Dreaming the Impossible

Dreaming the Impossible

I celebrate this new book by Paula Moreno because it fulfills the essential conditions of a good book: the search for that other self that we are and that is also Colombia, and the construction of multiplicity. It is a work that combines literary art, political vision, and commitment to humanity and the world.

This book takes us from the Bay of All Saints in Brazil, where it begins with a street artist, to a woman who challenges the establishment from her uprooted condition in Apartadó (Colombia), successfully creating a union for women domestic workers. We also meet a teacher of Afro-modern dance in Medellín, who, inspired by African dance traditions, travels the world. From Medellín to Buenaventura, the narrative introduces us to a priest who confronts dehumanizing powers, leading to a civic strike that vindicates the rights of marginalized men and women, turned into pawns of the wealth of the port, fighting for their essential rights alienated from them.

The author herself is a character in the story: a Black woman who has traveled the world, served as a Minister, founded an organization, and finally opens the doors of her Bogotá apartment to share her daily life as a writer. Her writing is clear, creative, and at the same time a testimony drawing on both universal and local references from literature and history. She gives voice to whites, blacks, and indigenous peoples, but above all to the marginalized.

It is a work that combines testimony, reflection, biography, creation, essay, denunciation, and utopia. A text that merges chronicle, testimony, social science, and poetry with an extraordinary ability to portray characters and their environments: the painful testimony of racism against María and her children in Antioquia; the exclusion, violence, uprooting, and poverty faced by domestic workers organized in a union; a dance school in Medellín that takes its protagonist from Copacabana to Africa and France; and a historic civic strike led in Buenaventura by a young priest, following paramilitary massacres in Puerto Merizalde. The book addresses diverse situations, united by a common thread that connects world history—from Africa to the most remote corners of Colombia. Personally, I feel honored by the allusions to my own literary work: El Cimarrón en la lluvia moves through this book from one place to another.

Congratulations to our writer, who ranks alongside great world leaders, writing from an infinitesimal point in Colombia. The time has come when, from exclusion, we are writing for the world—and the world is also us.