Those of you who follow either my del.icio.us links or the pornomisery tag know that I had wanted to translate Juliana’s latest post about … well, you’ll soon see what it’s about. I hadn’t thought to just ask.

Now I wonder if I can get her to translate and subtitle her own TV appearances? So, without further adieu, here is the English version of Juliana’s post, La PornoMiseria. (She later added links to “development pornography” and, from BoingBoing, “development porn“.

Pornomisery: that which makes a spectacle out of poverty. It comes from those Colombian films that cashed in on poverty and human misery to make money and get international recognition.

A friend once introduced me to the concept of Pornomisery as we were having a beer at Journalist´s Park in Medellín. I remembered this now as I read an article titled How to write about Africa which Oso pointed out. Changing a couple of things here and there, it could be guide on writing about Colombia. Or Peru. Or Costa Rica.

It’s hard to find the right balance when writing about something that will become a small window [for outsiders] to view life at a specific place, while at the same time, write without falling into the use of stereotypes … after all, it’s through stereotypes that many of us learn how to recognize places, people and situations. They are a … necessary? … evil that Arias and I were talking about the other day.

In some way or another, here in Colombia, we expect to hear about trafficking, drugs, violence, insecurity, emeralds and more drugs. And Gabo, of course. And very pretty girls. Because if someone shows us a Colombia without any of this, we become suspicious… are we sure this is Colombia we are talking about? It’s not Suriname or Guyana or some other country you never hear anything about and that they have just changed the name to get some ratings?

The Costa Rican stereotype flows around ecology and sex: you are either in a beautiful place, the virgin jungle full of wild animals with a gang of conservationists or you are planted within a place raped by indiscriminate deforestation, a trash heap or near an oil refinery, with the appropriate peaceful community protests. And there´s always sex. Even better if it´s at the beach. With hookers. And a fruity cocktail inside a coconut with a little umbrella on the edge.

From Peru I´ve seen two versions: the über rich who spend their lives making appearances at parties where there are drugs and gays (thanks Jaime Bayly) and that of the farmer fighting against the system, poverty, eating breaded cardboard and befriending children from the streets or a humble fisherman.

You never read about the non-corrupt bank employee who does a good job and who maybe once gave CPR to a coworker and saved his life. That would be boring. No editor would accept that for a book, you´d have to change a few things. For example, if he no longer works at a bank but becomes a dumpster diver, if what he actually did was read about the CPR procedures from old discarded magazines in the trash heap, and performed the procedure on his hooker friend after a civil servant dumps her on gutter in a side street. Then it becomes “interesting”. Likewise if there´s scandal, lots of plastic surgery, disputed inheritances, and some rich girl who falls in love with the handsome and not-quite-faithful millionaire.

I think this is why I like blogs. Because they don´t limit themselves to being a scrap of someone´s life or a moment chosen for impact and to impress audiences. It´s a series of these moments, sometimes in complete opposition to the one before. There’s literary freedom: no editor comes around and lets us know that this material “doesn’t sell”, we don´t have to pigeonhole our writing into memoir, autobiography, fiction based on a true story, or historical fiction, with all the style rules that each genre requires. We can write whatever we want, and thus each blog becomes a reflection of its author, even as the author tries to eliminate their voice from their product. The absence of their voice is a voice in itself.

In a blog we leave behind good texts and bad texts, moments of brilliance and moments of “what the hell was I thinking”; interesting posts and “my life is so boring right now” posts. It could be that in one post we write about our close encounter with death, and in the next we are meditating on whether diet chocolate ice cream will make us fatter than a frozen cappuccino. The next day we can revisit that deep post on life’s greater meaning … and confess that we’ve thought more about it and no longer think it´s such a big deal.

So when I read an Iraqi blogger dancing and listening to music at a party and the next day I read accounts of how they have to walk among collapsed buildings, destroyed streets and dead bodies to get to school to do a test, it shows the contrasts a country can have. It opens the possibility that nothing is just good or bad, that life has a variety of shades of gray and that it isn´t always about action, love, depression, rescues and risky situations. Sometimes nothing happens in life. There are great doses of “I’m bored”, “I don’t know what to wear” and “I’m happy when I eat hummus and pita bread”. It´s a shame that contemporary editors and the movie industry in general have eliminated our freedom to appreciate this.

Blogs give us a global vision of life in a specific place. Yes, in Iraq there are gardens with green plants in them. Yes, Jerusalem is a modern city, it no longer looks as it did on those movies about the life of Christ. They also have green plants there. In Cusco, Peru, there are “Indians” with master degrees and doctorates who go to Irish karaoke bars boasting a great variety of rock songs to sing. And no, they don´t own a llama or wear an earflap hat, not unless it´s cold anyway. In Tanzania people comment on blogs about their Miss Universe candidate´s hairstyle, higher education and plain gossip. In Korea, bloggers are concerned about the suicide of a girl who they say got depressed due to online harassment.

It doesn´t mean that I don´t want to know that there are children dying of hunger in concentration camps, it´s just that sometimes I´d also like to know about those who manage to survive there.