If any intellectual were to write about the local at this moment in history, he or she would be immediately shunned as an alien, unless the term was used ironically, pointing to global as the new local. Now, that is cool. Since the worldwide expansion of information technology and the all-pervading interconnectedness that ensued, the discourse of the global has become not only hegemonic, it is apparently the only rational way to examine and understand cultural phenomena. The mere thought of the local is deemed absurd, “local village” sounds now like an oxymoron. And yet we are dealing here with an issue for which not content, but perspective, is everything.

Imagine for a moment that you are a writer anywhere in the world. Writers don't live in countries, they live in languages. Take me, for example. I am a “so-called writer” and I inhabit the language I write in, Galician, a minority language in Northwest Spain. I can read Portuguese; actually Galician and Portuguese are the same language evolved separately after Portugal's independence. I can also read Spanish, English, French, and Italian, something that not many writers in major languages can do. Paradoxically, this circumstance does not make me feel more cosmopolitan than them, rather the opposite. When I sit down to write my own literature I am fully aware that no matter how familiar I am with palaces, my place is in the kitchen.

My colleagues who inhabit a major language may not realize that they can easily take language for granted as part of the landscape. English for them is like money, sleep, or the air they breathe. You know it is there okay, but you don't owe it a thing: you just breathe it in and out. The English language for an American, British, or Australian writer is like health for a healthy person, an invisible totality, something you can leave aside while you focus on the really important things: ideas, rhetoric, clarity, innovation.

I know a lot about these fortunate writers who can devote their efforts to their job and to the tiring task of getting published. I am afraid that they don't know one iota about me. I breathe the air that they have unconcernedly breathed first but my breathing is not as careless as theirs. My breathing is not reflex, but voluntary, planned. I know every breath could be the last. I am familiar with Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Crane, Faulkner, you name it. I have also enjoyed reading Pynchon, Burroughs, Salinger, Gaddis, Paley, Barthelme, Acker, DeLillo… I know lots of American writers who are younger than me. Most of them wouldn't be able to spot Galicia on a world map or would think we are the region of the same name in Poland. This is nothing personal. None of the writers I read would be able to name one single writer in my language.

This is not a literary problem, obviously. Literature is just another symptom of the unbalanced relationship between powerhouses and peripheries. McDonald's restaurants or Starbucks coffeehouses can easily be found around the world, but French restaurants and Parisian cafés have not sprouted likewise, probably because the quality provided by those American franchises is bound to beat any run-down tiny-table terrace in Montparnasse; I'll leave that for you to judge. We are talking about France and Paris, mind you, not a rugged, storm-blasted corner of Spain like Galicia. Now, that is how globalization works out here.

This inconvenience does not mean that I must forsake reflection, rhetoric, or innovation, or that I don't worry about being published. Quite the contrary, for us minority language writers the figure of the literary agent is a mythical figure, we negotiate our contracts personally, help design the cover, drive our private car to book presentations, even write drafts for the texts on the flap.

“Like your own minorities,” you might argue, “Globalization is not to blame, just a scapegoat to account for your failure and justify your tendency to wallow in the mire.” After all, things have been worse in the past. We could answer that results are measured according to expectations. Besides, all languages except English are these days minority languages de facto, like in cinema or popular music. Not only Hindi, Icelandic, or Slovenian… French, Spanish, German, Italian, or Russian now march one step behind English, the new koiné, and yet we don't hear the whining and sighing from French or Spanish writers. Maybe the fact that we who don't have a political entity to support us—a state—has something to do with that. We must confront our lack of relevance twice before we come out in the open. Our presence is tolerated provided that we accept the role assigned to us: we are welcome as consumers but whatever products we manage to create will remain within our borders. We are local weirdos writing about local idiosyncrasies, performing local antics at night covens round the fire. Take it or leave it.

In the case of Galicia, this is felt more so within the borders of Spain than when we are reviewed in the international scene. Latin American authors are considered to belong to the Spanish tradition and canon; they can be awarded the same distinctions as native Spaniards, while Basque, Catalonian, and Galician writers are blatantly ignored and treated as strangers in their own country. A writer from Andalucía is just that: a writer. When one of us manages to break the glass ceiling of the language and is accorded some attention in Spain, we are labeled as “Galician writers.” We are the others. They simply can't understand why we don't write in Spanish when that would open such a huge market for our careers. We might candidly explain away this reaction saying that they are not aware that they speak Spanish; they just speak and write, naturally. What's all that ruckus about languages? Our minds are twisted, our motivations are always dark, aggressive, and politicized. Our works are masked proclamations of separatism.

I wish we were more aggressive, at least less passive, but I feel the latter is more usually the case. Minority language speakers are always on the defensive. Our actions are inscribed in a politics of resistance. Both our political and cultural institutions are subservient to the Spanish ones and they comply with the job of hospital staff in charge of disclosing the bad news to the terminal patient's family. Time and again they warn us against the risks of waking up the monster, that is… disturbing Spain's peaceful dream of a monolithic cultural narrative, not because apocalypse would unleash, just because one shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you, or the future would become… unpredictable!!!

Even among the petty intelligentsia who won't buy the benefits of this shameful compliance with the situation of our language and our cultural heritage, an excessive feeling of wariness permeates every move. This is apparent, for example, when we parade our literary output. Response to the ever-present threat of falling into irrelevance may lead publishers and authors to either make risky decisions that might bring important gains, but also the opposite, having to pay the toll of being silenced or rebuked, or to fostering a friendly-to-all kind of publication, fiction that doesn't deter schoolteachers from prescribing it and the conservative, Spanish-biased media from reviewing it. Guess which route is ruled out instinctively, like a defective socket that might give our children an electric shock?

Even if we have some misgivings about the quality of some novels or poetry collections, we start whistling, shut our mouths, and watch each other closely so that no reckless visionary spills the beans that the emperor has no clothes. It is not strange to read that we are in a Golden Age of poetry or that the latest bore of a novel can be compared to Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past. The consequence is that the value of our literature turns into a Ponzi scheme, a boosted social media profile, a bridge made of cardboard which stands like any other, as long as you don't try to cross it.

Our country has a population of 2.7 million, a lower figure than 30 years ago, but much higher than it will be in 2050. We are literally imploding, parks have been taken over by the elderly, and newspapers couldn't feature the first newborn on last New Year's Day because there weren't any. A truly dystopian nightmare. Until the Civil War in the 1930s, 90% of the people spoke Galician. The language flourished when it was ignored; it was then brutally outlawed by Franco's dictatorship for decades, a process which coincided with an exodus from the impoverished countryside to the cities and towns, a cultural shock that left us with a virtually wiped out rural population, from 70% to less than 10%. As a result, the number of Galician speakers has fallen by half. The dwindling social life of young people does not revolve around the community anymore and 95% of all media and entertainment they access are in Spanish, so the extinction of our language is becoming an accident waiting to happen, a centuries-old cultural creation kindled as a ritual code, confined to cultural and political circles who, like Asterix's Gaul village resisting the Roman invaders, try to contain the flood with their bare hands.

The good news is that Asterix was not eventually defeated—the locals prevailed. I don't remember saying I wanted things made easy for me. Besides, our Galician village harbors quite a bunch of unrealistic dissenters who revel in the freedom of the loser, the freedom of not having, which includes not having to abide. Finally, here is my magic potion: Read globally and write locally. Read more than anybody else and write like nobody else.

Key: nobody else = you, yourself. After all, every person is a minority.