Abstract
This text reflects on identities from an African archipelago in the Atlantic that is part of the Spanish state. The Canary Islands were the first place colonized by Europeans in their expansion toward America. The text focuses on identity formation throughout the twentieth century. Reference is made to Canarian artists and poets such as Tomás Morales and Alonso Quesada, and more recent artists of international stature such as Manolo Millares, Martín Chirino, and César Manrique. The international context and the destruction of the idea of Europe are reflected from various perspectives. Reference is made to travelers who drew analogies between Canary Islanders and Native Americans, and the notion of “displacement” at every level is addressed. The article also discusses “foreigners” traveling back and forth in the era of advanced technology, globalization, and mass tourism. As Stefan Zweig and Franz Rosenzweig have observed since the 1920s, in the age of border control, anyone can become a “foreigner.” “Europe: Passage and Reflections” was born within the context of the exhibition “Europe, that Exotic Place” (2019–2020) and expands upon the reflection on insularities undertaken in the exhibition “Island Horizons” (2009–2010), which featured artists and writers from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, and Réunion. The article also arose from the “Islands, Images, Imaginaries” discussion series held at Duke University in 2011.
Where does true perspective lie?
—Alonso Quesada
Painter Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre traveled to London and Paris in the early twentieth century, far before the idea of luring tourists to the Canary Islands by capitalizing on the archipelago’s idiosyncrasies emerged, and just as a particular conception of culture was gaining prominence. The successive mutations of the Enlightened horizon and nineteenth-century idealism surged ahead, putting all the pieces of this project into linear and historical order. Given its origins in Greek and Roman civilization, Renaissance classicism, and a utopian mindset, forging a path toward the future necessarily required drawing upon melancholy and memory. At the time, the notion of a Europe with an expansionist vocation and universal values was manifest. Artistic expression and intellectual movements, both here and elsewhere, unfolded within this space that came to recognize its identity through an ongoing exercise in self-representation. Both Néstor and the poet Tomás Morales believed in appropriating the age-old motifs of European culture to drive modernity forward. However, the place where they created their works was an African archipelago in the Atlantic that “retained” the memory of a different origin. We can hardly sidestep the issue of colonization, the displacements of Spaniards and Europeans, or the ongoing silence and lack of discussion about these matters. There is a prevailing notion that, since 1789, Europe has followed a linear path toward progress and that history, like rationality, has been headed toward increasingly loftier cultural and political ends, leaving behind any origins—and the invention of those origins—as the fulcrum point from which modern discourses evolve.
In fact, what the “modernists” Tomás Morales and Néstor brought over to their territory was a mythology and age-old tradition that aspired to become contemporary, although the result often verged on rhetoric. The aim was to establish a cultural space founded on an ontological flaw: the whole enterprise was based on displacing anything with a distinctive origin anywhere other than Europe. The “modernists” thus persisted in engaging in a process of creating a personae, or mask, for a subject that had to be invented if it was to have an experience of identity over time. Already in the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche—who was widely read at the time—had pointed out that the mask was part of human nature. Adopting masks, readopting images, was part of the metaphysical vertigo of the time, a vertigo that suddenly became somber and historical shortly after the first decade of the twentieth century.
Indeed, the dream of Europe, its progress, its melancholy, ended in tragedy. Rational states combined the ideas of nationhood and nation, ultimately closing ranks. The seemingly primordial process that, until the early twentieth century, had continued to expand borders, first Westward and then South and East, came to an end. All illusions vanished. This idealistic nation-building collapsed in 1914 as an entire culture plunged into the abyss of the Great War. Nationalism, violence, and the conflict over territorial control were beyond anything imaginable. What has been left ever since—and what we have, in a way, inherited—are fragments, objects whose sense and meaning have been displaced, as well as a great many beings who have been displaced, annihilated, or confined by national fervor. After the war, with Europe now split along its eastern flank with the USSR—that L'Autre Europe: Moscou et sa foi, as Luc Durtain would say in the 1920s—it became necessary to rethink everything.
