de transformación radical pero silenciosa.

La etiqueta de “ilusión de ignorancia” hace justicia con las Humanidades al superar la idea equivocada de que son “algo inútil” que cumple alguna función, idea reflejada en la popular fórmula “utilidad de lo inútil” acuñada por el profesor Nucio Ordine en su exitoso libro homónimo. No. Las Humanidades son una forma de conocimiento profundo. “Ilusión de ignorancia” desplaza su definición del “¿para qué sirve?” de Ordine al “¿cómo me transforma?”. De la perspectiva utilitaria y funcional, que adopta de modo algo acomplejado un marco mental productivista, a la epistemológica y ontológica. Formar en Humanidades es depositar en el espíritu la pieza de un puzzle que ni siquiera somos conscientes de estar armando. No hay nada de inútil en esa operación.

El interrogante como freno, la duda como principio del pensamiento complejo, la idea invisible que se expande lentamente hasta transformar el modo en que comprendemos el mundo ofrecen la contrapartida exacta del flujo incontenible, confiado e inmediato del lenguaje generado por ChatGPT. El problema es que lo primero resulta incómodo y lo segundo gratificante. O algo peor: adictivo.

El directivo, el lector o el alumno acostumbrado a la respuesta rápida y segura del chatbot puede sentir cada vez más impaciencia ante la aproximación crítica y humanística a un problema. No basta con insistir en que no hay nada más “práctico” que tomar distancia, pensar de forma crítica y aprender a mirar las cosas de otra manera. Tampoco con prometer que aquellos capaces de resistir la incertidumbre del pensamiento real encontrarán tarde o temprano cuánto conocimiento había en esa “ignorancia”, del mismo modo que el adicto al chatbot descubrirá cuánto vacío había en ese “aprendizaje”. Hay que ir más allá y entrenar el músculo de la paciencia, la incertidumbre y la fricción. Y existen diversas vías para hacerlo.

La primera es convencerse y convencer de que esa sensación inicial de “ignorancia” que puede dejar la lección humanística es efectivamente ilusoria y falsa. La segunda, postergar la evaluación de su impacto lo máximo posible para dar tiempo a que ese conocimiento plantado germine. La tercera, aceptar que la dificultad para encontrar aplicaciones inmediatas y concretas en la formación humanística no representa un defecto, sino el mismo objeto de entrenamiento. La cuarta, anclar la respuesta humanística en una aporía, en una situación sin salida que despierte el cerebro y el ánimo y los lance en busca de una solución. La quinta, reforzar no solo la formación en pensamiento crítico, como se ha hecho en los últimos años en respuesta al auge de la inteligencia artificial, sino también habilidades como la gestión de complejidad -la contradicción que no se resuelve, sino que se habita- o la capacidad de atención, como impulsa el admirable proyecto Zero de la Universidad de Harvard.

 

La ambigüedad de la técnica

 

Ese listado omite una familia entera de estrategias que comienzan a popularizarse: las que plantean el uso de chatbots adaptados para entrenar esa “ilusión de ignorancia” de las Humanidades.

Es la postura de diversos “gurús” de educación y tecnología que han propuesto, por ejemplo, marcos para crear “ecosistemas de inteligencia híbrida humano-máquina” y “co-inteligencia”, “asistentes de razonamiento”, “chatbots amplificadores de pensamiento” o “métodos de diálogo socrático con sistemas de inteligencia artificial” que evitan dar respuestas directas y guían el aprendizaje mediante preguntas. ¿Resulta suficiente ese ajuste en la tecnología?

No lo creo. En todos estos ejemplos se observa un cierto desconocimiento de las limitaciones de la tecnología, entre las que destacan la incapacidad de gestionar información fáctica (las mal llamadas “alucinaciones”), la tendencia a homogeneizar respuestas o la adulación sistemática al usuario. Incluso algunas de sus ventajas se convierten en lastre en un contexto educativo, como la velocidad en la respuesta o la anulación de la posibilidad de cometer errores, pieza clave en cualquier aprendizaje. Limitaciones todas que vuelven imposible un “no sé” para la máquina.

Pero la confusión más alarmante de propuestas como las mencionadas se da en torno al papel clave de la persona en el entrenamiento humanístico. El objetivo aquí es transmitir no solo conocimiento, sino en particular una actitud, un interés, una capacidad de instalarse en la duda, el gesto inaugural -que es ético y estético- de no saber. Lo que el profesor “enseña” es un deseo, en términos girardianos. El alumno asiste a ese deseo y se ve impulsado a imitarlo. La investigación muestra que este efecto no puede originarse en una máquina, que naturalmente no desea nada. Algo que el usuario percibe a pesar del diseño antropomórfico del sistema.

Tomemos, por ejemplo, esa herramienta de conocimiento que mantiene su novedad radical después de 2500 años: el diálogo socrático. En su detallado libro sobre el tema, Ward Farnsworth sostiene que la eficacia del método usado por Sócrates en los diálogos platónicos no reside en los argumentos lógicos que ofrece a sus interlocutores, sino sobre todo en aquello que los inspira: una búsqueda apasionada por el conocimiento. Lo primero puede automatizarse con un chatbot. Lo segundo, no. Como sostiene el investigador Jonathan Boymal, la inteligencia dialógica es imposible con ChatGPT.

Como epítome de la “ilusión de conocimiento”, la naturaleza misma de la inteligencia artificial encarna lo opuesto de la “ilusión de ignorancia”. Sería un error confiar en que puede usarse para expandir y automatizar un proceso por naturaleza lento, paciente y personal, por más que proliferen expertos y propuestas con nombres más o menos estimulantes en busca de ese objetivo.

Pero también sería un error afirmar lo contrario. Plantear la tecnología como antítesis de las Humanidades ignora el hecho paradójico de que las artes son también una tecnología, como refleja su origen común en el término griego tékhne y su equivalente latino, ars. Heidegger ve en ambas un recurso para “revelar” zonas nuevas de la realidad. En su impactante análisis de la imagen técnica, Vilém Flusser describe el arte como una actuación contra el programa de una tecnología desde dentro de la tecnología. Un modo de frenar esa deriva entrópica del mundo y provocar lo inesperado, encontrar la hendidura, afirmar la vida y la libertad. Más que obstaculizar el acto artístico, la técnica es su condición previa. El medio ambiente necesario para que pueda producirse la ruptura estética.

La “ilusión de conocimiento” generada por la inteligencia artificial no puede atribuirse solo a la tecnología en sí, sino sobre todo a un error en el modo de concebirla. Este error consiste en verla como sustituto posible de lo humano, un malentendido derivado del carácter esencialmente mimético y engañoso que ha acompañado la inteligencia artificial desde sus orígenes. Pero nada impide que esta tecnología, cuando se haya despojado de su envoltorio promocional y distorsionado, sume en un futuro una herramienta para abrir otras formas de pensamiento, creatividad y aprendizaje, nuevos caminos para un “no saber”.

Con o sin ayuda de la tecnología, las Humanidades afrontan ahora ese desafío crucial. Entrenar en la contradicción en un mundo cada vez más tautológico. Ayudar a detectar ausencias en un mundo desbordado de presencia. Enseñar a seguir buscando lo que creíamos tener en un mundo adicto a encontrar lo que ni siquiera busca. Precisamente por todo eso, se trata de operaciones más necesarias que nunca. La vía para construir un futuro más parecido al gesto valiente, complejo e inaugural del no saber, y menos al vacío servil de la respuesta automática.

 

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Referencias

Los comienzos de obras literarias mencionadas corresponden a: Albert Camus, El extranjero; Charles Dickens, Historia de dos ciudades; Murasaki Shikibu, La historia de Genji; Hermann Melville, Moby Dick; J.D. Salinger, El guardián entre el centeno; Miguel de Cervantes, El Quijote de la Mancha; Jorge Luis Borges, “Una rosa amarilla”.

Otras obras aludidas o citadas en este ensayo:

Boymal, J. (2025). What dialogue requires. The Last Analogue. https://thelastanalogue.substack.com/p/what-dialogue-requires

Farnsworth, W. (2025). The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook. Godine.

Fisher, M., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2021). Harder than you think: How outside assistance leads to overconfidence. Psychological Science, 32(4), 598–610. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620975779

Flusser, V. (2017). El universo de las imágenes técnicas. Elogio de la superficialidad. Caja negra.

Gallese, V. (2009). The two sides of mimesis: Girard’s mimetic theory, embodied simulation and social identification. Journal of Consciousness Studies: Controversies in Science & the Humanities, 16(4), 21–44.

Heidegger, M. (2021). La pregunta por la técnica. Herder.

Kapur, M. (2014). Productive failure in learning math. Cognitive Science, 38(5), 1008–1022. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12107

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X.-H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. In arXiv [cs.AI]. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

Oakley, B., Johnston, M., Chen, K., Jung, E., & Sejnowski, T. (2025). The memory paradox: Why our brains need knowledge in an age of AI. Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5250447

Park, J. S., Barber, R., Kirlik, A., & Karahalios, K. (2019). A slow algorithm improves users’ assessments of the algorithm’s accuracy. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359204

Peirce, C. S. (2007). La fijación de la creencia. KRK Ediciones.

