“There’s no second birth because a catastrophe happened, but the opposite: there is a catastrophe after the origin because, from the very beginning, there must be a second birth” —Gilles Deleuze

Some of us rushed to assume that the jeering against comedian George Harris in Chile’s Viña del Mar Festival must be explained by xenophobia. But as soon as more videos and more reasonable explanations emerged, it became clearer that Harris’ presence, with his only-for-Venezuelans humor, his sympathy for the far right and, especially, his reckless attacks on the public, had been a bad programming decision.

However, the event had the unexpected effect of revealing Esteban Duch, a young Venezuelan comedian with the ability to perfectly imitate the mysterious Chilean dialect. His jokes on how that mimetic capacity helped him deal with xenophobic Uber clients, or gets him a reprimand from his uncle from Maracaibo, show a “diasporic” humor different from traditional Venezuelan humor, and from Harris, who incarnates our Miami obsession. Duch’s humor is the missing link between the generation who cheered at Emilio Lovera and El Conde del Guácharo and the one that inhabits neither Venezuela nor its Florida branch, but the diaspora, and responds to jokes fed with the experience of migration and North American and Japanese pop cultures.

I wonder if Dutch—and other humorists such as the El Cuartico team—are showing the prospects of a post-apocalyptic Venezuela that mutated to survive the catastrophe. I wonder if they are achieving, in their way, what politicians cannot: at once, accept reality and refuse to surrender.

Whatever it might be, one thing is true: in Venezuelan politics, no one seems interested in doing so.

The tomorrow that never came

In this dystopian context, the synergy of the current opposition leadership with the far right is reaching extremes. María Corina Machado is so focused on her agenda of promoting an international intervention against Maduro that she is practically dismissing the implication of criminalizing Venezuelans in the United States. Sometimes it seems that, for her movement, deportations are not a big deal, because the duty and destiny of Venezuelans abroad is to return.

But the Machadian dream of return is more than an innocent demand for reuniting disjointed families—something that can also happen abroad. It’s also about restoring a lost paradise. This melancholy is an essential part of the hope of convincing Trump to become a Reagan or a Bush, instead of seeing him as he is: a contemporary of Bannon, Netanyahu, Orbán and Putin.

The Committee for the Liberty of Political Prisoners (CLIPP), Sairam Rivas and the Baduel sisters are becoming the vanguard of a dissidence linked with old parties, but based on the defense of human rights on the ground (…) in the struggle against state kidnappings and forced disappearances.

But melancholy is a memory’s illusion: time doesn’t go back, and in order to survive we mutated into a human archipelago, where Venezuelans ceased to be contained within the borders of our country to turn into a constellation of big and small settlements in other territories, mixing our genes, experiences and culture with other nations.

The Caribbean intellectual Edoard Glissant had already warned about the world’s transformation in a sort of archipelago, and about how that the new creole world where everyone meets everyone, atavisms—and “neoatavisms” as chavismo and trumpism—entrench themselves to persist. But this is an active entrenchment, not the melancholic passivity.

While Maduro, Ortega, Putin or Netanyahu, one horror after another, shape the world of tomorrow, those affiliated by passive melancholy just want to go back to the past. The expectations about removing Maduro from power through a conventional election or a Panama-like invasion are a melancholic illusion among those who weren’t able to accept irreversible change.

Islands in the Net

In this sense, the double mistake of conceiving the struggle against dictatorship as a series of simple actions in the short term (“asphyxiating”, “boycotting”, “preserving spaces”) and the idea that traditional politicians and parties must direct that top down, with no accountability, adds to the misguided belief in that the diaspora’s problems are temporary and secondary, when the question is, on the contrary, how to build, organize and govern that flesh and bone archipelago that is Venezuelan society by 2025. 

To do that, diasporas must be a source of wealth but also of difference. They can send remittances and invest in Venezuela. They can also fund a liberation movement—as the Irish, Chinese and African immigrants did in their home countries—and also transfer knowledge and experience that are impossible to get in the mainland.

The fact is that the country still exists, and after a catastrophe, it is being forced to change while other kinds of leadership seem to be surging. The Committee for the Liberty of Political Prisoners (CLIPP), Sairam Rivas and the Baduel sisters are becoming the vanguard of a dissidence linked with old parties, but based on the defense of human rights on the ground. They have gathered and connected female leaders that emerged outside traditional politics: in the struggle against state kidnappings and forced disappearances.

Potent but fragile, necessary but insufficient, this post-catastrophic leadership suggests how Venezuela might regenerate its political organizations. Maybe, the struggle for the freedom of political prisoners will determine whether that capacity of reinvention will be part of politics, or rather an exception, and if our public arena will remain occupied by the brutality of atavists and the impotence of the melancholic.

We already are islands on the diaspora net, and if we want to fight for freedom and for the survival of our archipelago, we need other organizations and leaders. Different politics for a new country, transnational, precarious and dystopian, halfway between dissolution and reconstruction.

Recycle is the opposite to nostalgia. Venezuelan society needs to transform, to save itself from the ghosts of the past, rebuilt in the here and now, leaving behind the illusions of reversing the clock or hoping that someone else is doing so on its behalf.