One example is the supranational and humanist cultural approach taken by the magazine Europe, published in Paris since 1923 with the aim of restoring ties between the various states. Its founder, Romain Rolland, knew, as did his collaborators, that Europe had to be rebuilt based on the memory of the war and violence that had desolated the continent, whose echoes were felt in colonial territories and on every continent. Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew and a friend of Rolland, noted how passports and border controls, neither of which had existed before then, had suddenly been imposed. In an article entitled “Patrie européenne” published in the first issue of Europe, René Arcos writes: “Étranger! Le mot est devenu une injure. Cette terre vivante qu'est tout homme change de matière, veut-on nous faire croire, en changeant de langue. Les tarifs douaniers, les prohibitions et formalités de toutes sortes constituent autour de chaque patrie un mur de Chine” (“Foreigner! The word has become an insult. We are led to believe that the matter of this living clay that is every human being changes when it switches languages. Customs tariffs, prohibitions, and all sorts of formalities build a Wall of China around each nation.”)
After the first great armed conflict, it became necessary to reflect on nationalism. Together with various intellectual and creative collectives, the magazine’s Spanish equivalent, Europe, Revista de Occidente—also founded in 1923—sought to restore supranational ties and rekindle the dream of a new culture with a revitalized emancipatory telos. Forever obsessed with becoming part of Europe, Spaniards made another attempt. Meanwhile, avant-garde movements, especially the Dadaist movement that emerged years earlier in Zurich, understood that the philosophical and historical narrative that had once underpinned the former construction had been shattered. In 1920, German poet and writer Richard Huelsenbeck affirmed that Dada had let the old worldviews slip through its fingers (“Dada hat die Weltanschauungen durch seine Fingerspitzen rinnen Lassen”). Art historian Aby Warburg—much quoted in recent decades—took a different approach in 1924 when he started his atlas presenting piecemeal images of classical European culture. Dispersion and the diaspora seemed to signal the dawn of a new era that could well repeat the same patterns and reaffirm the same goals but would no longer share the same certainties, at least not for long.
Everything had changed. Europe was a different Europe. Zweig, who committed suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942, declared that the two great wars had completely transformed the world in his lifetime. This transformation, he affirmed, was due to the immediacy of news and technology: people in Central Europe would hear about a bomb raid in Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese War as it occurred. Technology and immediacy. It sounds like he was talking about the late twentieth century when images of the Gulf War were broadcast live! According to Zweig, the European homeland was no longer possible. Was it still possible for the cultural elites from the Canary Islands who looked toward the continent? Would it be possible afterwards?
From that moment on, everything went global. “Globus” is the title of the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig’s 1917 essay in which he explores the relationship between the nation state and war. Le globe sous le bras (“The Globe Under One’s Arm”) is also the title of a book later published by Luc Durtain, one of the driving forces behind the magazine Europe. The trend continued in the twentieth century after World War II, and especially following the reunification of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was also a world where distances were growing shorter after a technological revolution that continues to the present day. Authors from the Canary Islands looked to Europe, coming and going, and sharing the continent’s concerns at different points in history. They dreamed about Europe, crossed borders, moved there and back, traveled, stole, or simply copied. Or, they were ridiculous in their attempts to convince themselves that people in any given corner of Europe had very different life circumstances. Or, in recent decades, they confounded economic success and media presence with aesthetic value. Aren’t artists in thousands of cities all over Europe who want to devote their lives to making art also struggling? There is much to be said here about the way artwork is distributed, its market value, and its aesthetic and historical value. Customs restrictions and transport are another issue that even the Canary Islands’ regional governments have been unwilling to address.
In many island cultures, and in many languages, we talk about the Insider-Outsider dialectic. In Crónicas de la ciudad y la noche and in his essays on the First World War, Alonso Quesada, an author from Gran Canarias, provides ample references to this two-fold horizon. The Europeans are there, they arrive in the city, they’re in their boats; for a few years, supporters of the Allies, French citizens, and, later, Germans, arrive. Tourists and passengers disembark on their way to various destinations. The port, before and after the war, “is flooded with Europe, it’s as if Europe itself had been cut into many pieces and they were coming to sow their seed in these African sands.” They traveled through here on their way to explore Africa, says Quesada, when there was nothing left to explore. Or on their way to America. The tourists and merchants who came here made the islands feel more cosmopolitan, revealing traces of that outside world that intellectuals and creatives are so eager to discover. And Quesada pitted these foreigners, traders, British soldiers, Germans, Spaniards, explorers, and tourists against the natives, who were no longer aborigines, or Guanches. Originally from here or there, the natives were confined in their insularity, visiting the capital from the island’s inland villages or on their way back from their trips to London.