Quattrociocchi, W., Capraro, V., & Perc, M. (2025). Epistemological fault lines between human and artificial intelligence. In PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/c5gh8_v1

Ryba, T., & Goodhart, S. (Eds.). (2025). Desiring machines. Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350383951

Shaw, S. D., & Nave, G. (2026). Thinking—fast, slow, and artificial: How AI is reshaping human reasoning and the rise of cognitive surrender. In Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6097646

Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science (New York, N.Y.), 333(6043), 776–778. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1207745

Sutton, C., & McCourt, L. (2025). Why language models hallucinate (arXiv:2509.04664). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.04664

Tantucci, V., & Sparvoli, C. (2025). AI, be less ‘stereotypical’: ChatGPT’s speech is conventional but never unique. Intercultural Pragmatics, 22(2), 231–258. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2025-2003

Second Prize Short Essay in Spanish - Faculty & Staff

LOS TÚNELES DE LA DEMOCRACIA: el giro autoritario de la generación Z

Author: Borja Santos Porras

Associate Dean & Professor, IE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs

 

LOS TÚNELES DE LA DEMOCRACIA:

el giro autoritario de la generación Z

 

Terminé una clase donde habíamos hablado sobre por qué las instituciones son importantes para el desarrollo de un país, sobre la importancia de la democracia, sobre cómo atajar las desigualdades. Durante el debate todo había parecido normal. Al terminar, dos estudiantes se acercaron. Aunque inicialmente querían resolver un problema con sus asistencias, les pregunté cómo veían el desarrollo del curso.

—Nos gusta mucho el contenido, pero más de la mitad de la clase no cree en nada de eso —me dijo una de ellas.

—¿Cómo así? ¿A qué te refieres?

—Bueno, son muy desconfiados. Dicen que nada de esto es verdad. Que la democracia no existe y que quemarían las instituciones.

—No lo entiendo. En clase nadie ha dicho nada. Hemos trabajado con artículos y papers académicos.

—Nuestros compañeros no se informan con periódicos. Nosotros vemos las noticias en TikTok y hay muchos influencers que prefieren un gobierno más autoritario —intervino la segunda estudiante.

—¿Como una dictadura?

—Sí, no sé, algo así. Algo que de verdad responda a sus problemas.

—Pero… ¿por qué es la primera vez que os escucho algo así?

—Es que creo que nos comunicamos por canales diferentes.

Me dejó pensando durante días. ¿Cómo era posible que ni en las discusiones en clase ni en las tutorías me hubiera dado cuenta de estas percepciones? ¿De dónde sacaban los jóvenes estas ideas? Yo no las escucho fácilmente. Quizás esa era la clave: vivimos en túneles informativos distintos, y el mío no conecta con el suyo.

Me puse entonces a buscar en profundidad las cifras que había leído superficialmente. Lo que encontré me alarmó.

 

UN RETROCESO QUE NO ES ANECDÓTICO

Según el World Report 2026 de Human Rights Watch, el 72% de la población mundial vive ya bajo regímenes autocráticos. El Global State of Democracy 2025, publicado por IDEA Internacional, muestra que en promedio son más los indicadores democráticos que descienden que los que ascienden. El retroceso democrático no es un fenómeno localizado ni pasajero; es una tendencia global y sostenida.

Pero lo que más me inquietaba era lo que estaba ocurriendo con la gente joven, justo como me habían advertido mis estudiantes.

En España, la encuesta de hábitos democráticos del CIS revela que un 27,3% de los jóvenes de entre 18 y 24 años no considera que la democracia sea preferible a cualquier otra forma de gobierno, y un 12,7% cree que en algunas circunstancias un gobierno autoritario podría ser mejor —el mayor porcentaje registrado desde que existen estos estudios—. Pero el dato que más me impactó fue otro: en una encuesta del CIS de diciembre de 2024, el 48% de los jóvenes de 18 a 24 años prefiere que las decisiones las tomen personas expertas en cada materia —un gobierno de expertos, una tecnocracia—, y el 45% de los de 25 a 34 años también. Solo el 29,5% del total de encuestados considera que las decisiones deben tomarlas los representantes políticos elegidos en las urnas. Es decir, la democracia representativa tal como la conocemos no es la opción preferida ni siquiera en la población general. Y entre los más jóvenes, casi la mitad la descarta explícitamente.

No estamos hablando de nostalgia por la dictadura. Estamos ante algo más sutil y quizás más peligroso: un cuestionamiento profundo del mecanismo central de la democracia liberal, la representación política electa, en favor de un modelo donde los expertos decidan. Esto plantea preguntas fundamentales sobre legitimidad, rendición de cuentas y pluralismo que no deberíamos ignorar.

Esta tendencia no es exclusivamente española. La encuesta Young Europe 2025 arroja datos preocupantes en todo el continente: menos del 60% de los jóvenes europeos creen que la democracia es la mejor forma de gobierno; uno de cada cinco apoyaría un régimen autoritario bajo ciertas circunstancias, y solo el 6% considera que su sistema político funciona bien. En Italia, la cifra de apoyo a un régimen autoritario alcanza el 24%. Según el UN World Social Report 2025, más de una cuarta parte de los nacidos en los años noventa declara no tener ninguna confianza en sus gobiernos.

En Estados Unidos, el estudio de Claassen y Magalhães (2023), publicado en Public Opinion Quarterly y basado en el análisis de 12 encuestas nacionales con más de 18.000 encuestados entre 1995 y 2019, documenta un declive inequívoco: el porcentaje de estadounidenses que rechazaba la idea de un líder fuerte sin restricciones del Congreso cayó del 75% al 62% en apenas dos décadas, y el apoyo a la democracia como sistema de gobierno descendió del 94% en 2006 al 71% en 2019. Los autores demuestran que este declive no es un efecto del ciclo vital, sino una tendencia generacional sostenida: cada generación nacida después de los años cuarenta ha sido menos favorable a la democracia que la anterior.

Estamos frente a una paradoja inquietante: la generación más educada, más conectada y más libre de la historia es también la que muestra menor apego a la democracia.

 

TÚNELES QUE CONVERGEN: LAS CAUSAS

¿Por qué sucede esto? Pensaba que sería cómodo buscar una única explicación, pero la evidencia apunta a una convergencia de varios túneles —económicos, institucionales, informativos, culturales— que se retroalimentan y refuerzan mutuamente.

 

El desencanto material

Muchos analistas coinciden en que no necesariamente estamos ante una nostalgia autoritaria —un período que estos jóvenes no han vivido—, sino ante un rechazo de sus condiciones de vida actuales. La precariedad salarial, la pérdida de poder adquisitivo y, sobre todo, el problema de la vivienda alimentan una frustración que se convierte en desafección política.

Los datos son elocuentes. Según la FAD Juventud, los principales retos que enfrenta la juventud respecto al mercado laboral son los salarios bajos (41,9%), la falta de oportunidades para adquirir experiencia (35,5%) y la dificultad para emanciparse (32,6%). La edad promedio en que las personas adquieren una vivienda por primera vez ha alcanzado un máximo histórico de 34 años en Europa. En España, los jóvenes se emancipan a los 30,3 años de media, según el Consejo de la Juventud de España, la cifra más alta de los últimos veinte años, y la tasa de emancipación juvenil se estanca en el 15,9% (entre 16 y 29 años), frente a una media europea del 31,9%. El desempleo juvenil en España superó el 27% en 2023.

Existe una relación documentada entre los períodos de crisis económica y el aumento del apoyo a tendencias autoritarias o al populismo nacional. Una investigación reciente ha identificado la inseguridad financiera como el principal predictor del apoyo a partidos populistas. En contextos de mercados laborales inestables y perspectivas limitadas, los jóvenes son más propensos a apoyar narrativas populistas, impulsados no solo por la ideología sino también por el sentimiento anti-élites y la desilusión política. La incapacidad de los gobiernos en ofrecer estabilidad o condiciones de vida satisfactorias ha creado el escenario perfecto para que triunfen narrativas que proponen un "cambio de sistema". Cuando la democracia no te permite acceder a una vivienda, no te ofrece un empleo estable, y no parece escuchar tus demandas, es comprensible —aunque preocupante— que busques respuestas en otro sitio.

Esta búsqueda de alternativas no se limita al ámbito político. También se refleja por ejemplo en la creciente atracción de muchos jóvenes hacia las criptomonedas. Nacidas tras la crisis financiera de 2008 como una respuesta a la desconfianza hacia los bancos y las instituciones tradicionales, las criptodivisas encarnan una narrativa profundamente anti-establishment: la idea de que los sistemas existentes han fallado y deben ser sustituidos por estructuras descentralizadas y ajenas al control institucional. Hoy, alrededor del 30% de los nuevos inversores en criptomonedas tiene entre 18 y 24 años, y diversos estudios muestran que una parte significativa de la generación Z confía más en las criptomonedas que en los bancos para proteger sus ahorros. Más allá de la tecnología o de la inversión, este fenómeno refleja algo más profundo: una pérdida de confianza en los mecanismos tradicionales de autoridad y mediación. Cuando las instituciones políticas y económicas dejan de percibirse como capaces de ofrecer estabilidad, aumentan las probabilidades de que prosperen discursos que prometen soluciones simples, rápidas y radicales a problemas complejos.

