In my previous post, I referred to the number of Venezuelan writers who are writing about the current situation in Venezuela. Writers have found in literature a way of expressing their opinion, of making known the true story of what is happening and even trying to avoid the censorship that prevails in Venezuelan territory.

From all genres, poetic, narrative and essays, the Venezuelan writers have raised their voices and have recorded in their work the phenomenon of migration that we suffer from, the corrupt and dictator government, social confrontation, hunger and disease, the division between brothers and friends; in short, the plague that is the Bolivarian Revolution.

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That fragmentariness in the country, that division in which we have become, is found in the poem "Dos patrias" by the Venezuelan poet Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, in his book Intensive care:

People are like that!
They listen,
rumored,
They hide behind the ferns.
Somebody passes by and says,
            what they say.
They raise slogans,
they wave their wings,
           birds of ill omen.
They are just whispers,
things that do not happen
No one knows anything behind my door.

From the same title reference is made to the idea of two countries, two countries in which apparently the same thing happens and rumor predominates. Rumor as a way of life, a weapon, a reinvention of reality. Apparently there are also in the two countries "slogans" and "harangues", slogans thrown in the air that serve to survive, words that are spilled so that they become true by use. The verses where we are told that "they hide behind the ferns" and "Nobody knows anything behind my door", make us think of the clandestine, the anonymity of the rumor, but also the risky thing that can mean knowing, talking .In Venezuela it is dangerous to comment, denounce, challenge:

There,
In the other country,
far,
you also live
           they say
              between the woodworm and the harangues
Here, there are only whispers,
False tremors,
things we do not hear,
that do not happen
Two homelands, two homelands I have:
Or are they both?

Then, with these verses, we discover that not only is the rumor but the creation and daily destruction of the memory, of the establishment of the misrepresentation. In the words of Alberto Barrera Tyszka (2015): "The quantity and speed of the news lead us to forget them. The country is a noisy limbo. " It is a permanent rumrum, a daily fiction. We no longer have a source of reliable news: everyone has the truth, everyone says a lie. The news is a stone that is thrown from each sidewalk.

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At the end of the poem, we face certainty but also doubt: "Two homelands, two homelands have I: / Or are they both?". This poem, unlike the previous Yolanda Pantin, does not seek to explain the reason for the division of the country, but to speak from the conviction of that separation, of that other part in which the other and us have become; to testify that we suffer the same, that we suffer and lack the same. The problems Venezuela has are not the problems of a few, but of all Venezuelans.

The question in the end is neither doubt nor suspicion, it is certainty: the country is one, even if we are divided. We live as in a mirror: a group of people on one side and on the other; identical reflection of only one. It is worth rescuing here an idea about the mirror that another Venezuelan writer, Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, makes in his novel Arena negra:

The mirror has the first image that is on this side, it has the second image that is the one on the other side, it has the third image that is on this side and that of the other when they come together. But all are true and none is true.

Source

It is worth saying, and finally, that although it is true that the country is divided into two parts, those of us who are against the government and those who are in favor of it, the two parties are suffering the same calamities, except some important government figures. Imagine that Venezuela is a house where Venezuelans live.

Every deterioration in the house, every damage in the house, every crack, every problem we all live. When the house falls, we will not speak of chavistas and opponents, we will say that the Venezuelans were left homeless, without a country; they were left wandering, orphans.

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