Georgi Gospodinov

Because this election is not only crucial for the United States; the stakes are much higher

I live an ocean away from Washington, DC, or five thousand miles by air. So why should I be anxious about who will be president of a country so far from my own? Because I know that in today’s world, we are part of the same body and how vulnerable and fragile it is. 

I will never forget that early November morning in 2016 when Trump was elected. It was morning, yet it looked like the beginning of a long night. My daughter was asleep in the other room, and we were looking on the computer at the blue and red rectangles of the US map. I remember at first there was hope, and then there wasn’t. When they officially declared victory, I saw my wife was quietly crying, careful not to wake our child. I felt that frustration when you see something monstrous happening and there’s nothing you can do about it. I knew that this thing would not stay there, overseas, that it would affect us personally and physically from now on. I knew that it would eat away at the already fragile future of more than just our generation. 

Perhaps the most important and worrying event in Europe’s recent past happened then, in the late autumn of 2016, thousands of miles away. The vampire of populism is based on the past, but feeds on the future—our future. Then, in my desperation, I began to write my novel, Time Shelter, telling the story of the weaponization of nostalgia, the discrete monster of the past, the rising “dealers of the past,” and the referendums on the past they want to foist on us.

Today, in an even more difficult situation for the world, we are faced with an even more important choice—to vote for the past or for the future. Things have come to the point of preserving not just the human, but the humane. Of defending the last limits of the humane, those basic principles of freedom, equality, the right to happiness, the right to life, the right to a future and carrying them forward in time. 

I, who come from Eastern Europe, cannot tell the American voter whom to vote for. But I can safely say what is worth voting for because some of those values have been forged and defended over the centuries here, on this old continent, and have been carried across the ocean. This election is not only crucial for the United States; the stakes are much higher. The results will be a sign to the whole world—our depleting, polarized, and darkening world.

So, the chance for all of us and our children is a new future with a womanly face. In this election, the name of that future is Kamala Harris. 

Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov is the author of Time Shelter, winner of the International Booker Prize. His most recent novel is Death and the Gardener.