At the same time, Canary Islanders increasingly insisted on creating and inventing a mythology around their identity. “The Englishman’s eyes explore our own primitive eyes,” said Quesada. Those who looking to the enigmatic Europeans, who speak in tongues, also explored those eyes and retraced their cultural wakes. Some believed the “natives” were natives, as is the case with the ethnographers and travelers who visited El Museo Canario to verify that the mummies and precolonial artifacts date back to the Cro-Magnon origins of Europe’s grand civilization. Others thought all outsiders were the same. Insiders behaved in various ways, but the sense of isolation was biased toward the Other. The islands welcomed tourists and travelers and emigrants coming back from America or from Swiss, English, or German cities. As Fernando Estévez would prove starting in that century, the Inside relies on a fiction, and on a considerable degree of imposture with regards to what is one’s own and what is not, to construct the cage of its identity. Long before, Quesada observed one and the other, the familiar and the foreign, with irony and detachment.
Some of the people who arrived on the islands were invisible. Such was the case of Radclyffe Hall, one of the leading figures in queer studies today, who started writing The Well of Loneliness—one of the most influential novels on the question of lesbianism—after a stay in Tenerife in 1909. Other figures had a brief moment in the public eye, including German artists Hans Paap, who had several exhibitions at various hotels in Las Palmas and Puerto de la Cruz in 1935. He painted seascapes and even an island “native”: A “Guanche” from Tejeda. Paap continued his travels between continents; even living for years among the Navajo and the Taos, whom he also painted. He became quite famous in the United States before returning to the Canary Islands in the 1950s. The islands welcomed increasingly more tourists and travelers who left their traces behind, everyone from Paap to Gerhard Richter and Wolfgang Tillmans. Many others went completely unnoticed.
Some of these visitors offer an extraordinary pretext to think about the European gaze and our own situation. In Le globe sous le bras (1936), the aforementioned Luc Durtain talks about his numerous visits to the Canary Islands and recounts the decimation of its native population, establishing links between the effects of “civilization” on the Hopi, the Navajo, and the Guanches. In addition to evoking “our Cro-Magnon ancestors” to refer to the aborigines, Durtain points out the destruction brought about by “the first adventurers to arrive from Europe.” When Durtain left, he left behind this ghostly imprint in his writing: the towers of the cathedral of Santa Ana become “figures gigantesques de deux Guanches, dressés comme des spectres qui regardaint s’eloigner les Européens” (“huge figures of two Guanches standing like specters and looking away from the Europeans”). Foreigners arriving, passing through… Art critic Eduardo Westerdahl always kept an eye out for them. And, in 1969, his friend Domingo Pérez Minik wrote a book called Entrada y salida de viajeros (“Travelers Entering and Departing”). Meanwhile, people from here and elsewhere were transformed in the vast array of contemporary art and culture. Much has happened since Marcel Griaule visited Las Palmas in 1931 on the ethnographic mission from Dakar to Djibouti so clearly described by Michel Leiris in L'Afrique Fantôme (Phantom Africa). Did their gazes mold us? Are we construed from an invention of one of their gazes? From these ghostly existent and non-existent images?
Dreams and illusions allow for movement from place to place, displacing ideas, images, and discourses. As a result of this transit, “natives” are construed through translation, invention, and the exciting interchange between the inside and the outside. Before World War II—with La Rosa de los Vientos, the Lujan Pérez School, the magazine Gaceta de Arte—there was an increasing focus on Europe. Eduardo Westerdahl’s 1931 Journey to Europe, or Óscar Domínguez and Agustín Espinosa’s travels to Paris and other world capitals, prove that it is possible to make the dream of engaging in an international dialogue come true. Domínguez talks about his ancestors in Cueva de Guanches, and he does so in the context of European Surrealism. One of the effects of this aperture was the 1935 International Surrealist Exhibition in Tenerife. It turns out that translation and dialogue were possible (the overblown myths Canary Islanders have espoused surrounding this event, which at this point have become tiresome, notwithstanding). The European Surrealists also alluded to the Canary Islands, the women of Tenerife, the black sand beaches, and the volcanoes. How could they not during this period that had just about everything under its arm? Artists from the Canary Islands achieved something that had previously been impossible. Though short-lived, an aesthetic movement that would go down in the history of avant-garde art gravitated around the Canary Islands. But having Frenchmen such as André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Jacqueline Lamba come and stay came at a high price. It took travelers, or tourists, Pérez Minik and Westerdahl until 1945—ten years!—to pay off the debt incurred on that trip. Even in the spendthrift days of the early twenty-first century, it is inconceivable that any Canary Islander could have been granted the funds to spend a few weeks visiting any European capital outside the Islands, much less incur such debt. Looking to Europe and wanting to be part of its present and its avant-garde movements entails significant expense and is also a great opportunity to be in the limelight.