 

La desconfianza institucional

El 59% de la juventud española no se siente representada por el sistema político actual. La confianza en las instituciones clave es baja: solo un 50% confía en el Congreso, un 43% en los partidos políticos, un 39% en el Senado. Esta desafección genera dos escenarios: la abstención —en las últimas elecciones europeas de 2024, más de la mitad de la población española no votó— o el voto a partidos radicales como forma de protesta contra un sistema percibido como fallido.

Van der Brug, Hobolt y Popa (2025), en un artículo publicado en el Journal of European Public Policy, analizan los datos del European Election Study de junio de 2024 en 28 países de la UE y encuentran diferencias generacionales significativas: las generaciones más jóvenes muestran menor apoyo a las normas democráticas liberales y mayor propensión a votar por la derecha política radical. El rechazo a los valores democráticos liberales no solo aleja a los jóvenes de los partidos tradicionales, sino que los canaliza específicamente hacia alternativas que cuestionan esos valores.

Las cifras electorales lo confirman. En Francia, el voto joven al Rassemblement National se duplicó entre 2019 y 2024, pasando del 15% al 31% entre los votantes de 18 a 24 años. En Alemania, el AfD alcanzó el 21% entre los votantes de esa misma franja en las federales de febrero de 2025, casi doblando su cuota respecto a 2021. En España, el barómetro del CIS de julio de 2025 sitúa a Vox como primera preferencia entre los varones menores de 34 años, con una intención de voto que supera el 30% en ese segmento.

 

El ecosistema informativo: algoritmos, burbujas y desinformación

Aquí es donde los túneles se vuelven literales. Según el Flash Eurobarómetro sobre juventud y democracia, más del 70% de los jóvenes europeos se informa sobre política principalmente a través de redes sociales. En Estados Unidos, alrededor del 37% de las personas entre 18 y 30 años obtiene sus noticias regularmente de influencers en redes sociales.

Los jóvenes de la generación Z pasan alrededor de seis horas diarias con sus móviles, lo que los convierte en el público ideal para la manipulación narrativa y la diseminación de desinformación. La atención promedio en una pantalla ha caído a 47 segundos. En ese contexto, los algoritmos que gobiernan las plataformas crean un efecto de filtro burbuja: tienden a mostrarnos contenido que refuerza nuestras percepciones y actitudes previas, atrapando a los usuarios en entornos polarizados donde las posturas radicales se amplifican.

Pero el problema va más allá de los algoritmos. La desinformación intencional —organizada, financiada, dirigida— ha encontrado en este ecosistema su campo de batalla perfecto. El Parlamento Europeo ha documentado que el objetivo último de la interferencia rusa es socavar, dividir y debilitar a la Unión Europea. Operaciones como Doppelganger —que suplanta y clona medios de comunicación legítimos para difundir contenido falso bajo apariencia de credibilidad— y Storm-1516 —que emplea deepfakes y periodistas falsos para fabricar narrativas— son infraestructuras profesionales de desinformación con respaldo estatal.

El caso de las elecciones en Rumanía fue el laboratorio perfecto que demuestra toda la cadena: desinformación, TikTok, jóvenes, candidato pro-autoritario, crisis democrática. Călin Georgescu, un candidato marginal con posiciones antiglobalistas y pro-rusas, pasó del 1% al 35% de intención de voto en apenas dos semanas gracias a una campaña en TikTok que movilizó más de 25.000 cuentas coordinadas y 5.000 canales de Telegram vinculados a intereses rusos. Los algoritmos de TikTok alimentaron a usuarios nuevos y políticamente neutrales con una media de tres veces más contenido de extrema derecha que de cualquier otro tipo. El Tribunal Constitucional rumano acabó anulando la primera ronda de las elecciones presidenciales de 2024, citando evidencia de interferencia extranjera. Pero la lección más inquietante es que la desinformación rusa no necesitó convencer a nadie de que la democracia era mala; solo necesitó amplificar una desconfianza que ya existía.

Un estudio reciente de Lorente y Jiménez-Bravo (2025), publicado en Frontiers in Political Science, aporta una evidencia muy relevante para entender el vínculo entre redes sociales y desafección democrática en España. Sus resultados muestran que, entre los hombres jóvenes, la alta confianza en redes sociales como fuente de información tiene un efecto negativo y estadísticamente significativo sobre el apoyo difuso a la democracia. No es el mero uso de redes sociales lo que erosiona las actitudes democráticas, sino la confianza que se deposita en ellas como fuente fiable para entender el mundo. Y, como advierten los autores, si las redes sociales amplifican contenido extremo y emocionalmente hostil, las implicaciones a largo plazo para la juventud actual son profundas.

Irónicamente, el 72% de los jóvenes europeos reconoce que la desinformación es un problema grave para la democracia. Lo saben, pero el entorno en el que se informan les hace vulnerables precisamente a aquello que critican.

 

La brecha de género y la crisis de masculinidad

En todas las métricas mencionadas aparece una constante: los hombres jóvenes se decantan más rápidamente por opciones autoritarias que las mujeres jóvenes. Milosav, Klüver y otros (2025), con datos de casi 25.000 votantes en 27 países europeos, confirman una brecha de género significativa en el voto a la extrema derecha: el 21% de los varones jóvenes frente al 14% de las mujeres.

Este fenómeno tiene raíces profundas. Los cambios sociales, el creciente feminismo, y la pérdida de los roles tradicionales han generado en muchos hombres jóvenes lo que algunos investigadores describen como una "crisis de masculinidad": la sensación de que han perdido el espacio donde podían afirmar su identidad de protector y proveedor. Según un estudio de King's College London (2025), los hombres y mujeres de la generación Z están más divididos que cualquier otra generación anterior en temas de feminismo, roles de género y derechos de las mujeres. Crecen percepciones inquietantes: la idea de que los esfuerzos por la igualdad se han excedido y que ahora son los hombres los discriminados.

La llamada "manosfera" —una red informal de comunidades en línea que afirman abordar las dificultades masculinas pero que a menudo promueven actitudes perjudiciales— funciona como uno de los principales túneles digitales por los que muchos hombres jóvenes canalizan frustraciones económicas, afectivas e identitarias hacia posiciones cada vez más radicales y, en algunos casos, abiertamente autoritarias. The Atlantic sostiene que los discursos antifeministas pueden actuar como una puerta de entrada a formas más amplias de radicalización. Esto se debe a que proporcionan una explicación sencilla a sentimientos reales de descontento, gozan de cierta aceptación en determinados entornos digitales y, en algunos casos, facilitan la adopción posterior de narrativas conspirativas o extremistas.

La manosfera tampoco existe de forma aislada. Forma parte de un ecosistema digital más amplio donde convergen comunidades de "crypto bros", influencers de masculinidad extrema, foros incel y contenidos que glorifican modelos de éxito basados en la dominación, la riqueza rápida o la superioridad masculina. No es casualidad que exista una importante brecha de género tanto en el consumo de estos contenidos como en la inversión en criptomonedas. Diversos estudios muestran que los hombres jóvenes participan significativamente más que las mujeres en estos espacios digitales, y actores políticos como Donald Trump identificaron explícitamente a esta audiencia masculina y joven como un grupo electoral estratégico durante la campaña presidencial de 2024.

En muchos casos, estas comunidades ofrecen respuestas aparentemente sencillas a frustraciones reales: dificultades económicas, incertidumbre laboral, soledad, problemas afectivos o sensación de pérdida de estatus. El movimiento incel —formado por hombres que se definen como "célibes involuntarios"— constituye uno de los ejemplos más extremos. A través de plataformas como Telegram y otros espacios digitales cerrados, algunos de estos grupos transforman experiencias personales de rechazo o aislamiento en narrativas colectivas de resentimiento hacia las mujeres y hacia los cambios sociales asociados al feminismo.

A ello se suma una exposición cada vez más temprana a contenidos sexuales online. Diversos estudios alertan de que la mayoría de los adolescentes ha consumido pornografía antes de alcanzar la mayoría de edad y que una parte significativa de ese contenido presenta dinámicas de dominación o agresión. Aunque la relación causal es compleja y debe abordarse con cautela, numerosos investigadores advierten de que la combinación de pornografía, redes sociales, idealización extrema de la apariencia física —como ocurre con fenómenos recientes como el looksmaxxing— y comunidades digitales de resentimiento puede contribuir a consolidar visiones distorsionadas de las relaciones afectivas, la sexualidad y la igualdad de género. En determinados contextos, estas dinámicas terminan alimentando discursos antifeministas que encuentran una afinidad natural con proyectos políticos iliberales y autoritarios.

En paralelo, el fenómeno de las tradwives —mujeres que publican contenido en redes sociales idealizando una vida doméstica tradicional con roles de género estrictos— representa otra cara de la misma moneda. Lejos de ser una simple tendencia estética, como advierte la profesora Heejung Chung, directora del Global Institute for Women's Leadership, si esta tendencia no se aborda adecuadamente, se corre el riesgo de empujar a toda una generación de mujeres hacia visiones autoritarias de la familia, restringiendo la autonomía que tanto les ha costado conseguir. Esta dinámica de género, alimentada por las redes sociales y la frustración económica, crea un terreno fértil para discursos que presentan el orden autoritario como la solución natural frente al "caos" de la igualdad.

