/lit/ - Literature

>>8129368
> all we creatures of that disorderly reality have needed to ask little of the imagination, for the major challenge before us has been the want of conventional resources to make our life credible.
>To interpret our reality through schemas which are alien to us only has the effect of making us even more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
>people who desire to have their own life while sharing the good things in the world
>Nevertheless, in the face of oppression, pillage and abandonment, our reply is life.

Colombian here. I had never read that speech and I am not particularly fond of his work, I actually strongly dislike it, but it is all in there. We in latam simply have no self identity as a group, we are trapped in the conflict between building a society which deserves that name and the effort to be a part of the modern world. Only that, unlike for instance asian societies which had a well developed culture to face that modern world and are in that same struggle, having been succesful in integrating it within their own culture and values, we had no unified culture when modernity arrived and now we have no ground to make it grow on.

This kind of literature gives you a picture of how people live here, by facing a reality they hate but cant escape and are forced to sugar coat it somehow in order to be able to live in it, no matter how little it 'leaves to imagnation'. I guess that kind of literature grows out of the mixture of living life in that incomprehensible and hostile reality and the instinctual striving for life inside every human being, because sometimes I look at kids growing here and wonder why do they cling to life... I wouldnt if I hadnt travelled around a bit living abroad for some time, and having seen that life can be different and something you can make on your own as you go along.

When you see colombians or latinos and dont get what they do, or are disgusted by how they live, take advice from wittgenstein: "when you feel like hating people, try to understand them instead, and thus be in peace with yourself"