After 1945, the process of globalization and shifting borders took a radical turn. The “globe,” like Europe itself, had changed. Over just a few decades, globalization intensified. As Rosenzweig predicted, the war had expanded its horizons beyond measure through the action of the various nation states. While in 1914 the historical, enlightened, nationalist narrative surged ahead, starting in September 1945, with Europe in ruins, the remaining fragments were hard to reconcile. And this dispersion was hastened by the changes that occurred between the mid-twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, with new technologies and new wars. The questions may have been the same, but perhaps they were now more insistent: Should we go up, down, or wander about in every direction?
The Spanish and European post-war period and the years that followed were devastating for the Canary Islands. Once again, waves of emigrants left for America; then, in the sixties, for England, Switzerland, and Germany. Many of these immigrants didn’t even speak the language. For a while, one might have thought that distances were being bridged. In this sense, I imagine how happy Pedro Perdomo Acedo—a former collaborator at the Revista de Occidente—probably was when he made the first trip by plane from London to Gran Canaria in 1962. That same year, the press announced that several British airlines would “send us their tourists from November to April.”
However, in the late 1950s and during the 1960s, artists continued to resist as best they could. In 1955, Manuel Millares, Alejandro Reino, Elvireta Escobio, Manuel Padorno, Josefina Betancor, and Martin Chirino boarded a ship to the continent. The years that followed were crucial to their immersion in the new contemporary trends. Europe was far from the Canary Islands and Spain. Although technology and television would soon begin to offer live images of the student revolts of the sixties, the humanitarian crisis in Biafra, the war in Vietnam…. Tourists arrived in waves. To the “natives,” at first they seemed inscrutable, but these tourists ultimately changed everything. Their spell was soon broken, and the islanders themselves started laying on the beaches as nonchalantly as the “outsiders.” Had they now become European?
European cities were no longer at the center, nor did they bring people closer to the watchtower of an age-old culture that had prestigiously evolved over the centuries. In the world of art, Europe was lagging behind New York. In the seventies, Martín Chirino would often, somewhat paternalistically, tell artists that they should go live in New York for a while. César Manrique had been there and came back with new ideas about art and nature, and tourism. Many of today’s artists have lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan, or other American cities. Europe is no longer the space created by the dream of the Enlightenment and teleological metaphysics; it is now part of a scattered atlas that has been broken down into countless pieces.
For sculptor José Abad, was Europe the same Europe that had existed before the war when he visited the workshops of Perugia and Venice, Italy, in the 1960s? What about when he worked in Paris in the 70s? Or when he exhibited his work at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid? Is the Canary Islands the same when he imagines its aborigines with a classical vision? Does the concept of aborigines during the boom times of tourism have anything to do with the pursuits of the Enlightenment or the islands’ regionalist writers during the nineteenth century? And did Europe have anything to do with the pre-war period when, in the late 1960s, Lázaro Santana, Eugenio Padorno, and Jorge Rodríguez Padrón launched the magazine Fablas? Or when they translated American, French, Norwegian, and German texts?