 

El desconocimiento histórico

Hay un factor que, aunque menos visible, es igual de preocupante: los jóvenes que se sienten atraídos por modelos autoritarios no han vivido una dictadura. En España, un 20,1% de los encuestados jóvenes no sabe cuándo tuvo lugar el régimen franquista. El 20,3% de los hombres y el 10,9% de las mujeres de la generación Z considera que los años de la dictadura fueron "buenos o muy buenos". Un 14% de los jóvenes considera que el cambio que se produjo tras la muerte de Franco fue "para mal".

Como señala Cynthia Arnson, del Wilson Center, el principal factor que hace que los jóvenes vean como factible vivir bajo una dictadura es que, al haber nacido después de la transición democrática, no tienen memoria directa de los abusos de los regímenes autoritarios. Las lagunas en el sistema educativo, combinadas con contenidos en redes sociales que exaltan el franquismo o trivializan las dictaduras, crean una generación más susceptible a discursos que los minimizan, normalizan o reivindican.

 

¿QUÉ PODEMOS HACER?

Trabajo en una universidad donde muchos de los jóvenes a los que educamos son parte de estas estadísticas. No es una abstracción: son mis estudiantes. Son las personas a las que me dirijo cada mañana en el aula.

La primera tarea es comprender que la mayoría de los jóvenes que se sienten atraídos por el autoritarismo no comparten necesariamente su base ideológica. Se acercan a él porque se presenta como la única alternativa ante una acumulación de condiciones de precariedad, de frustración, de desconfianza. Y debemos reconocer que tienen razones legítimas para estar frustrados: la vivienda, el empleo, la sensación de no ser escuchados. Desestimar esa frustración sería el peor error que podríamos cometer.

Pero también es nuestra responsabilidad hacer ver que la democracia no es simplemente otro sistema de gobierno: está fundamentada en un sistema de garantías. La igualdad de género, la libertad de expresión, el acceso a una vivienda y un empleo dignos son aspectos que, dentro de un modelo autoritario, se erosionan o desaparecen. Los jóvenes, al apoyar un cambio hacia el autoritarismo, serían paradójicamente uno de los grupos más afectados cuando el sistema democrático comenzara a desmoronarse.

Desde la educación, hay varias líneas de acción urgentes. Debemos informar mejor y, sobre todo, entender los canales por los que se llega a la juventud. No podemos seguir hablando desde púlpitos que nadie frecuenta. Mis estudiantes me lo dijeron con claridad: "Nos comunicamos por canales diferentes". Eso implica que debemos estar presentes en esos canales, y bajar a los túneles si es necesario. No para competir con los influencers, sino para aportar contexto, matiz y pensamiento crítico donde hoy solo hay simplificación y polarización.

Es fundamental fortalecer la educación histórica y la memoria democrática, no como un ejercicio de nostalgia o revancha, sino como una herramienta de comprensión. Una generación que no conoce los horrores de las dictaduras es más vulnerable a idealizarlas. Y es igualmente fundamental invertir en alfabetización mediática: enseñar a distinguir entre información, desinformación y manipulación no debería ser una asignatura optativa, sino una competencia transversal en cualquier programa educativo.

El Consejo de Europa, en su Estrategia de Educación 2024-2030, propone renovar la misión democrática y cívica de la educación, mejorar la responsabilidad social del sistema educativo y aumentar la capacidad colectiva para contrarrestar la manipulación informativa. Las universidades debemos asumir un papel activo en estos tres pilares.

Pero quizás lo más importante es algo que no se enseña en ningún programa: escuchar. Escuchar de verdad a los estudiantes que ya no confían en la democracia. No para darles la razón, sino para entender qué les ha llevado hasta ahí. Solo desde esa comprensión podremos ofrecerles algo que valga más que un vídeo de TikTok de sesenta segundos: la posibilidad de pensar con profundidad, de conocer la historia, de ejercer el pensamiento crítico, de entender que la democracia, con todas sus imperfecciones, sigue siendo el único sistema que les garantiza la libertad de criticarla.

 

ENTRE Y SALIR DEL TÚNEL

Ante una generación que no ha vivido dictaduras, que se informa por algoritmos que amplifican el extremismo, que construye su identidad en un entorno digital diseñado para capturar su atención, y que se enfrenta a condiciones estructurales inciertas, estamos en el ojo de una tormenta en la que estos malestares pueden amplificarse hasta convertirse en simpatía activa por el autoritarismo.

La cuestión no es si la democracia podrá sobrevivir ante el giro autoritario de parte de la juventud. La cuestión es si los principales actores —gobiernos, partidos políticos, universidades, sociedad civil— tendremos la agilidad y la urgencia necesarias para responder a la gravedad del problema con soluciones a la altura.

Vuelvo a aquella conversación después de clase. "Nos comunicamos por canales diferentes", me dijo la estudiante. Tenía razón. La información fluye por túneles desconocidos para mi que haceN tambalear el sistema. Pero los túneles, por oscuros que sean, tienen salida y llegan a la luz. Recorrerlos juntos es probablemente el mayor desafío educativo, político y democrático de nuestra generación.

First Prize Short Essay in English - Faculty & Staff

The Shape of Things to Come

Author: Ignacio Rodríguez Álvarez

Adjunct Professor, IE Law School

 

The Shape of Things to Come

“The shape of things to come is not fixed; it is imagined before it is built.”

— H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come

As children, we are taught that good poetry avoids the clumsy repetition of identical words, preferring instead the subtler recurrence of rhyme. History, if one follows Mark Twain’s celebrated observation, seems to move in a similar fashion: less through repetition than through echoes, correspondences and uneasy rhymes across time.

There are periods in which such rhymes become particularly difficult to ignore, moments when the present begins to acquire the texture of something already half remembered.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe once again appears haunted by the language of crisis. Economic dislocation, political disaffection, institutional fatigue, democratic anxiety and geopolitical uncertainty have become recurring features of public life. Confidence in traditional parties weakens, representative structures appear increasingly fragile, and the vocabulary of polarization, extremism and democratic decline has returned with surprising ease. One has the impression, to borrow Zara Steiner’s phrase, that the lamps which once illuminated Europe are dimming again¹.

Perhaps more striking still is the familiarity of the atmosphere. The present is increasingly narrated through the imagery of the interwar years. References to Weimar, democratic collapse, authoritarian temptation and social atomization now appear almost instinctively in political commentary and intellectual life. The analogy is not entirely superficial. Roughly a century ago, Europe was likewise traumatized, economically exhausted, politically fragmented and uncertain of its place in a rapidly changing world. International institutions seemed simultaneously indispensable and inadequate. Liberal societies displayed outward sophistication while inwardly doubting their own permanence. New technologies accelerated life while ideological passions radicalized it. One begins to understand why contemporary observers so often experience the sensation not merely of crisis, but of historical recurrence.

Yet there are moments when historical comparison ceases merely to clarify and begins instead to generate its own peculiar mood of expectation. The danger lies not simply in misunderstanding the past, but in quietly allowing analogy to harden into prognosis.

It is difficult not to encounter something of this atmosphere while reading interwar literature today. H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, was framed around the ‘Dream Book’ left behind by Dr Philip Raven following his unexpected death in Geneva in November 1930. Raven, a senior official inhabiting the increasingly sclerotic world of Geneva internationalism and the fading liberal order surrounding the League of Nations, composes from within that atmosphere of conferences, memoranda, committees and mounting apprehension a future history of Europe’s approaching disintegration: economic collapse, another continental war, political fragmentation and civilizational crisis.

Part of the peculiar authority the book acquired rested precisely on chronology. Although Wells imagined Raven’s manuscript as having been completed before the close of 1930, the novel itself appeared only in 1933, by which time several of the events alluded to in the ‘Dream Book’ had already come to pass: the American debt discussions of December 1932, the establishment of the Hitler regime in Germany, Japanese expansion into China proper, and the failure of the London World Economic Conference to arrest the global depression through currency stabilization and economic coordination. These correspondences lent the work with an unsettling aura of prescience, as though the future had already begun quietly arranging itself according to the logic of Wells’s narrative.

What remains striking in retrospect is less the accuracy of these anticipations than the atmosphere from which they emerged. Europe in 1933 already possessed, psychologically at least, the texture of catastrophe. Another continental war no longer appeared speculative but increasingly embedded within the trajectory of the age itself. Wells was not indulging in prophecy in the vulgar sense so much as extrapolating from a civilization that had begun imagining its own breakdown before it fully arrived.

In truth, many of these anxieties had long been latent in Wells’s imagination. Beneath the scientific optimism often associated with his early romances there persisted a much darker intuition about the fragility of civilization and the instability of progress itself. The Time Machine — written almost forty years before The Shape of Things to Come — was already less a celebration of the future than a meditation on historical exhaustion, social division and eventual decline. The distant future visited by the Time Traveller is not a triumphant world of rational advancement but one in which humanity itself has drifted toward fragmentation, degeneration and finally extinction beneath a dying sun.

