Better hungry than dead

The wife of the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández had only onions to eat while breastfeeding their son. Hernández wrote Lullaby of the Onion for them while imprisoned by the fascist regime. Mother and son survived. He was denied medical attention and was left to die in jail. I was a student of humanities in the public university when I learnt about that.

At the time, my country was supporting the US in its attack of a Middle Eastern country. This war, as all others, was avoidable. My father had himself gone through an avoidable war in his childhood. A rebellion funded by the privileged against a democratically elected and somewhat innovative government that was investing in getting my country out of illiteracy and poverty. The privileged weren't happy with that. They probably thought we were too primitive for such a plan and that everything would end up in anarchy and death. So they had to do something about it: they had to start a war in which 540,000 people would die, so that they could avoid the death that a hypothetical anarchy might bring about. Death prevents death, they might have thought. After three years, the rebels, with the help of other European fascist forces, won that war and a dictatorship that would last 36 years followed. No anarchy. They succeeded in keeping my country as illiterate and hungry as the 20th century allowed a Western European country to be. They also changed the country's flag, so only their supporters could identify with it and their victims would feel like foreigners in their own land. My father went through all that, but his dad was a stubborn goatherd who at the cost of his own hunger managed to feed his son enough so that he could study. And my father studied, a lot. Rumour has it that years later, while my father was teaching chemistry, the dictator walked into the classroom. He had to say hello to him and stand in a corner.

My father spent half of his life studying and teaching so he could eat, buy books on the black market and have a room in which to hide them safely. Only when in his fifties, the dictator dead and the fascist regime over, he had the time to have a daughter. So there I was, in my early twenties, seeing how the democratically elected government of my country was supporting an avoidable war. 'Dad, but why didn't you vote in the last election to avoid something like this happening? Dad, why don't you ever vote!?' My father had answers to all my questions. I could ask him about history, physics, Russian literature, algebra, agriculture, classical music, biology... he knew about it all. He never gave me a convincing answer for this question, though. It remained a mystery that he left for me to figure out.

Despite having toiled his way through the century of ideologies, my dad was politically a rarity, not so much a freethinker as an indecipherable one. For years I wondered if he was consciously making an effort not to fill me with resentment, not to shape my identity... too late, dad. Too many books on our shelves had already done it. You never hid them from me. So then, what could have happened to my father that he never used his right to vote after having damned the coup that wrecked his childhood, killed his teachers, starved his dad and forced him to stay silent in a corner to survive? The reasonable answer was fear. But the right answer was what I've come to realise only now. A feeling that comes after fear and that I'm experiencing these days. Let's call it disillusionment. 

After the Iraq war, I always voted for those who now have the privilege of forming the democratically elected government of my country. Unlike my dad, I voted to ensure that never again would thousands of people die for the decisions of the privileged few. These days, the democratically elected government that I voted for acts late, ignores scientific evidence, allows and enables thousands of avoidable deaths. The democratically elected opposition, the one supposed to challenge the government, is pressuring it to act even later, even less, to let more die. This democratically elected and ideologically heterogeneous group of privileged people probably thinks saving lives will bring about hunger and anarchy, so they have to do something to stop saving lives, or in this case, they have to do precious little to let those deaths happen. Just enough to save face, just that. Letting people die would save people from hunger and hypothetical death... Death prevents death, they must be thinking. Probably they haven't thought that hungry people like my father's dad still have a chance that death does not give them. The chance to be stubborn enough to feed their sons at the cost of their own hunger, so one day someone like my father could read books and survive and have a daughter who, unlike him, will overcome disillusionment and will keep on voting for the lesser evil until one day no privileged group will leave us to die again.

'Fly, child, on the double moon of the breast: it, onion sad; you, fed and content. Do not falter.' I owe it to Hernández, to those books, to my father. I owe it to his father as well.