After numerous adventures, Manolo Millares received texts from American and European authors, including Dore Ashton, John Ashbery, and the Swedish writer Lasse Söderberg. Millares influenced authors from here and elsewhere and was in turn influenced by them. Pino Ojeda, a prominent poet, exhibited his paintings in Italy and Sweden. When he left the islands, he had been engaged in a dialogue with poet and critic Artur Lundkvist, a distinguished member of the Swedish Academy—in charge of choosing Nobel Prize laureates—and, of course, a tourist. Lundkvist visited Las Canteras in the mid-twentieth century. Photographer and architect Carlos A. Schwartz was trained in London and Barcelona. In Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Schwartz was one of the people behind the Escultura en la Calle street sculpture exhibition (1973). The show included pieces by Henry Moore, Joan Miró, and other European and American artists. Gonzalo González, who studied in Madrid, had shows in Italy and Germany. José Herrera and Luis Palmero trained in Barcelona and exhibited their work in Berlin and Zurich. Carmela García studied in Madrid and Barcelona, and her work can be found in Mexico, England, and France. Her work took off after the age of tourism had already transformed Lanzarote and long after Werner Herzog had depicted his subversive characters running around this part of the Atlantic in Even the Dwarfs Started Small (Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen, 1970). Amidst this dispersion and in the absence of leading cultural hubs, artists went from here to some other place. What changed on the horizon?
As time goes by, many artists don’t even recall the idea of a strong European culture because globalization and the expansion of borders have bridged distances or, simply, made everything irrelevant. However, many still take the Outsider-Insider dialectic—a displacement from the interior to the exterior, or vice versa—as their starting point. Nevertheless, the wall separating one society, language, or individual from another has grown thin almost to the point of disappearing. Teresa Correa has lived in Mexico for years. Her work as an artists has led her to research aboriginal remains at El Museo Canario. Does the inspiration for her photographs, for instance of a Mexican hillside where life and death intertwine, have much to do with what ethnographers and anthropologists perceived as they pondered the carefully numbered skulls in the showcases at El Museo Canario and questioned Europe’s racial origins? Choreographer and visual artist Gabriel Hernandez has been based in Paris for decades and also works in the islands without making too big a fuss. Yapci Ramos and Jesús Hernández Verano live in New York part of the time. Filmmaker and video artist Miguel G. Morales was trained in Havana and has traveled to Cambodia, the Philippines, and every corner of Europe. Laura González used to live in Paris. Martín and Sicilia have lived in Berlin and exhibit their works in Bamako, Johannesburg, and Havana. Esther Aldaz lived in London for a while. Ubay Murillo lives in Germany and has left clear impressions of the magnitude of tourism on the islands. Teresa Arozena studied in Toulouse. Rosa Mesa has lived in Canada and Switzerland and presented a performance in the Canary Islands about borders and all things foreign that included, among other things, a parody of the “globe.” Jorge Ortega exhibited the transnational project “der Globe Art Praxis” in Göttingen. Hildegard Hahn was born in the Czech Republic, studied in Stuttgart, and has spent most of her career in Las Palmas. And then there’s Laura Gherardi, who was born and educated in Rome….
Younger artists have also followed this trend: Paula de Vega, from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, composes songs for the album Inside and for her band Not a Number; but she has lived in Madrid and in the United Kingdom. Verónica González “Ero-Pinku” makes manga comics in Las Palmas that are very popular in France, the United States, and, especially, Japan. Filip Custic, a Canary Islander of Croatian origin, is doing outstanding multidisciplinary work in Madrid that is starting to garner recognition in Europe and America. Musicians, filmmakers, painters, photographers, video artists, etc., all produce their works without concern for that sense of isolation that so worried Quesada, the islands’ avant-garde artists, the team behind Planas de Poesía and Fablas, or people who, like me, jumped at the chance to draw breath from European and American cultures in every direction the moment the Franco regime ended. Transnationality has become the habitat of creatives. The Canary Islands’ cultural centers and facilities have welcomed all sorts of beings, and the islanders have moved among them without unduly mythologizing them. This includes European artists like Axel Hütte, art historians like Serge Fauchereau, people like Roy Lichtenstein who arrived by private jet to take part in an event at the Atlantic Center for Modern Art (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, CAAM), and others like Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott who took a commercial flight to Las Palmas to present his poetry full of references to the Caribbean, tourism, Anglo-Saxon and African cultures, and even Homer! All barriers have now been demolished.