And yet there is something subtly misleading, in retrospect, about the accuracy of Wells’s anticipations. A few successful prophecies lend coherence to larger architectures of expectation. Diagnosis gradually acquires the authority of destiny. One begins by observing tendencies and ends by imagining that history itself unfolds according to decipherable scripts. Wells, for example, imagined the coming war erupting in January 1940 from a violent confrontation between Germans and Poles at Danzig — remarkably close to the actual origins of the Second World War. Yet from that point onward the logic of historical prognosis gradually detached itself from historical probability: Poland emerges as Germany’s military equal, and the conflict unfolds along trajectories increasingly distant from reality. The initial diagnosis had been penetrating; the projected future considerably less so.

Periods of uncertainty are especially susceptible to this temptation. Societies confronted with instability rarely limit themselves to interpreting the past; they begin imagining the future through the analogies the past appears to provide. Historical memory gradually ceases to function merely as caution and starts becoming a framework of expectation.

Something similar may perhaps be sensed in the contemporary fascination with the 1930s. The comparison undoubtedly illuminates certain recurring tensions of modern political life: democratic fragility, economic insecurity, ideological radicalization, the weakening of liberal confidence, the attraction of certainty during periods of social fragmentation. Yet historical analogies possess a peculiar tendency to exceed themselves. One begins by invoking Weimar as a warning and ends by unconsciously expecting recurrence.

It is telling that even recent attempts to describe the contemporary international condition increasingly return to interwar vocabulary. Robert D. Kaplan, for instance, has written of a world drifting toward a kind of ‘second Weimar’: politically fragmented, culturally restless and uncertain of the authority structures upon which liberal order once depended. The comparison is revealing less for its precision than for the persistence of the imagination behind it².

Elsewhere, historians and commentators repeatedly reach for words such as fracture, vertigo, deluge, fateful hours or even the language of a discernible ‘syndrome’ to characterize both the Europe of the interwar years and the anxieties of the present. Such metaphors do more than describe political conditions. They reveal the extent to which contemporary historical imagination increasingly seeks to interpret uncertainty by conjuring up recognizable ghosts from the past³.

Yet periods of uncertainty are rarely experienced purely as decline. The Europe of the interwar years oscillated constantly between apprehension and renewal, between tragedy and promise. Modern historical consciousness, however, often approaches the past primarily through warning and indictment. We study previous catastrophes so as not to repeat them; we revisit political failures to immunize ourselves against recurrence. The twentieth century, particularly in Europe, has provided more than sufficient reasons for such caution⁴.

Yet there is also a danger in relating to history exclusively through negation. The past gradually ceases to function as a source of orientation, inheritance or even inspiration for the future and becomes instead a reservoir of anxieties projected forward into the present. Historical analogy then loses proportion. One no longer studies the interwar years to understand them, but to search within them for premonitions of one’s own catastrophe.

It was perhaps precisely this tendency that troubled some of Wells’s contemporaries. G. K. Chesterton, who admired Wells’s imaginative genius while distrusting many of his conclusions, once remarked that ‘Mr Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message’. The criticism was directed less at Wells’s politics than at a broader modern temptation: the desire to compress the ambiguities and contingencies of historical life into ever more elaborate rigmaroles of explanation and reconstruction.

Periods of instability frequently encourage precisely the kind of literary-political synthesis that Orwell later identified — thinking, indeed, of the sort of ‘histories of the future’ in which Wells himself occasionally indulged — in the modern ‘political book’: a form combining historical interpretation, political criticism and speculative diagnosis. Such works can illuminate genuine tensions within an age. But they also risk granting historical analogies a coherence and inevitability that history itself rarely possesses⁵.

The Europe of the late 1920s and early 1930s produced an extraordinary abundance of such books. Across very different ideological traditions, writers and political thinkers attempted to render the crisis of European civilization historically intelligible through overarching narratives of decline, renewal and, at times, prophecy. Civilizational decay, permanent revolution, racial destiny, ideological nihilism, the anticipated collapse of liberal internationalism, technological utopias and political disillusionment all became ways of organizing the confusions of the present into larger trajectories supposedly revealing where history itself was heading⁶.

Many of these works perceived genuine fractures within European civilization. They recognized with remarkable clarity the instability, exhaustion and apprehension already permeating interwar Europe. In this sense, they often contained more than a mere grain of truth. Their weakness lay elsewhere. Diagnosis gradually hardened into prognosis. The most catastrophic tendencies of the age came to appear not merely possible, but historically inevitable.

It is perhaps this sensation, more than any precise political parallel, that renders the interwar years so resonant today. The resemblance lies less in events themselves than in atmosphere: the sensation of acceleration without direction, of technological sophistication accompanied by spiritual fatigue, of societies uncertain whether they still possess sufficient confidence to defend the principles upon which they continue formally to rely — a mood already faintly contained in the many ‘Brave New Worlds’ imagined at the time.

Some contemporary debates about the Europe of a century ago resemble, at times, not merely discussions of what happened, but what Wells imagined through Raven’s ‘Dream Book’: modern Sibylline narratives which outwardly interpret the past while quietly arranging expectations about the future. Beneath their analyses of democratic fragility, institutional decay or geopolitical disorder there often lingers the suggestion that history has already begun arranging itself according to recognizable trajectories. The past ceases merely to illuminate the present and begins instead to prescribe the horizon of the future.

History, however, rarely repeats itself in any mechanical sense. What returns are anxieties, illusions, patterns of feeling and, now and then, the faint suggestion of a rhyme. The greater danger lies not simply in failing to learn from the past, but in becoming too convinced that one already knows the future because one believes one recognizes the past in the present.

Wells once observed that ‘human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe’. Yet education, in this sense, cannot consist merely of accumulating historical parallels or rehearsing inherited warnings. Historical consciousness is not prophecy. It is a discipline of proportion.

For the shape of things to come is never entirely discovered in advance. The more insistently societies persuade themselves that they recognize the return of familiar histories, the more likely it becomes that political imagination itself begins to contract around those expectations. Historical analogy then risks becoming not merely a way of interpreting the future, but of limiting the futures that remain imaginable.

 

---

¹Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2007).

²Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis (New York, 2025).

³See Blom, Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938 (New York, 2015); Jähner, Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany (New York, 2024); Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (London, 2015), Ullrich, Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic (New York, 2025); Hoyer, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe (New York, 2026). See also, Ginzberg, Sindrome 1933 (Roma, 2020).

⁴The expression alludes to the characterization of Weimar Germany as simultaneously “promise and tragedy” in Eric D. Weitz’s Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2015).

⁵Orwell, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, in The Horizon (1941).

⁶Representative examples of this broader interwar literature of crisis, prophecy and civilizational interpretation include Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) (Munich, 1918–1922); Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects (Moscow, 1919); Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century) (Munich, 1930); Hermann Rauschning, Die Revolution des Nihilismus (The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West) (Zurich, 1938); John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power (London, 1932); Ignazio Silone, Fontamara (Milan, 1933); and Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (London, 1940).

Second Prize Short Essay in English - Faculty & Staff

Pin me on your map

Author: Deniz Torcu

Executive Director, IE Business School

 

Pin Me on Your Map

I have often said, not entirely joking, that I dislike meeting new people.

The statement usually produces confusion. Those who know me well know that I am not shy. I do not struggle with public speaking. I do not shrink in unfamiliar environments. I have spent years placing myself in rooms where I knew no one and initiating conversation without hesitation. Social interaction does not exhaust me. What unsettles me is not the presence of strangers. It is the ritual that structures the encounter.

There is something almost mechanical about the way introductions unfold. A handshake. A name. A brief acknowledgment of profession, affiliation, or circumstance. These first exchanges feel rehearsed, neutral, even harmless. They create a surface of civility. And then, usually within seconds, the question arrives.

“So, where are you from?”

It is asked with a smile. It is asked with interest. It is asked with the assumption that it is both reasonable and necessary. The question does not present itself as invasive. It presents itself as orientation.

And yet it does something very precise.

It assumes that identity can be anchored geographically. It assumes that knowing the location will explain the person. It presumes that origin is singular, that it can be plotted, and that once plotted, it will clarify the rest. I have come to recognize that this question is not merely biographical. It is cartographic.

The moment I answer, I can almost see it happen. A mental pin drops onto an internal map. Around that coordinate gather assumptions, histories, expectations. Perhaps they are generous. Perhaps they are skeptical. Perhaps they are romantic. It does not matter. The terrain has been mapped.

The map reassures.

The reassurance is not accidental. Modern political and social life is built upon the idea that belonging can be territorialized. Benedict Anderson’s description of the nation as an imagined community makes clear that national belonging is constructed through narrative coherence and shared symbols (Anderson 2006). But that imagination is always spatial. It requires borders, origin myths, continuity across generations. It requires a beginning.

Administrative life reinforces this requirement at every turn. Birth certificates require a place. Passports require nationality. Census forms require classification. Databases demand singularity. Identity is not merely lived; it is recorded. And recording requires stability.

The everyday question “Where are you from?” mirrors this institutional logic in miniature. It asks for the point from which everything else unfolds.

My hesitation begins precisely there.

Not because I do not know where I was born. Not because I cannot name a country. But because I know that any single answer will be partial.

No generation in my family has remained still long enough for belonging to harden into singularity. Movement is not an interruption in our story. It is its organizing principle. Every attempt to identify a clean origin reveals a prior crossing.

When I trace my history backward, I do not encounter rooted stability. I encounter departure.

