This week, Santiago de Querétaro will be an open window to the world and its affairs, an amalgam of punk, poetry, political (and artistic) activism, gatherings and drinks among a handful of those privileged minds of our century that occasionally meet in the same place. The blame lies with the Hay Festival 2024, which returns to the colonial center of the city to make it the stage for the ninth time of the international meeting between writers, activists, musicians, scientists, journalists and other intellectuals from around the world: 22 countries that make up, say the organizers, the most diverse edition to date.
From this Thursday to Sunday, Querétaro will host almost a hundred cultural events in different venues such as the Teatro de la Ciudad, the Cineteca Rosalío Solano or the Jardín Guerrero. The 9th edition will be opened by the French writer based in Mexico, Neige Sinno, author of Triste tigre (Anagrama), one of the great publishing revelations of last year, a raw novel about sexual abuse against boys and girls, in conversation with the journalist Elvira Liceaga; it will be closed by an “artistic and disruptive performance” by Guz Guevara, a musician and anti-capitalist activist, focused on the rights of people with disabilities and the LGBTTTIQ+ community (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transvestites, Transgender, Transsexuals, Intersexuals and Queer).
War and poverty will be present, paradoxically, through two Nobel Peace Prize winners: the Ukrainian Oleksandra Matviichuk (in 2022) and the Indian Kailash Satyarthi. Matviichuk won the prestigious recognition in 2022 together with the Russian human rights organization Memorial and the imprisoned Belarusian activist Alés Bialiatski. Director of the Center for Civil Liberties, since Vladimir Putin decided to invade her native country in February 2022, her life has been a mission: to document the war crimes of the Russian Army in order to, one day, see Putin sitting before an international court. Satyarthi left her job as an electrical engineer in the 1980s and since then focused her life on the fight against child exploitation. In 2014 she received the Nobel Prize together with Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who at 14 committed the mortal sin of wanting girls to go to school and received her punishment in the form of a bullet to the head, fired by the Taliban, from which she survived by a kind of atheistic miracle.
Not only the war in Ukraine. Israel’s offensive on Gaza, denounced by South Africa before the UN International Court of Justice for genocide, will be in Querétaro embodied by the poet Najwan Darwish, a Palestinian in the diaspora, journalist and literary critic. Darwish is one of the great Arab writers of recent years and, since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and the Jewish State responded with excessive force, which has already killed more than 40,000 inhabitants of the Strip, he has also become the involuntary ambassador of his country, forced by circumstances to be the voice of the victims.
From Palestine to Chile with Raúl Zurita, excessive and brilliant, considered by many critics as the best living Spanish-speaking poet. And from the Southern Cone, also, the journalist Leila Guerriero, who will present La Llamada (Anagrama, 2024), her latest book, a brutal chronicle about the Argentine dictatorship, the disappeared, the politically repressed and the searching mothers through the story of Silvia Labayru, participant in the armed struggle, kidnapped by the military, tortured, enslaved, raped, survivor and branded a traitor by her former companions.
The filth and fury (or what’s left of it) of the Sex Pistols will also land in Querétaro, thanks to Glen Matlock, founding member of the original punk band that shook up the British status quo at the end of the 1970s. Many years after the adventures of that short-lived group with a long epitaph, Matlock, composer of most of their great anthems, continues making music solo and as a member of the also legendary Blondie, but he arrives at the Hay Festival with a book under his arm, his memoirs: Triggers: A Life in Music (Nine Eight Books), published this year and still without translation into Spanish.
The remaining list of participants and events is long and unmanageable. From the new revelation of Spanish literature, Sara Barquinero, to the Frenchman Patrick Autréaux, the Mexicans Emiliano Monge and Frida Cartas, the music of Lila Downs and Colin Greenwood (bassist of Radiohead), the scientific gaze of physicist Julieta Fierro and neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, the linguist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil or a tribute to the great Mexican poet David Huerta. Querétaro awaits.
Source: elpais
