Anonymity as an act of literary freedom

BarcelonaNot every day do you have the luck to read a newly published book and have the certainty that you have a classic in your hands. This is what happened to me when I read Encara hi sou tots, by Liadan Ní Chuinn, published by La Segona Perifèria and translated into Catalan by Ariadna Pous. They are six extraordinary stories that explore the British colonial legacy in Northern Ireland. Both Irish and English critics already consider her one of the best voices of the generation after the Good Friday Peace Accords. From the person behind the pseudonym, Liadan Ní Chuinn, we only know that she was born in Northern Ireland in 1998, the year these agreements were signed. The name, however, is a declaration of intent: Liadan comes from the ancient Gaelic liath ("grey") and dan ("poet"), and it is the name of a 7th-century Irish poetess who fell in love with the poet Cuirithir, but who chose her vocation and her work and became a nun. NíChuinn is the feminine form of "daughter of Conn", high king of Ireland and legendary ancestor of the Gaelic dynasties. All in all, it would mean ancient poetess, daughter of Ireland. Ancient poetess, daughter of Ireland. Ní Chuinn, with the connivance of her publisher, has made no public appearances, the interviews she has given are written and no portrait of her circulates anywhere. The only contemporary precedent so deliberate was that of Elena Ferrante (until a more than bored journalist unmasked her).In Catalonia we have had milder versions of this same choice. Of Marta Rojals we know her real name and that she is an architect born in 1975 in La Palma d'Ebre, but she has always maintained a clear position: no photographs, no public appearances. Ada Klein writes under a pseudonym and in her debut we only knew she was a doctor, but she did not allow herself to be photographed or make public appearances so as not to mix profession and the literary world. With her second book she has relaxed this stance. Another different example would be that of Irene Solà, whose real face and name we do know, but who actively avoids media exposure, despite her success. These are three ways of trying to preserve something important from the noise.In an era of compulsive overexposure on social media, choosing absolute silence, as Ní Chuinn has done, is an act of freedom and self-esteem that I find admirable. It is only the work that speaks, and it does not need to exhibit the body or instagram one's own biography to achieve the easy dopamine of likes or external admiration and validation. It is surely a necessary gesture if one wants to write freely and truthfully because, let's be honest, addressing a national conflict in a colonizing state is not free anywhere. We know this well in Catalonia, where we have had politicians in prison and in exile. Read from here, then, Ní Chuinn's gesture reminds us that the freedom to write is never a guaranteed right, but a conquest for which each author must continue to fight, in their own way, every day.