My great grandmother left her Georgian town because she had no choice. Her husband had been murdered by Russian aggressors. There was no space for deliberation, no opportunity to weigh options. She gathered her two sons and began walking. More than fifty kilometers. On foot.

I try to imagine the terrain. I try to imagine the silence between steps. I try to imagine what it means to walk away from a house without knowing whether you will ever see it again.

There must have been objects within reach that she could not allow herself to consider. A child’s toy left where it had been dropped. A folded dress hanging by the door. Family heirlooms that carried memory more than material value. Perhaps there were photographs. Perhaps there were kitchen utensils worn smooth by use. All of it remained behind not because it was unimportant, but because there was no time to weigh importance.

Departure, under threat, does not allow for curation.

She could not linger to decide what might be worth carrying. She could not sort memory from necessity. She could not pack a future.

She did, however, carry her keys.

The detail of the keys has stayed with me all my life. She did not leave them behind as a symbolic severance. She did not hand them to a neighbor. She kept them because she believed she would return. The house was not imagined as lost. It was imagined as waiting.

The return never happened.

Displacement did not simply relocate her. It reorganized the structure of belonging. Stuart Hall’s argument that cultural identity is not an essence preserved intact but a production shaped through representation and positioning becomes painfully concrete here (Hall 1990). My great grandmother did not carry a frozen Georgian identity across space. She entered a new environment where language, custom, and hierarchy functioned differently.

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital helps understand what such a shift entails (Bourdieu 1991). Languages do not exist in isolation. They carry value relative to context. In one setting Georgian structured daily life and conferred legitimacy. In another it retreated into the domestic sphere. It survived, but it no longer governed.

Belonging, under such conditions, is no longer inheritance. It is negotiation.

Identity is not preserved intact. It is reconstructed within constraint. It does not disappear abruptly.

What once circulated naturally and without reflection begins to retreat. Georgian did not vanish in exile, but it changed tone. It became the language of lowered voices, of conversations that were not meant for children, of fragments exchanged quickly and then abandoned. It surfaced when adults did not want to explain something. It surfaced when worry felt too heavy to translate. It surfaced in moments of intimacy and caution.

Language, in that setting, was no longer mundane. It became selective.

What had once structured daily life without self-consciousness acquired a new texture. It was spoken with awareness. It was deployed strategically. It sometimes functioned as protection, shielding children from anxiety or from explanations that felt too complicated. But protection has consequences. The more a language becomes coded, the fewer the contexts in which it is voiced fully. The fewer the contexts, the fewer the speakers who inhabit it without hesitation. Gradually, what was once ordinary becomes mysterious. What was once continuous becomes intermittent.

And when a language is spoken intermittently, its presence thins.

This thinning is rarely dramatic. There is no public declaration that a boundary has been crossed. There is simply a shift in frequency, in ease, in confidence. Words begin to feel less immediate. Vocabulary narrows. Silence expands.

I find myself returning to a question that has no clear threshold: where does the Georgian end, and when does the Turk begin? Is there a moment when one yields to the other? Is it measured in vocabulary? In accent? In the language one dreams in? Or does the shift occur so gradually that no one can identify the crossing?

The boundary, if it exists, is not visible. It is lived.

My maternal grandparents’ migration to Germany unfolded within a different historical framework yet reproduced similar tensions. They entered a labor system that was designed to be temporary. The term “guest worker” itself encoded limitation.

A guest is welcomed conditionally. A guest does not assume permanence. Migration was narrated as interruption.

Work for a few years. Save. Return.

But temporariness rarely unfolds according to administrative design. Saskia Sassen has shown how global labor systems treat workers as mobile solutions while underestimating the long-term social consequences of mobility (Sassen 1999). Arjun Appadurai describes the disjunctures between economic flows and lived realities that characterize globalization (Appadurai 1996). Policy imagines circulation. Life accumulates attachment.

Children entered schools. Friendships formed. Habits took root. The imagined return remained emotionally central even as daily life solidified elsewhere.

For the second generation, belonging became performance. Language became vigilance. Rosina Lippi-Green’s research on accent discrimination demonstrates how pronunciation functions as a socially acceptable marker of difference (Lippi-Green 2012). Grammar can be mastered, but sound carries biography.

To belong meant to adjust. To listen. To recalibrate.

And somewhere within that constant recalibration, another question began to take shape, even if it was not articulated openly.

Where does the Turk end and the German begin?

Is the boundary marked by paperwork? By the year a child enters school? By the moment an accent softens? Or does it appear gradually, through repetition rather than decision?

My grandparents did not sever ties with the Black Sea coast. They returned in the summers when they could. They carried stories back and forth. Suitcases moved in both directions. The idea of return did not disappear. It coexisted with the routines of work in Germany. Turkish did not vanish when German entered daily life. German did not replace Turkish when it became the language of school, administration, and economic survival. The two languages inhabited different domains, sometimes overlapping, sometimes colliding.

There was no single moment when one identity yielded to another. There was no ceremony marking transition. Instead, permanence accumulated quietly alongside the possibility of return. The categories of guest and host blurred long before the paperwork caught up.

The question of where one identity ended and another began never received a clear answer. It remained suspended, lived rather than resolved.

This condition is often described as hybridity. Homi Bhabha’s notion of the third space captures the structural in between where identities are negotiated rather than inherited whole (Bhabha 1994). In the third space, identity is not simply carried forward intact; it is articulated under pressure, shaped through encounter, and defined relationally. Yet the language of hybridity is frequently celebratory. It suggests creativity, fluidity, the productive merging of worlds.

What it does not always emphasize is the labor involved.

The third space is not simply generative. It is demanding. It requires constant translation. It requires attentiveness to context, to audience, to tone. It requires an awareness of which parts of oneself are legible and which require explanation. It produces adaptability, but also vigilance. One learns early that identity is not something one simply inhabits. It is something one manages.

I did not have theoretical language for this when I was a child. I only had the sensation of misalignment. The first time I became aware that something did not quite fit was not in a dramatic political confrontation, but in something far more ordinary: vocabulary.

In primary school I noticed that certain words we used at home did not appear in my classmates’ speech. They were not rare words. They were words of intimacy, irritation, affection. When I asked why, I was told that our family retained vocabulary from a Muslim ethnicity related to Georgians in the Caucasus.

The explanation felt sufficient.

Years later in Istanbul I encountered speakers of the language I believed explained our difference. I cited examples confidently. They responded gently.

Those words were not from their language. They were Greek.

I remember feeling unable to process what I was hearing. Greek belonged to textbook narratives of rivalry, not to the affectionate language of my grandmother’s kitchen.

When I confronted the family matriarch, she acknowledged coexistence in our town. Yes, Greek had been spoken. Yes, there had been exchange. But we are from here, she insisted. We have always been from here.

The contradiction did not trouble her.

It unsettled me deeply.

The realization that the words of my childhood carried Greek traces did not produce immediate clarity. It produced a kind of cognitive dislocation. I had been given information that did not fit into the internal map I had been using. The categories I had inherited, national, linguistic, historical, did not collapse dramatically. They blurred.

I carried that blur for years.

When I later encountered the work of Édouard Glissant, I recognized in his critique of root identity a language for what I had felt but not articulated. Glissant argues that the obsession with singular origin is a specifically Western inheritance, one that privileges the image of the tree, stable, rooted, descending from one trunk. Against this model, he proposes relation. Identity, in his view, is not a root but a network, not vertical but horizontal, not singular but entangled (Glissant 1997).

The presence of Greek vocabulary in my family did not dilute identity. It revealed proximity. It revealed that history in our region had been less about separation than about contact.

The desire for purity, I began to understand, is often a retrospective fantasy.

Derrida’s critique of origin deepened that realization. In Of Grammatology, he dismantles the philosophical longing for a pure beginning untouched by trace (Derrida 1976). Every origin, he argues, is already marked by what came before. Meaning does not arise from presence but from difference. There is no pristine starting point.

For a long time, this argument felt theoretical. Elegant, yes, but distant from daily life. It became less distant when I noticed my own compulsive tracing of origins. I would search for the etymology of words that caught my attention. I would follow recipes backward through cookbooks. I would ask older relatives where a particular superstition had come from.

Each time I believed I had reached a beginning, another layer appeared.

The Georgian carried Ottoman traces. The Turkish contained Greek inflections. The German was already marked by migration. What I had imagined as stable dissolved into relation.

This instability surfaced again at a celebration marking one hundred years since the declaration of Georgian independence. I attended with a mixture of pride and hesitation. Anniversaries are rituals of continuity. They compress complexity into narrative coherence. They tell stories of origin and endurance.

The ambassador greeted me warmly. He told me that I looked Georgian.

For a moment, the statement felt affirming. It felt like recognition.

Then he paused.

“But perhaps a bit too blond,” he added lightly. “Have there been Russians marrying into the family?”

The comment was delivered with a smile. It may have been intended as humor. Yet it exposed something structural. Authenticity, once more, was being measured against an imagined template.

I remember thinking that the remark was absurd. The Caucasus has always been a region shaped by crossings, by imperial encounters, by intermarriage and exchange. Variation seemed to me an inheritance rather than a deviation.

And yet there I was, gently audited.

