Colombia: Ediciones El Silencio. 2023. 94 pages.
Los desterrados by the Colombian philosopher and writer Julián Chang is a novel about a historical crisis and a social crisis when pain, mistreatment, and devastation persist like the legacy of those who seized power, took a country, and turned it into a shameful plunder. Venezuela thus stopped being what many people in the world said it was to confirm itself as a sort of hyperbole of lamentations that harbor unquestionable truths: a high percentage of its population had to flee by tortuous paths to the neighboring Republic of Colombia.
The story, based on historical events, is made into fiction, a recreation and representation of each of the wanderers, called mochileros or backpackers, who had to navigate the porosity or solidity of the border to be able to survive.
The characters do not need names. They are the thousands who have crossed paths where crime from both sides does business with the pain of the helpless, the now-exiles, those without a homeland who form part of a social fabric often condemned by nationals of the places where they arrive.
“LOS DESTERRADOS IS A NOVEL WHERE FICTION AND REALITY COME TOGETHER TO SPOTLIGHT CERTAIN EVENTS THAT, FROM A DISTANCE, LOOK LIKE AN ADVENTURE FILM”
Rosaura is the protagonist of this story, although other actants accompany her on the difficult journey to escape a broken country: they could all wear the same name, they could play the same role, the same person: man or woman, adult or child, who has managed to navigate the dangers of the border between San Antonio del Táchira, Venezuela and Cúcuta, Colombia.
Julián Chang writes without embellishment. Los desterrados is a novel where fiction and reality come together to spotlight certain events that, from a distance, look like an adventure film. Yes, this is a story of painful and dangerous experiences, so much so that readers are stunned by the harsh and heartbreaking actions found on its pages.
These experiences could be compared to those of the Jews during World War II, a reflection of the exodus led by Moses in the Old Testament.
But in this novel, the characters are all Moses. They are all doing something to survive. They all cross rivers and deserts. They all lead, they all become one in order to arrive at a sort of promised land.
Rosaura uses a wheelchair and thus, disabled, she decides to escape from those who invaded her house in San Francisco de Yare after having sheltered a group of people who took over her home, which is why she had to escape, helped by some neighbors, and subsequently take initiative to leave the country.
On the way to the border, things happen that happen to Venezuelans every day: they are harassed by military and police authorities and by criminal guerrillas and traffickers. The number of incidents that happen at pawn shops and populated areas on the road without any authority doing anything about it would be too many to count. And later, at the same border, everyone suffers the harshness of those who claim to be guards of a dividing line in order to take advantage of it through crime. Once the characters overcome that experience, the question of “where to go?” arises. And Cali is the place that offers manifest destiny; the city is referred to as “La Sucursal del Cielo” (the Branch of Heaven).
They are Venezuelans from various parts of the tropical map, but they become one single figure that symbolizes the failure of a history that hasn’t ended yet, because Latin America, it seems, has still not succeeded in finding a path forward that defines it as a peaceful and prosperous continent.
Cali, the beautiful Colombian city, is shown as a postcard that receives the exiles with bitter saliva. Those coming from the Venezuelan failure are considered a nuisance—competition for the already existing poverty of the place. And to complete the scene, after various experiences to survive, a protest breaks out led by students, farmers, and indigenous peoples in Colombia demanding their inalienable rights, a protest that keeps the city on the brink of a civil war or at least on the brink of the death of many Colombians and Venezuelans who somehow get wrapped up in it. Innocent or guilty, the pain is the same.
Chang’s novel displays his ability to tell the story without changing the structure very much. Rosaura manages to captivate readers with her ability to show herself as an active being despite her disability: she can narrate from her consciousness—while she is in a bathroom—part of the story that the other characters complete. She is both character and narrator. She is a symbol of the sort of resistance that seeks to invigorate, in a sort of living chronicle, the story that the writer has created for her and her companions. Just like the person who pushes the wheelchair: a narrator of adventures and investigations.
The narrator, who uses the characters to build the story, condenses his work with the consent of the actants, who are intertwined in a society of worries, small conquests, earned spaces, and affective losses. Love, as a symbol, is sustained in hope.
Each individual fulfills a mission: a mom who carries her young son and an orphan girl. A person who sings and rejoices in the moment, another who stitches together the story with the permanent search for places to rest. The acrobat who takes to the stage on street corners to earn a few pesos while he dreams of being in the circus. And there is the one who works as a laborer. All in one until death, the death of the singer, happens (in a sort of culmination of what could have been considered the start of an instant to emotionally begin again). To start fresh in a strange land where exile, by definition, is said to be good sense, resentment, memory, worry, fear, and instant joy.
The exiles, the stateless, classified as venecos, define their existence below a blue sky in a Colombian city that ends up taking them in.
