How do you write a tango?
A respectful call for fairness
By Eugenia Gallardo
How do you write a tango? I asked for. A tango is not written, it is danced, they answered me in the classic posture of someone who enjoys consuming and not doing what is consumed. However, in that tango that we dance we forget the heartbroken man who wrote it and the bandoneon who dried his tears and we don’t see the need to make our own tango.
We do the same with literature. We read, we buy books, we make libraries, reading promotion days, literature study programs, readings and literary meetings… all in the same vein of “let’s dance that tango”.
Parallel and marginally (I emphasize the marginal) the world offers us workshops on literary creation or writing or write your best seller in five steps. Writing as an exception, as a bizarre task for someone who aspires to be a writer with capital letters or an author with capital letters and bold.
My concern is this: what would happen if, in addition to cultivating the beautiful garden of readers, we bent our backs creating and nurturing a hotbed of writers? What if we put a writing lab in every library in the universe? Utopian? Couldn’t we at least have a room for every hundred libraries for those who wander around lost wanting to polish their writing? A closed room that, instead of saying “Silence” as in the library, says “Write, ask questions, share your concerns as a budding writer”. A little fairness between educating readers and cultivating writers is what I ask for. Balance the balance a little and rethink that: “do you want to be a writer? read!” and introduce the concern: do you want to be a writer? scribe! scribe! scribe! that many read so much that they later become inhibited and no longer write. In libraries, in bookstores, a friendly space for the writer. A safe space with a guide, a tutor, someone who listens, who guides, who stimulates! That the right to read does not eclipse I show the basic right to express ourselves with the written word to leave, at least, an account of what we had to live. Let’s read, yes: let’s dance that tango. But let’s not forget to write our own tango to leave a mark, so that our descendants know who we were.
Eugenia Gallardo
3 October 2022
Raleigh NC