Frantz Fanon’s reflections on the racialized gaze illuminate such moments. The body becomes text. It is read, interpreted, and classified (Fanon 1967). Belonging is not solely self-declared. It is negotiated through external perception.

Charles Taylor’s work on recognition sharpens the point further. Recognition is not merely affirmation. It can also misrecognize. It can subtly qualify (Taylor 1994). The ambassador had recognized me, but conditionally.

Yes, you belong. But explain this difference.

That moment did not destabilize me entirely. It clarified something I had long suspected.

Identity is not simply something we inhabit.

It is something others measure.

A similar scene unfolded in a professional context. I was introduced at an academic event as having an “interesting background.” The word interesting lingered in the air. It suggested multiplicity. It suggested departure from norm.

A visiting scholar smiled and asked, “Where are you really from?”

The adverb did the work.

My first answer, the country of my birth, was insufficient. It was surface. The question sought something deeper, something earlier, something more authentic.

I felt the familiar calculation begin. How much do I narrate? How far back do I trace? Do I offer the version that fits the moment, or the version that complicates it?

The exchange lasted less than a minute. Yet it revealed the persistence of origin as a demand.

This persistence becomes more striking when placed within the broader political context. We live in an era characterized by mobility, fluid affiliations, and transnational lives. Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity describes a world in which traditional anchors of stability have weakened (Bauman 2000). Careers shift. Communities disperse. Borders are crossed with increasing frequency.

And yet, in this very condition of fluidity, the demand for solid identity intensifies.

Nationalist movements across continents appeal to origin stories with renewed fervor. Citizenship debates hinge on bloodlines and birthplaces. Administrative systems require singular nationality. Databases demand classification. Even as economies globalize, belonging is territorialized.

Rogers Brubaker warns against groupism, the tendency to treat identities as bounded entities rather than dynamic processes (Brubaker 2004). Yet boundedness persists because it simplifies complexity. It makes governance possible. It makes social interaction manageable.

Even the small talk question participates in this logic.

When someone asks where you are from, they are not merely curious. They are seeking stability in a world that feels unstable. They are asking for a coordinate that will render the interaction predictable.

Let me ask you something in return.

When you answer that question about yourself, do you ever hesitate? Do you pause for even a moment before naming a country? Or does the answer arrive cleanly, confidently, without friction? When you say where you are from, are you describing a birthplace, a passport, an ancestry, a language, a political allegiance? Which layer are you privileging in that moment, and which are you setting aside without acknowledging it?

If you trace your surname backward, does it remain anchored in one place? If you follow the etymology of the words you use every day, do they belong exclusively to one linguistic lineage? If you consider the food you identify as traditional, can you locate its ingredients within a single territory? Or do you assume that your origin is simpler because you have never been required to examine it closely?

Perhaps the difference between us is not fragmentation but visibility. My layers are audible. Yours may be quieter, folded into a dominant narrative that does not demand explanation. When difference aligns with the majority, it becomes invisible. When it sounds foreign, it becomes interrogable.

When I think about my son, this tension ceases to be abstract. It becomes anticipatory.

He will grow up surrounded by Georgian dishes that he cannot fully pronounce but will recognize as his. He will hear Turkish idioms embedded in stories and jokes. He will encounter German words that survive as fragments from another migration. He will live in Spanish, think in it, perhaps dream in it. He will absorb Greek expressions that slip into affection without announcing their origin. Through his father’s lineage, Italian will linger in surnames and stories, even if not in daily speech.

He will not experience these as neatly separated compartments. They will overlap before he has the conceptual language to divide them.

And yet, one day, an institution will require division. A form will ask him to select one nationality. A border control system will scan one passport. A teacher will ask the familiar question in a classroom full of children who answer without pause.

He may look at the blank space labeled place of origin and ask me which box is correct.

What will I tell him?

That he is Georgian because his great grandmother walked fifty kilometers carrying house keys? That he is Turkish because that is the language in which our shared memories are told? That he is German because labor migration restructured our family? That he is Spanish because that is the country in which he is growing up? That he carries Greek words without having studied Greek? That Italian shadows his lineage even if he cannot conjugate a verb?

Where do I end and where does he begin?

The question is not poetic. It is structural. Identity is often imagined as something that passes cleanly from one generation to the next. But what he inherits from me is already composite. And what he will add through his own life will complicate it further.

The boundary between where I end and where he begins is not a line. It is an overlap.

Benedict Anderson reminds us that nations are narrated into coherence through selective storytelling (Anderson 2006). Origins are curated. Continuities are emphasized. Disruptions are smoothed over. The story becomes linear even when history was not.

Perhaps what we call origin is often a simplified version of a far more entangled reality.

Instead of imagining identity as something that begins in one place and grows neatly outward, I have come to see it as something that accumulates. What came before does not disappear when something new is added. My great grandmother’s displacement does not cancel the Black Sea years that followed. Labor migration does not erase the languages spoken before it. The life I built in another country does not replace the histories that shaped me.

Each layer remains, even if it is not always visible at first glance.

When I am asked to be pinned on a map, I understand the desire for orientation. I understand the comfort of coordinates. But comfort does not require reduction.

The handshake still comes. The name is still exchanged. The question still follows.

Where are you from?

I still pause.

Not because I do not know.

But because I know that no single pin can hold what I carry.

 

References

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.

Sassen, Saskia. 1999. Guests and Aliens. New York: The New Press.

Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann, 25–73. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Third Prize Short Essay in English - Faculty & Staff

A Clash of Civilizations in Europe: Learned Helplessness and the Politics of Fear

Author: Ana Patricia Romay Febres

Program Coordinator, IE Impact

 

A Clash of Civilizations in Europe: Learned Helplessness and the Politics of Fear

   Samuel Huntington’s 'clash of civilizations' thesis has been widely adopted as a lens for interpreting global conflict, and, with the rise of populism and extremism, for interpreting terrorism as an indisputable proof of Huntington’s ideas. Yet, as Martha C. Nussbaum, Jakob Roesel, and most famously Edward Said have proven in their different works, the thesis is incorrect and misleading. The simplistic dichotomy of “civilizations” pitted against each other fails to capture the complexity of human societies and the nuanced reasons for conflict. This essay does not argue whether Huntington’s thesis proves terrorism: it does not. A misleading, fallacious, and ultimately discredited argument cannot confirm nor deny a phenomenon. Instead, this paper aims to examine how this flawed narrative has been wielded to justify cycles of fear, securitization, and otherization. It is false yet politically convenient.

A fundamentally flawed thesis has somehow achieved an extraordinary impact: a generalized learned helplessness that has translated into a state of cultural paralysis. By analyzing the psychological theory of learned helplessness, and using the works of Matthew Arnold, Edward Said, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Jakob Roesel, I will show that Huntington’s theory, while inaccurate, has been masterfully used to entrench a narrative of division, provoke cultural stagnation, and justify extreme measures.

Samuel Huntington, in his 'clash of civilizations' thesis, proposed that future conflicts would be fought not between countries but between “cultural blocs,” most prominently Orient, as defined by Said, and the West. But, as Said (2004) stated, “neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other” (p. 870). This dichotomy, neat and digestible, posits two monolithic entities locked in eternal opposition. And yet, the thesis survives. When a terrorist attack happens in Europe, there’s a predictably psychological Pavlovian response: analysts trot out Huntington’s thesis, as if the very act of violence confirms the irreconcilable nature of “our” civilization with “theirs.” It’s comforting, I suppose, for those who like their politics simple and their enemies clearly defined. Unfortunately, foreign policy actors are often those who find power in this comfort.

For those inclined to believe in the clash of civilizations, terrorist attacks are a convenient confirmation. Their media coverage and their suitable shape of an existential threat allow for confirmation bias to do much of the heavy lifting and trigger the so-called Mean World Syndrome, a cognitive bias coined by George Gerbner in the 1970s in which constant exposure to hostility and violence distorts one’s perception of reality and safety (Kemp, 2023). The result is a population gripped by fear and willing to accept draconian security measures as a reasonable response. But this is not mere speculation. The psychological phenomenon of learned helplessness develops in the following manner: “When experience with uncontrollable events leads to the expectation that future events will elude control, disruptions in motivation, emotion, and learning may occur” (Peterson et al., 1993, p. 7). According to Hooker (1976), learned helplessness is “similar in many respects to the crisis state and depression” (p. 194). Thus, the constant invocation of a clash of civilizations doesn’t just mutilate understanding; it has real psychological consequences. Through learned helplessness, people are subjected to repeated portrayals of conflict and the dangerous other that sicken with powerlessness. With every new incident reported in terms of “us” versus “them,” the public becomes more resigned to a world of inevitable conflict, where the only viable response is to hunker down, bolster security, and tolerate increased surveillance. And there is something deeply telling when governments seem more eager to amplify these threats than to diffuse them.

Roesel (1995) pointed out a very important element of the clash of civilizations in his critique: “How Huntington describes civilizations resembles very much … how ethnic ideologues envision ethnic groups and how nationalist leaders or historians describe nations and nation states” (p. 77). Perhaps without realizing it, hence his question mark on the title, Huntington theorized a nationalist and ethnocentric game plan, and did not manage to convince us that this strategy is exclusive for the mean “East.” Not only did he name it, but also contributed to justifying it: the clash instills fear, helplessness, cultural paralysis, and justifies excessive power and violence against the other in the name of a necessary order. Guriev & Treisman’s (2020) study of authoritarianism proves this tendency occurs under “the promise to provide law and order. Many dictators … claim to be restoring discipline after periods of crime or corrupt political competition” (p. 6). Thus, they become “necessary” to save a helpless population from the rising power of the ill-defined criminal and corrupt other that is presented through narrative. Said’s (1994) emphasis on the power of narrative in Culture and Imperialism becomes crucial.

