“Stop the world I want to get off!” It is one of the wonderful phrases that the great cartoonist Quino put into the mouth of the young philosopher Mafalda.
Quino has definitely come down from the world. But that invented character, now more real than anything else, survives him. Mafalda not only knew how to portray the Argentine society of the sixties and seventies, as stated Uberto EcoIt was also the emblem of a way of thinking, of a way of living.
Mafalda wise, funny and simple
He knew how to show us with ingenuity both the miseries and the hopes of the human being. She is the girl who denounces the injustices of an ungoverned world, where the creators of problems abound more than the seekers of solutions.
Quino vignette. / THE CONVERSATION
For Mafalda, “the trouble is that women, instead of playing a role, have played a rag in the history of humanity.” And in her occurrences, Mafalda sang with love to women, as John Lennon did in Julia, dedicated to his mother.
The critical and scathing Mafalda recognizes the brutalizing role of the media. For her, even unplugged, television has us accustomed to various frivolities. He told us that “the newspapers make up half of what they say” and to add to that, they don’t tell half of what happens. To think about when we read any news that one day of our life tells us …
Soup and the Beatles
There is a whole philosophy of life in Mafalda’s cartoons. He hates soup, perhaps a metaphor for the rejection of the militarism of the dictatorships of Latin America. He was opposed to the doctrinaire charlatans, who look at the world from his narrow and pointed point of view and proclaim his clichés as absolute dogmas:
“The problem with closed minds is that they always have their mouths open.”
Mafalda adored the Beatles, who today have become the soundtrack for this tribute to Quino, his worlds of strawberry fields and his overflowing imagination that breaks ground:
“The ideal would be to have the heart in the head and the brain in the chest. Thus we would think with love and we would love with wisdom ”.
I always imagine Mafalda in the sky with diamonds, like the Beatles song.
Instead of violence and petty interests, Mafalda breaks a spear for culture, for everything that makes living an exercise in dignity. And despite conspiracies against happiness, life is beautiful; It is not as complicated as those who confuse everything would have us believe. But it is not easy to notice the beauty of what surrounds us and to open our eyes wide to appreciate the open skies. It takes a bit of good prudence and to look, like Mafalda, around you.
How sad and revealing that more bills are printed than books! Let people listen to more politics than music! If we did not have so many interested interests, if we were more interesting, that something that gives meaning to everything for the Beatles would come to populate our lives.
A girl in an adult world
Mafalda never wanted to accept that adult world that she ridiculed from the first cartoon, which appeared in 1964, to the last one in 1973, when Quino decided to stop drawing the irreverent girl. And in that course, and despite the fact that he was born to promote an appliance, obviously without success, Mafalda managed to captivate disparate generations. His revolutionary impulse passed through his comics.
The slow revolution
What a rhythm of life so hectic. It does not allow us respite to even live and spend time on what is important! The girl philosopher teaches us to think about our world, about those details of our lives that go unnoticed.
Mafalda wakes us up and forces us to ask fundamental questions, as happens in good stories. Have you considered what is worthwhile in your lives? Have you stopped to consider whether the slowness and parsimony to the daily routine, so full of things to do and to say as empty of meaning? Why not let yourself be illuminated by other suns, like those of Mafalda and the Beatles?
Mafalda taught us to be nonconformists, to see the world from the eyes of a girl who does not hide it behind veils of naive optimism. It will not interest the followers of that pseudo-philosophy of life that happy flower. Because no, everything will not go well. At least on its own, only with good intentions, with intentions that are never carried out, with endless principles. The world is a mess, let’s face it.
Our beloved Mafalda discovers the world as it is: imperfect and disorderly. But still he invites us to the laugh that runs through the universe from the open and lucid mind of a six-year-old girl. Nothing will change our world, but expressing such observations with wit and mischief already implies turning it a bit, hopefully for the better.
Against that ridiculous world in which, said Mario Benedetti, you have to ask permission even to be happy, Mafalda stands up like nothing else, with his eternal and undeniable courage:
“I’m not disheveled but my hair has freedom of expression.”
As the Beatles suggested in Hey Jude: “Take a sad song and make it better.” It is what Quino and Mafalda knew how to do with the world with the permission of reality and at the expense of the impossible.
Antonio Fernandez Vicente, Teacher, that is, speak, listen and ask, Castilla-La Mancha university
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.
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