Reseña

EARTH AND LIGHT
—Everything you see here— Illa whispered to the young woman beside her, a history student by hobby, who silently recorded with a discreet camera—
All of this was written from within. There are no external sources, no suppositions. Only the voices that endured.
That notebook held names, dates, memories; it was not an invented story. It was a testimony:
—her own and that of so many others— written from the very entrails of exodus and loss.

Wars, so often told as distant tales, were for them an open wound. First the great ones, those that shook the world. Then the small ones, the internal ones, those that tore neighbors apart and disfigured families. And amid all that chaos: human beings.

—dispossessed, displaced— turned into numbers, into statistics, into dispensable objects.
—The only thing we had left— Illa continued, as they approached a tree that resisted in the midst of dust— was our will. Our thirst to live.

But even that will, as firm as the roots of the old ceibo that still gave shade to the wanderers, sometimes faltered; then, in the darkest moments, they turned —to beings of light, with love and gazes free of judgment.
They held wounded souls, gave them courage to begin again.
—And here are their names. Those who crossed borders, learned new languages, sweated in fields and mines, cleaned desks and floors, while dreaming of classrooms, and years later, sat to lecture in foreign halls and universities they had never imagined.
—It was not only survival— she said, with a voice that no longer trembled—.

It was reclaiming the place that rightfully belonged to them; it was sowing in barren soil and seeing the unthinkable bloom.
And thus, with every word, she rebuilt herself, raised not with bricks, but with an unshakable strength.