Words against fear

La Habitación Propia

calls for

words against fear

At La Habitación Propia we have talked a lot about what others did before us. Honouring previous generations has been the ultimate motive of our activities, meetings and events ever since our establishment back in March 2014. Nevertheless, La Habitación Propia is not, and won't claim to be an academy. Our research happens at grassroots level on the field of creativity and words, and it is there where its participants and distant followers converge. Our aim is, and has always been progress. For this purpose, we make use of what we consider to be a main pillar of the history of human progress: literature. We celebrate, honour, practise and share it not only for its dissemination or for having so many good times, but because we are convinced of its great social value. Wherever humans get together to create and share ideas and knowledge, connections blossom, and bonds are built with words.

Fear has always flooded our dreams as a species and as individuals. In our first manifesto after the establishment of LHP we already referred to the crisis with the media trend of generalising a fiscal lie. But our crisis is not about debt. It is a crisis of impossibilities. The impossibility of living, eating, flourishing, or achieving happiness raises frustration and fear in every individual. More than economic, our crisis is human, in the way that nowadays too many individuals live overwhelmed by that fear. Fear grows in the vicious circle of terror, within destruction and death, and it continues an unstoppable cycle. Fear entrenches us because of its immediate effect: paralysis and, ultimately, going backwards.

LHP calls for words against fear, words against destruction—construction; against ignorance—education; against paralysis—movement. At LHP, we haven't stopped moving because we do not resort to undoing what has already begun. If we have recalled generations before, it has been to figure out what can we do for today and for the future. And we claim responsibility for all the generations living in this time and (every) place. The responsibility to fight terror with words, conversations, information, education, meetings, and common grounds should take us away from cynicism, apathy, indifference, loneliness and despair, among other proponent of fear. Literature is our history; and words, our tools.