Hello, dear readers. In these days of anguish in my country, Venezuela, I have read a lot of poetry. Poetry is a literary genre that helps us to reflect, but also to look inside ourselves and calmly look at our surroundings. When we read a poem we see reflected a feeling that can touch our most intimate fiber, especially if what we read we have lived it. In these days I have remembered many poems in which writers speak of their country, of the meaning that the homeland has for them.

There are two ways of looking at and perceiving a country: being inside and outside it. Sometimes, because we are inside, we don't value many things, nor are we moved by others. Homeland can become a hollow word without much echo in us. Only those who are far from their country can miss it, love it, even be sincere in their gaze and see all the defects. It's as if the distance allows you to be more objective, critical, but at the same time be more proud of where you come from. That's why many foreigners live in new countries with customs of their countries of origin, it's as if they never finish leaving. Being out of the country brings out the melancholy of the homeland, the desire for a speedy return, and this becomes fuel for writing.

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The renowned Chilean writer, Gabriela Mistral, who led an itinerant life has a beautiful poem, of which I would like to write a stanza:

I was born of things
that are not a country:
of homelands
that I had and I lost
of the creatures
that I saw die
of what was mine and left me.

In this stanza we perceive a lyrical voice that speaks to us of losses, of what was and no longer is. It is as if when we leave the country in which we were born, we begin to break our roots; the country is blurring, it is no longer in the memory and the memories when we live the tragedy and the sadness. It is a country that no longer belongs to us because everything that united us to it has died. We say that the homeland is the piece of land where we feel safe, protected; it is the national house where we are proudly and to which we belong. But when the feeling is one of sadness and anguish, when we feel that every day the country attacks us and forces us to leave it, then there is nothing to unite us to the earth. We are trees without roots.

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Another of the writers who was outside his country, in this case exiled by a military dictatorship, was Juan Gelman, Argentine writer, who lived many years in Rome, Paris, Mexico, and who made poetry of his life in exile. Here is a poem written in prose:

People should not be uprooted from their land or country, not by force. People are hurt, the earth is hurt.
We are born and our umbilical cord is cut. They banish us and nobody cuts off our memory, our tongue, our heat. We have to learn to live like the carnation of the air, properly of the air.
I am a monstrous word. My roots are thousands of kilometres away from me and we are not tied by a stem, two seas and an ocean separate us. The sun looks at me when they breathe at night, they hurt at night under the sun.

In this beautiful and heartfelt poem we find a voice that thinks of exile, of separating from a country still carrying it in its veins. The poetic voice affirms that when we leave the country of origin we should cut off everything that belongs to the country, leave it behind, forget it. But no. We carry it with us and it's a memory that hurts. Learning becomes the most used verb: we learn another language, we learn another culture, we learn another history and we must learn to forget. We learn not only to speak another language, but also to feel in another language, which is like opening our eyes in the dark. Then we become birds that once lost their nest and must rebuild another, even if the memory persists the memory of the previous one.

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José Emilio Pacheco, a Mexican writer, who not only wrote poetry, but also narrative and essay texts, also addressed the theme of the homeland in some of his poems:

I don't love my homeland.
His abstract brilliance
is ungraspable.
But (even if it sounds bad)
I would give my life
for ten places of his,
certain people,
ports, forests, deserts, fortresses,
a broken-down, gray, monstrous city,
several figures in its history,
mountains
and three or four rivers.

This poem is quite ironic. The first verse is a statement that is denied by the following verses. The lyrical voice says that he does not love his country, but we see how he says that he would give his life for some things in it: its nature, its history, its people. In short, he would give his life for everything. It is not strange that at some point this feeling of love-hate for who we are as a nation can be presented. As we said at the beginning: it is normal that we recognize the imperfections, the evils of the land in which we were born and yet we do not change it for anything in the world.

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I would like to close with another woman, the Uruguayan poet and political activist Cristina Peri Rossi, who has been in exile in Spain since 1972, but who has left in her work her opinion on the sense of homeland. Here I leave you one of his famous poems:

They dream of returning to a country that no longer exists
and that they would only recognize on maps
of memory.
Maps that they make every night
in the fog of dreams
and that they roam in white ships
in perpetual motion.
…
If they came back
they wouldn't recognize the place
the street, the house.
They would hesitate in the corners,
they'd think they were somewhere else.
But they come back every night
in the white ships of dreams
on a safe course.

There's nothing like distance for nostalgia. From the outside we remember and long for the place where we were born, grew up, the place of childhood and memories. It is to that place that we return: to the country that remained in the memory, but that is no longer there. Like us, the homeland also changes and no matter how much we want to go back to the past, it will never be the same again. If the one who has gone returns sometime, he will realize that the country that was in his memory and that he remembered, no longer exists. Sometimes it changes not only the country, but also us: we change the way we see, think and perceive things.

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It is said that during his exile in England, the thinker and writer Elias Canetti locked himself every day in a room to write single words in German, one after the other, for fear of losing his language, trying to maintain it and with it to maintain ties with the homeland. It is true that there are many writers who stopped writing in their language, only for the simple fact of going out and not knowing their country of origin. But this is the exception, not the rule. In writers, their status as exiles, rather than desensitizing them, makes them defenders and spokespersons of their country in the distance. There is no loss: the place where your best memories live, your childhood years, where you were happy: don't doubt that this is your country, your home, your homeland.

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I hope you enjoyed these poems as much as I did. I remind you that you can vote for @adsactly as a witness and join our server in discord. Until the next smile. ;)

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriela_Mistral
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gelman
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Emilio_Pacheco
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Peri_Rossi

Written by: @nancybriti

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