I refuse to lose hope – 12/31/2023 – Giovana Madalosso

In this year that leaves, hope tried to leave with it. Or were we the ones who chased her away? It already started on January 8, when men attacked the beardless democracy with sticks and stones. I remember the time when my hope fled without saying if it would return: it was when one of them showed his ass wrapped in a flag — how ugly the gluteal face of ignorance is.

I’m not sure when my hope reappeared, but I remember feeling it by my side months later when I saw a girl cross the Arctic Circle alone aboard a vessel called Sardinha. If two biceps so thin and a sailboat so fragile can face the rough sea, how many things can’t a population of 8 billion people face together?

It’s a shame that 8 billion people aren’t always together, as the war soon came to remind us. A certain horror, which we thought buried, reappeared in the Star of David anti-Semitic graffiti on a door, in babies taken hostage, in bombed hospitals, in 8,000 dead Palestinian children, in others being amputated without anesthesia, in hunger being used as a weapon of war, in the world watching it silently. Not to mention the other conflicts.

Not even those with the fiercest hopes were able to maintain them during these months. And mine only showed up (to disappear shortly afterwards) when a hostage from this same war, recently freed, turned to her tormentor, shook his hand and said: shalom.

“The fist was once an open hand and fingers,” wrote the poet Yehuda Amichai, a fellow hostage of this same hostage, a few years earlier.

“To write a poem that is not political / I must listen to the birds / but to listen to the birds / the bombing must stop”, wrote Palestinian Marwan Marhoul.

Poetry doesn’t save humanity, it doesn’t save the reader, it doesn’t even save the poet, but sometimes its beauty can save the minute. And it is in the truce of minutes that hope reappears.

Gypsy feeling, hope never comes to stay. All we can do is try to hold it for as long as possible. Like a diver breathing, the chest expanding, exercising to make the most of what little you have.

Now in November, I almost lost hope once and for all when I attended a negotiating table that decided the Earth’s temperature and, therefore, whether life on this hardened planet will be viable.

For a few days I thought we were toast, totally sold out to the oil producers who were hosting the meeting and were already starting to draft a drastic agreement, but then a child invaded the UN table with a poster and the representative of an island country that could be swallowed by the water, he raised his voice “we will not go down silently into our watery graves!”, and the negotiations were interrupted to be resumed on better terms (although far from ideal).

When everything seems lost, there is always a person who appears with a speech, a handshake, a poem, a poster, a sailboat, a perspective, a shout, a proposal, a wave, a dance school in a devastated land. I don’t know if I believe in humanity, but I still believe in people.

It may seem innocent to try to maintain some hope (and it is), but what’s the point of living without it? May this New Year’s Eve this hard-to-grasp feeling be with you.

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