Siobhán O’Connor is an Irish writer living in Madrid. Her writing explores themes of motherhood, trauma, social justice and home. Her work externalizes the inner distress and turmoil of the female experience, generational trauma, emigration and loss. Siobhán is an editor at an educational publishing company, a member of an English-speaking writing group in Madrid, the author of Honestly Written and a New Media and English graduate of the University of Limerick.

We are standing on the shore, looking out to sea

By Siobhán O’Connor

My family is a by-product of the flexible borders, free movement and bendy rules of the European Union.

We are a happy little unit of three. Man-Woman-Child. Each born in a different country, making a home in this one not that one, a serendipitous cultural mash up, just another collision of particles in a benevolent universe.

The top drawer in my partner’s desk is where we keep our documents – so many pieces of paper to make a family.

There is my Irish passport.
There is his Argentine one.
There is my EU Residency Card.

There is also his now-defunct EU Residency Card, only possible because of the civil partnership he got when living with an Italian ex. No, I never asked if it was for convenience or love. Yes, I am still a bit jealous.

There is the stack of supporting documents for his Spanish citizenship application and there is the citizenship itself, granted 10 years after it was sought.

There is his Spanish passport. There is relief, breathe out, you did it.

There is my Spanish driver’s licence and the receipt from when I surrendered my Irish one. That hurt more than I expected.

There are my divorce papers from a previous relationship. That hurt less than I expected.

There is our daughter’s Spanish birth certificate, including my sworn testament that the aforementioned ex-husband would not emerge from the shadows to claim paternity. WTF.

There is also our daughter’s first ever Spanish passport with predictably horrific newborn photo.

And finally, there is our Libro de Familia – not mine, nor his, nor hers. OURS. The result, if you will, of the mad catwalk of documents that preceded it. And the one that will prove we belong together if they ever try to pull us apart.

P.S. – Daughter’s Irish and Argentine passports coming soon to a drawer near you.

When you put it all down in black and white like that, it is quite amazing, isn’t it? The sheer volume of applications approved. All those yeses along the way. Sure, it meant tons of paperwork and weeks of our lives lost in beige administrative buildings. But what it all adds up to, what we systematically take for granted, is our ability – nay right – to define ourselves. To define our families. To say…

this is who I was
who I am now
who I want to be
who I don’t want to be any more
who I don’t want to be with any more
who I do want to be with
who we are
and where we want to be together.

I am certain I have never, until writing these words, sufficiently appreciated the gobsmacking freedom of this.

Freedom is on my mind. I am worrying about freedom. Especially freedoms like mine, those we take for granted. I worry the easiest freedoms to take away will be the ones we don’t even know we have.

All this consternation is Paul Lynch’s fault. I have recently finished his dystopian soul-crusher, Prophet Song – winner of the 2023 Booker Prize.

Prophet Song is more than an incredible book. It is a megaphone held to your eardrums. Through the megaphone the author bellows…

The novel’s protagonist is Eilish, a mother whose total paralysis before the creeping fascism enveloping her Dublin home will have you screaming ‘Run Eilish, run! Grab the children and get as far away as you can!’

But Eilish does not run. Page after page, her agonising denial mounts. When her trade unionist husband is detained by the secret police, she stays. They must be there when he is returned to them. When her eldest son joins the resistance and disappears into the war, still she does not flee with her remaining children. This is all some kind of mistake, she continues to plead, as her street is barricaded and her children begin to starve. Even as the bombs drop on their heads, Eilish will not leave the house where she knows, she just knows, they will all be together again soon, where they will replant the torched cherry trees in the back garden.

This was the Orwellian narrative galloping around my brain as I stepped out of an aeroplane and onto Argentinian soil, only one month after Javier Milei – neoliberal super-capitalist and “Trump on steroids” – became president.

Carlos did not want to talk about it. About him. Nobody did. Come to think of it, in the seven days I spent in Buenos Aires, absolutely no one mentioned him by name. Not once.

And yet, he was everywhere. He was in the ¡Milei Puta! graffiti at the playground. In the ¡Ni Una Menos! poster at the bus stop. His scowl was thirty-feet tall on a billboard as we drove into the capital federal.

He was there even when he was not; in the conversations that diverted away from him when they skirted too close, in the quick changing of the radio station, in the waitress who turned the TV off with a sigh before serving me coffee with a smile.

But most of all, he was in the stooping shoulders and avoidant eyes of my father-in-law.

No. Carlos did not want to talk about it.

In our home in Madrid, Milei and the turmoil in Argentina is not a subject we ever discuss. It is not that my partner refuses to talk about it. It was I who banned the topic. It was also I who had seen his stricken face as he walked in the door from the ‘Peronistas en Madrid’ election event. It was I who had observed the heaviness of his gait in the weeks afterwards. And it was I who had fretted about the oceans of online toxicity he exposed himself to, as he searched for answers to the unanswerable – how could this have happened? I took the executive decision not to amplify this darkness. Instead, I reasoned, I would be a source of light. Tell him about my day. About the books I was reading. Give him space. Rub his hair when I kissed him. Bring home muffins. And never, ever, mention the bad man.