Threat narratives propel securitization and extreme measures by making them incompatible with diversity and cultural exchange, fostering an environment hostile to multiculturalism. Yet, the evidence that favors multiculturalism is vast. According to a 2004 report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe under Recommendation 1687, “culture can, in fact, play an important role in preventing the development of a terrorist mentality, but its role in this respect is underestimated” (Sudarenkov, 2004). In fact, culture is more often a target of terrorism and armed conflict and cannot be logically attributed as the cause of them. In countries like Afghanistan, Mali, Yemen, and Iraq, according to UNESCO (2023), cultural heritage and expressions are directly targeted and attacked, which is “often paired with the persecution of individuals based on their cultural, ethnic or religious affiliation.” These attacks hinder the opportunities for peace and dialogue. The reductionist claim of a clash of civilizations fueling terrorism is not only logically contradicting due to this evidence, but also displays a fundamental lack of empathy for those who cannot freely live their cultures due to terrorism itself.

This is consistent with Nussbaum’s (2008) who, sustained by the evidence of India’s Gujarat pogrom of 2002, argued that

the real ‘clash of civilization’ is the clash within every modern society between those who are prepared to live with people who differ, in terms of equal respect, and those who seek the comfort of a single ‘pure’ ethno-religious ideology. At a deeper level, the ‘clash’ is internal to each human being, as fear and aggression contend against compassion and respect. (p. 357)

   As described by Said and proven by Nussbaum and UNESCO’s data, when culture becomes narrated as independent from power or as a force transcending everyday life, it justifies superiority, a moral enclosure, attacks in the name of a superior culture, and absolutism in the name of cultural exceptionalism. As E. W. Said put it in Culture and Imperialism (1994), “culture conceived in this way can become a protective enclosure: check your politics at the door before you enter it” (p. 14). It is the trap of subjugation in the name of an ethnic or cultural majority, and even the protective enclosure of cultural relativisms that overlook such subjugation. This narrative of transcendence and exceptionalism of culture for subjugation has not, in any way, been a phenomenon exclusive to “monolithic civilizations” that Huntington (1993) implied were destined to clash due to a culture they share and that differentiates them from others: “in conflicts between civilizations, the question "What are you?" is a given that cannot be changed” (p. 27). UNESCO’s evidence and Nussbaum dismantle this reductionist idea that such a violence is inherent to conflicts between culturally different major civilizations, of which he only hesitantly managed to quantify “seven or eight” (p. 25). We should spot the question mark in the title The Clash of Civilizations? and take it seriously.

Despite Huntington’s own hesitancy, the narrative of the clash has given value to warfare and securitization and stripped it away from culture. Matthew Arnold, writing in 1869, warned of the dangers of placing too much value in “machinery” at the expense of the “sweetness and light” that is culture (p. 38). Substitute “machinery” with modern-day security measures and the machinery of war, and Arnold’s warning resonates as clearly today as it did then. Arnold cautioned that an over-reliance on machinery, be it industrial in the 1800s or militaristic today and for the purpose of this paper, distracts from human and cultural aspirations. Warfare, like the machinery Arnold warned against, has taken on a life of its own, justified as necessary for “protection” even as it dismantles the very values it claims to defend.

That is not to say that Arnold’s 19^th century arguments present the full picture in any way. For Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1994), reinterpreting or, more accurately, completing Arnold’s work, the word, "culture" has two senses. First, it means “all those practices … that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms, and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure” (p. 12). But to see culture in this light, or as “sweetness and light” as Arnold did, we must see it fully, and reveal the obscured influence of power, imperialism, and exceptionalism in culture for it to truly be “the study of perfection” as Arnold wished it to be in 1869 (p. 34). For culture to truly become a study of perfection, reflective of true humanism, or for it to even be close to a “perfect study,” we must unveil what Said (2004) noted was missing from the works of the great humanists in Orientalism once more.

According to Arnold (1869), the individual is “obliged, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection” (p. 36). That is to say, a march towards culture. At its best, this statement may remind us of John Donne’s "No Man Is an Island,” and Arnold, as a poet, may have intended it in the most poetic sense. But, at its worst, it reminds us of the narrative behind imperialism and colonization. Therefore, according to Said (1994), comes the second sense of culture: “a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another” (p. 13). This definition necessarily deals with the connection between “practices such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other” (pp. 13–14). Indeed, this connection is necessary, and brings about the importance of narrative that Said stresses throughout his work. “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, constitutes one of the main connections between culture and imperialism” (p. 13). Indeed, exceptionalism as a justification for subjection is consistently masked under this cultural theater that is reinforced by narratives. This is where myths such as that of the “Western civilization” emerge, one that is positioned over “uncivilized others.” It is also contradictory because it is easily malleable when convenient. A terrorist attack of the uncivilized “other” may prove that there is a clash of civilizations, but a violent and systematic colonization undertaken by the civilized “one” is not a clash at all, but merely an “encounter between two worlds,” as Spain has often poetically defined the colonization of the Americas, while also refusing to call it colonization. The dichotomy is then deeply entrenched in a false morality often owned by the West that justifies its own contradictions.

Culture and humanism can only become “sweetness and light” if they exist without exclusions. Humanism is not in any way compatible with a Hobbesian idea of inevitable conflict rooted in human nature that makes us all destined to clash, making us helpless, and giving us the need for a powerful Leviathan that will protect us against the mean other by any means. Humanism cannot be compatible with dehumanizing said mean other to undertake destruction in the name of securitization. Dissemination of these orthodoxies, as defined by Said (2004), “give viewers the sense of surgical precision, but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction produced by modern ‘clean’ warfare” (p. 876). The cycle of a clash of civilizations narrative that breeds learned helplessness and justifies exclusion and excessive power as security is not humanism: it is wholly opposed to it. “Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority” (Said, 2004, p. 878). The real tragedy of the 'clash of civilizations' narrative is not that it is wrong, but that it is useful. It traps us in a worldview where conflict is not only inevitable but somehow desirable, where peace is uninteresting and idyllic, and multiculturalism is disposable. Instead of succumbing to the allure of such reductionist theories, we should aim for a vision of society that embraces cultural diversity and seeks peace. Not through securitization and warfare or through the tired oxymoron of wars for peace.

If culture is indeed perfection as Arnold described it, and if we, as humans, are finite, what is perfection if not transcendence? What is more opposite to transcendence of cultural manifestations and to sweetness and light than warfare and destruction of all that is human and humane? True humanism, according to Said (2004), “is the only and final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history” (p. 878). It is easier to accept the “inevitability of conflict” than to resist. But accepting such an idea is also uninteresting. The unfounded arrogance of calling such a theory “realist” is lazy. It is negligent and irresponsible as political scientists to merely assume that we are not capable of anything more than conflict. This narrative cycle, from terrorism to helplessness to securitization, creates fertile ground for extremism and xenophobia, establishing a culture in which diversity is feared, and control and surveillance become the default response. Huntington’s discredited thesis doesn’t promote understanding; it perpetuates a myth of unavoidable conflict that serves those who capitalize on fear.

 

References

Arnold, M. (1869). Sweetness and light. In Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism.

Guriev, S., & Treisman, D. (2020). The popularity of authoritarian leaders. World Politics, 72(4), 601–638. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0043887120000167

Hooker, C. E. (1976). Learned helplessness. Social Work, 21(3), 194–198. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/21.3.194

Huntington, S. P. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22. https://doi.org/10.2307/20045621

Kemp, S. (2023). It’s a mean, mean world: social media and mean world syndrome. https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.1333

Nussbaum, M. C. (2008). The Clash Within: Democracy and the Hindu Right. Journal of Human Development, 9(3), 357–375. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649880802236565

Peterson, C., Seligman, M. E. P., & Maier, S. F. (1993). Learned helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control.

Roesel, J. (1995). The Clash of Civilizations: A Critique. Strategic Studies, 18(1), 75–109. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45182200

Said, E. (2004). Orientalism once more. Development and Change, 35(5), 869–879. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2004.00383.x

Said, E. W. (1994). Culture and imperialism. Vintage.

Sudarenkov, V. (2004). Combating terrorism through culture. In Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (Recommendation 1687). Council of Europe. Retrieved October 20, 2024, from https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=17278&lang=en

UNESCO. (2023, May 11). The role of culture for resilience, peace and security: a new international agenda promoted by UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/emergencies/culture/role-culture

Collage artist: Coeur Papel

I am an analog collage artist. I find joy and fulfillment in making things with my hands; hunting down textures and colors to evoke feeling and memory.

Windows of Time: Series

This series focuses on the abstract evolution of time.

Each work is hand-built, composed of fragments of paper magazines, books, and printed media to form layered, composite images.

Spring: Breath
Summer: Vert
Autumn: Clean
Winter: Lilac