“[The collectives of the 50s and 60s] were experiences full of vitality, that were never able to crystallize. We are a burnt-out, lost generation. A generation of frustrated people” (1976)
This citation by Vestrini invites me to a reflection. Maybe hers was a generation of frustrated people, as she herself says, because having had so much youth and such a wealth of literary groups, important names and revolutionary proposals of radical ideologies, in sum, a frenetic and abundant time period, the future with its drowsiness and its eternal crisis, its slow and opulent decomposition of the country and its institutions, would have represented for them the absolute confirmation of the failure of the optimists, the beginning of the era of the hopeless and cynical. Were that to be so, Miyó foresaw it, and she chose to commit suicide before languishing and becoming a fossil.
We, who today remember that “lost generation” as the inhabitants of a type of golden era or, at least, a prodigious and abundant time, are on the other hand a disconsolate generation, born of its own broken dreams and guided in life by the maxim that the latter is elsewhere. By nature desirous, we have been given the fate of witnessing how the country intends to return to its own empty shell, and how, within a panorama of grandiloquence and of the highest numbers of weekly murder rates, amid poverty and marginality and historic petroleum prices, it has been our place to know ourselves as foreigners, since every form of nationalism hides and involves –compensates– a galloping defamiliarization. Our Venezuela doesn’t belong, doesn’t apply, to anyone. We have a borrowed, portable, mobile country. We are the generation of the precipice, who look toward the future down below and with dread, while we dream with the wings of our ancestors that were broken.
“I don’t think our generation will ever mean anything, for anyone,” Miyó said, and today we’re surprised how wrong she was.
{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 9 January 2012 }
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