Not talking about it was tough for me, for I am nothing if not an obsessive, melodramatic, bleeding-heart lefty. When the bad men do bad things, I default to long-winded discursive mode. I get together with others of my ilk and we talk ourselves around in circles, as though this might loosen the knots of injustice.

In any case, by the time I arrived in Buenos Aires, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Now, I needed to see for myself how Argentinians were coping. I craved discourse. And so, like some disgusting, tabloid grief junkie, I started asking people how they were.

Voices were rising. In the previous moment, I had proffered the question – “So, how is everyone coping since Milei got elected?”

Carlos left the room.

My brother-in-law, Rodri, sighed out a politically correct answer I fail to recall. His wife Julia began bouncing the baby on her hip. She radiated agitation as she waited for her turn to speak. Her words passed through me unregistered, as my attention returned to Rodri. He looked like he wanted to escape his own body as he listened to his wife. I could see that it was taking every ounce of strength he had not to roll his eyes.

I realised they did not agree on Milei, and that it was painful for them to be in discordance.

I was disgusted with myself. Willingly, I had draped a blanket of excrement across the dinner table, sacrificing the loveliness of the evening to assuage my morbid curiosity.

Martina already knew what she was going to do. She would sell her apartment and use the money to move to Spain.

I had met this cousin on several previous occasions. But she was not how I remembered her. She seemed frightened.

“I think I can get around a hundred thousand US dollars for it”

“That much? That’s actually not bad…”

“And I’m going to buy a little flat in Madrid. I just need you to tell me what I can get for that amount over there”.

“Umm, Jesus, well I don’t know. Things are not great in Spain either and…”

“Ok, but how much does a two-bedroom apartment cost? Just tell me”.

“A lot more than that… I guess maybe you could find a two-bed in a town outside the city, but don’t you think you’re rushing things a bit?”

“Rushing things? But, I am afraid. And it is only going to get worse”.

“But you don’t know that yet”.

“What if he forbids the sale of property? What if they make it illegal to leave the country altogether?”

“That will not happen”, I yelled.

That. Will. Not. Happen.

I was shocked to hear this denial spring forth from my own mouth, when not an hour earlier I had shuddered again at Eilish’s refusal to see the encroaching threat. Here was a young woman, reacting in exactly the way I so wanted Eilish to, looking straight at the problem, planning her escape. And what was my response? To soothe. Temper. Downplay.

This exchange allowed me to peep behind the curtain for just a moment – to see the me that I hide from myself. The coward. The pleaser. I saw then what a farce it had been to believe that I would react to the warnings when Eilish had not. In that instant, I knew that I had merely been consoling myself with notions of wokeness, with hypothetical convictions of the decisive action I would surely take in her position.

For when I was faced with a member of my own family telling me they were frightened, that they felt the country was going down, that they were thinking of boarding the lifeboat, my answer was…

Stay. It won’t come to that.

It was our last day in Buenos Aires. I was tired and only half-listening as my in-laws chatted over breakfast. I realised the conversation had turned to politics but that Carlos had not fled the room. There was going to be a general strike along with a massive protest outside congress in the coming days.

“Are you going too?”, I ventured to Carlos, whom I truly did not want to upset again.

He smiled as he answered that yes, he was definitely going.

“Bien, Carlos, bien”, was all I could manage as I took in the awesome shift in his body language; his gaze was steady and met my own as we spoke, and his shoulders were higher, as though unburdened.

As I watched him, I suddenly understood the change in him. It was the protest, for here was something he could actually do, a few hours that were his to control.

I realised at that moment also what monster had sat atop his shoulders during the first days of my visit. Its name was Impotence. Carlos had lived all seventy-five years of his life well. Responsibly. He had always voted for the good guy, and even when it didn’t come out his way, he had borne the other guy with grace. He had wanted the best for his children. He had worked too hard. He had secured relative comfort for his winter years and was able to take care of his wife in an economy that had never made it easy for him. He had done well. Beaten the odds. And he was proud.

He had done everything right, but there was nothing he could do when it came to Milei. His countrymen had elected a bigoted, dangerous scoundrel, and this, he could not change.

On every shore in the world, we the people are gathered, gazing out to sea. The giant wave is approaching. We can already see it. But it is still far away, and we hope it will abate.

That is exactly how fascism has arrived for millions of others. Others who are not so otherly. People who currently live not so far away. People who lived not so long ago. Some who live in our very midst.

The future perpetrators of fascism live in our midst as well. They seem harmless enough – a few racist comments here and there, and they have the wrong idea about feminists, of course – but they don’t make enough of a fuss for us to really pay attention. However, they are also gazing out from the shore, and they are smiling. When the wave arrives, and all is torn asunder in its deadly wake, it will be they who brandish the weapons.

When Spain elects its own Milei, how will I feel about my intercultural family and our place here? How do I feel even now, as I look out from the shore? Within me, the serendipity is waning, and in its place, something new.

Disquiet lurks there now.

One day, the extreme right-wing party Vox will have a majority in the Spanish government, and they will bring with them a manifesto explaining the difference between ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ immigrants. Which am I? Which are we, my happy little unit of three?

In only one strand
of my family’s DNA
you will find
this-not-that
run from
stay
choices choices choices
clean slate
paralysis
why not?
now what?
see what happens
not that way
over there?
stay stay stay
fight
love
persevere
persevere
persevere