INTRODUCTION
There is no way to put this in a softer way: this past year has been a year of losses. Amidst a global pandemic that hit this nation and our region especially hard, we have lost relatives, colleagues, and friends. Many of us in our community and at our university have been sick, lonely, overworked, bereaved. The entire world can look like a scarier place after realizing an imperceptible virus can turn our ordinary lives upside down and kill more than four million people (and counting). In addition to the pandemic, we have also experienced a lot of things we wish we never had: among them, a resurgence of racial attacks and tensions, an attempt to overthrow American democracy, and increasingly tragic effects of climate change.
Poet,” Steiner wrote: “Has our civilization, by virtue of the inhumanity it has carried out and condoned —we are accomplices to that which leaves us indifferent— forfeited its claims to that indispensable luxury which we call literature? Not for ever, not everywhere, but simply in this time and place, as a city besieged forfeits its claims to the freedom of the winds and the cool of evening outside its walls.” When looking for an answer to his anguished question, Steiner could have looked at other places far away from the US and Europe, such as Latin America, where literature stopped being an “indispensable luxury” long ago and it has become since then simply indispensable. He should have read Gabriela Mistral, Ernesto Cardenal, or Nicolás Guillén, writers for whom their social and political commitment was always inseparable from their literary activities. When receiving his Nobel prize, Gabriel García Márquez said: “To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.” And writing literature is part of that struggle against death, not less than having kids, playing
In this context of sociopolitical turmoil and global mourning, one could wonder: What is the value, usefulness, or pertinence of literature? Why do people still write fictional stories or poetry, and is anybody interested in reading that instead of the news? Previous generations have wondered the same thing, as did for example the literary critic George Steiner and others who lived through the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a famous article entitled “Silence and the
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