Twelve fictions on the future of Europe: truth is also invented

Instead of opening up new scenarios, all too often a question prefigures an answer and further narrows the pre-existing territory: we learn little in this way. If we really want to challenge ourselves, a question will lead us to another question and this map of possible answers will show us the extent of our ignorance: this is how we learn, from knowing in depth what we do not know.

When we think about the future of Europe —when we ask ourselves about the future of Europe—, it is essential to analyse in depth the initial conditions, that is, to x-ray our present from all possible means and voices. Speaking of Africa, Ryszard Kapuściński said, “the continent is too big to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a planet apart, a varied and rich cosmos. Only with the greatest of simplifications, as a matter of mere convenience, did we say ‘Africa’. Indeed, except as a geographical denomination, Africa does not exist”. Even if Europe’s dimensions are much smaller and comparisons are always wrong, we could almost say the same thing about Europe: that it does not exist, that it is an entelechy. If we want to say the opposite, or rather, if we want to be able to say the opposite, if we want to be able to say firmly that it does exist, we can only do so by pointing out its lack of unity and cohesion, by recounting in the thousand buds and expressions that emerge from a series of common roots, by celebrating the multiplicity and eclecticism, the multitude of languages, peoples, impurities, mutations, defeats, crops and dead ends.

To sound it out, to understand a little of what the Europe we inhabit may hold for us, we have asked twelve authors to think through the fiction of their own writing, because writing is thought and fiction is the territory of the possible. If in order to understand, one must imagine, who better to imagine than those involved in it, the writers? Most of them are women; most of them are under forty, and many of them have a biography that shows the richness and plurality that European identities can reveal. Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida was born in Angola and lives in Portugal, Juana Adcock is Mexican and lives in Scotland, Eluned Gramich is Welsh and lives in Germany, Nina Yargekov has dual French-Hungarian nationality. The texts also draw a fertile and diverse panorama: from a poem about the slaughtering of the pig to a questioning about love, from a slang dialogue to a gruesome dystopia, each piece of writing plays as it wishes and does not participate in any orthodoxy.

Therefore, here is this range of voices, with all their folds and contradictions, without forgetting any truth: each one, together with the other, forms a spurious, free picture of what is going on right now, and what we imagine we will be like when we grow up.