Survival of the Fittest On Monday morning, the morning after the Assembly-cum-Spectacle of the Somasaguas professoriate had ended, I was walking up the Calle Toledo, rather exhausted and more than a bit disappointed, when I came across a young African, a man probably in his mid-twenties. He was standing on the corner, dressed casual but smart, clean-cut, his face adorned with a sly but genuine grin. He looked me in the eye, and asked if I could spare some change. “¿Tienes una moneda?,” he put it, in somewhat broken Spanish. I stopped, pulled a euro coin out of my pocket and handed it to him, returned the gaze, and asked him in English, “Where do you come from, my brother, and how did you get here?” “The north of Nigeria,” he told me, and cracked a slight smile: “The Boko Haram, man, they hit my village hard, so I had to get lost.” Then he let out a sigh, suddenly and subtly transformed into a laugh. “How’d you get here?” I asked, still looking him in the eye. “Up through the Sahara, then across the Mediterranean. A hard trip, man, a bad trip,” he concluded, staring right through me, and I right through him, both catching a glimpse back over the deep ocean abyss and into the scorching desert through which he had passed and miraculously been delivered, as if protected by God’s mighty hand. “Do you know anyone who died along the way?” I continued to press, perhaps impertinently, though bowing my head, almost instinctively. “I can’t think about that, man. Not everyone makes it. I almost drowned myself, but I didn’t. There were some I knew who got swallowed up by the Sahara, too. But they are in God’s glory, I can’t be thinking about them now.” “And how is life treating you here in Spain?” “Oh, I like it in Spain. The weather is good, the people are rich and relaxed, there’s no violence, I can’t complain. I want to stay.” This time he cracked a smile that was much more than slight. “What about the police? How do they treat you?” “The police here are pretty nice, so long as they don’t catch you doing anything illegal. They will help you even sometimes.” “And what about the crisis? They say there is a big economic crisis these days, you know? What do you think about the Spaniards and their crisis?” “Well, to me, they all look pretty rich, even the ones who are poor. It’s all relative, I guess, but it doesn’t look much like a crisis to me.” I thanked him for sharing his thoughts with me, shook his hand, and was on my way. So absorbed had I been in the conversation that I forgot to take his photo. For a brief minute I had forgotten how to be a mere observer. As I continued up the Calle Toledo, passed the Metro Latina and headed on up to the Plaza Mayor, I saw two other young, clean-cut African men, also begging. It made me remember Orwell’s claim in Down and Out in London and Paris that he never worked harder in his life than when he was a beggar. But these men were beggars who could in no sense be accurately described as down and out. For they are survivors, among the fittest of the fit. A matter of perspective, I suppose. Over the weekend in Vista Alegre, at the old bull-fighting ring, now converted into a concert stadium, as I witnessed a pantomime play out on the big screen, up front center stage, with the chorus of activists chanting with varying degrees of cynicism, echoes of Obama’s insidious slogan “Yes, we can,” I couldn’t stop thinking just how difficult it is to escape the combination of vanity and mediocrity, how hard it is for we heirs of imperial privilege to transcend the limited and alienated horizons of the New Reagan Man. But the young African men I witnessed Monday morning made me feel more optimistic about humanity. For theirs was a tale from the margins, to be sure, but it was a tale of champions, of iron-willed survivors, nonetheless. Of existential warriors, the vanguard of the sub-liminals, the lions of zion, the street-corner prophets of the concrete jungles sprouting up all over the globalized rape-italist Empire of Babylonia.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:46:03 +0000
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