Is it possible to capture a bit of that European cultural prestige now that we no longer imagine carrying that “globe” under our arm and are instead able to access all sorts of information from any point on the planet? It is nevertheless worth asking to what degree we have lost that distance that made us perceive those who arrived on the islands or those who left for Europe as Other? What happened starting in the 1960s when the Swedes and Germans who had lived through World War II washed up on our beaches to bask in the sun or dream of a paradise lost? In this age of tourism, has the fragile awareness of belonging to a place and creating a whole mythology around it about aborigines—displaced populations from Andalusia and Castile, Portugal and Belgium, Lebanon, or India—created a place where the boundaries for establishing otherness are weak? Are the people who arrive on the islands still chonis or guiris, as the locals derisively refer to “foreigners”? Who do we label with that offensive word “foreigner”? Did our ideas about Europe and identities slip through our fingers much as they once did for the Dadaists? Or are these notions reappearing in the form of violence or customs and border control?
Long before that, Néstor, Morales, and, perhaps more aptly, Alonso Quesada, experienced this history and origin—this insular and Atlantic character—as a space and time in need of names, images, and a narrative. They made things up, harbored doubts, created mythologies. They discovered that, behind this westward cultural displacement, on this side of the Pillars of Hercules, there lay a huge silence and no small amount of tragedy. Can we dispense with that silence, that nothingness, that faint edge that is also at the origin of the displacements of that age-old culture, its tapestry of images, its earliest memories?
I mentioned the magazine Europe and other publications earlier. To conclude, perhaps it would not be entirely banal to recall something that appeared in another periodical, albeit from the mid-twentieth century. What I’m talking about is an image that appeared in 1962, when the seventh International Situacionniste bulletin predicted the culture of spectacle. At the time, the bulletin published a simple cartoon illustrating the spirit of a phenomenon that was coming to the fore in Europe and had already been sighted in the villages of the Canary Islands. The image is this: a young woman in a bikini is kneeling on the beach, leafing through a book, and looking off into the distance. She’s wearing sunglasses. Nearby, we see a bottle of sunscreen, a purse, and a little transistor radio. The speech bubble in the cartoon—which in this case is globe-shaped, almost like a portrait of the Globe and the world—says: “De l’huile pour bronzer, un bon bouquin, mon transistor, et… sourtout… qu’il ne se passe rien !” (“Suntan lotion, a good book, my transistor radio, and… above all… knowing nothing will happen!”).
Now, in this globalized era, the uniformity within cultural boundaries has everything to do with this: knowing nothing will happen. Can art, here or elsewhere, endure such immobility and so little weight simply in order to exist? Should nothing happen? Not even a hint of creativity or criticism, without even keeping the parody of that cartoon afloat? In this Atlantic island world we’ve inhabited and invented, are art and writing based on metaphysical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic immobility? Does nothing happen? Of course, as much as art has evolved since the early twentieth century, and as much as wars and contemporary nonsense have globalized and trivialized everything, something needs to happen in the spectator, in the reader, in the work of art, in its referent … or in its lack of referents.
When Gilberto González, director of the Tenerife Arts Space (Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, TEA) asked me to write this text, I couldn’t help but reflect on these matters from the perspective of this region and the times that I grew up in and based on artists and writers of different ages from here and elsewhere, from the pre-war period, the mid-twentieth century, or newly arrived in the twenty-first century. The cartoon has come in handy as a way to describe something I have felt for years, something that is perhaps evident in the paintings and pieces of many of the writers and artists that have piqued my interest—both in the Canary Islands and elsewhere. These artists arrive and are already very much Other, they are as Other as I and my entourage are. I spoke about this years ago at Duke University, in North Carolina, when Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián—a film, photography, and Caribbean culture specialist from the Canary Islands—invited me. Those impressions were later published in the United Kingdom, in the journal Third Text, in “Islands, Images, Imaginaries” (2014). I wrote about that gathering and about what I feel in this globalized, recurrent, and often oblivious time-space in that essay, and also in a text I published in La hoja seca, in 2014. There, I mentioned a well-known tourist-colonial film produced in the mid-twentieth century. I would like to conclude my journey through this, big or small, space that—no matter how you look at it, whether from the perspective of a “native” or of a European—is more labyrinthine than it often seems, with a poem about what it is that leads us from here to there in this international context in which we are constantly seeking reassurance that “nothing will happen.”
2
I listen to that song from the 1957 film again. And I hear Leslie, Claudia,
Michaeline, and Adrián laughing again in front of the Henry Moore sculpture over
in North Carolina, singing: “Island in the sun. Island in the sun. Island in the sun.”
A photo, Lucía, and flash: We’re off. These friends are crazy, but what about us?
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.