Miren Amuriza: "A lost friendship leaves you with a wound equal to or worse than that of a romantic breakup"

BarcelonaThe "rural and polygonal" Basque Country of the 90s is resurrected in Pleibac, the second novel by Miren Amuriza (Berriz, 1990) which Pau Joan Hernàndez has translated into Catalan for Club Editor with grace and skill, to which he has added the transgressive linguistic vocation of the original. The book tells the story of friendship and betrayal between two adolescents, Jone and Polly, who grow up in the same Biscayan municipality where the author followed the family tradition of singing improvised verses in Basque. Years after establishing herself as a bertsolari and publishing several poetry collections, Amuriza tried her hand at prose in Basa (Elkar, 2019; in Spanish by Consonni), and now repeats the experience with a novel that flows down like a fresh beer after a party with friends.

Was having a recognized bertsolari father like Xabier Amuriza an incentive to try your luck in the world of improvisation, or rather an obstacle?

— Oral improvisation has been very present in my environment since I was very young. My grandfather used to sing. My father participated in bertsolaritza championships for years, although he currently dedicates himself mainly to writing: he is almost 85 years old. My mother was a professor of oral improvisation, because in the Basque Country it is such a popular practice that it is taught in schools. I took a while to sign up for a bertsolaritza workshop. If I did it at 12 years old, it was due to the influence of friends, not family. I was at a time when, above all, I wanted to rebel against paternal authority.

You didn't take long to start competing, and when you were 18 years old you appeared on television singing the popular song Gure aitak amari.

— During the first few years it was a kind of game, for me. As an only child, I spent a lot of time with adults and the elderly when I was little. By the age of eight, I already had the gift of speaking like an old woman.

This old woman's voice was very believable in Basa, your first novel.

— All authors have a foundational question that we investigate book after book, and mine has to do with looking back and being able to collect what has been transmitted to me. Both context and place greatly affect characters, and in the case of Basa I set out to tell the story of an elderly woman through her words. That was my only goal. From there I went on writing very slowly, trying out the text aloud paragraph by paragraph. Sometimes I get stuck because I'm missing a word of specific syllables that keeps the rhythm I'm looking for. Hearing is fundamental, for an author like me, both when writing verses and novels.

Readers who knew Basa and now reach the first-person voice that explains Pleibac to us will be taken aback. The Catalan translation incorporates words from Basque and also from Spanish to show a complex linguistic reality.

— Although the discourse may seem very fluid, I have thought a lot whenever Spanish appears in the book. I am aware that writing in a hegemonic language is not the same as writing in a threatened one like mine. I have allowed myself more leeway in the use of vocabulary than in mimicking syntactic structures.

In the Catalan version we read "botellón", "puto asco", "no me jodas" and "cumple". The girls "pillen el bus", do "un simpa" and remember those "siesteros documentaries from La 2".

— My intention was to use words that sounded natural throughout the Basque linguistic domain. If I used, for example, "pultsera brillantea", the French-speaking part of the Basque Country would also understand me. If I had opted for the standard expression, it would have been different. Many conversations that the characters in the novel have would surely have taken place in Spanish. I set out to write them in Basque and give them plasticity. The most important thing is the literary value you can bring to what you write. You have to be brave. If you treat the language as if it were a creature or an old woman, you weaken it.

Nevertheless, it must have been a controversial book.

— Yes. Basque is experiencing such a fragile situation that internal debate is constant. The diglossia is very great. I understand that different policies are needed in education and in the media for the situation to improve, but when writing a novel, you have to be able to break your own limits as a citizen.

Were you expecting negative reactions?

— I have been criticized mostly by the generation of the 60s, who fought to get Basque normalized. The most frequent criticism has been this: "You who can write so well, how have you managed to do this with the language?"

And what did you answer?

— That I applied very concrete criteria so that they corresponded to a voice that I wanted to sound authentic.

I imagine that your generation has also incorporated changes in the world of bertsolaritza that have caught your attention.

— The social, political and cultural current events continue to be sung about, but since the appearance of Maialen Lujanbio, the first woman to win the national bertsolari championship [in 2009], those of us who came after her have been able to make our way perhaps more easily. We bertsolaris do not forget the great themes of always, but we have spoken for the first time about maternities, the body, power relations, and what it means to be a woman.

You have changed the rules of the game.

— Uxue Alberdi explains it very well in the essay Revers [Pol·len, 2023], where she collects testimonies from many of my colleagues about the dynamics we encountered. There was a certain paternalism, on the one hand, but also a hypersexualization or infantilization of those of us who were dedicated to it. It is not the same to participate in the party with already created rules as to create our own party.

One of the main themes of Pleibac is the analysis of the friendship between Jone, the narrator of the story, and Polly. The former dedicates herself to reflecting on the relationship they had and that they lost.

— For years, girls had their first monogamous romantic relationship with their best friend. You loved your best friend so much you would have eaten her to become her. At the same time, the power dynamics and jealousy that occurred were also very strong.

Jone tries to explain why she was able to betray Polly.

— A lost friendship leaves you with a wound equal to or worse than that of a romantic breakup. I remember some words from the anthropologist Mari Luz Esteban that enlightened me: she says that we have many breakup rituals to face a romantic relationship, but the same does not happen with friendships. We only need to take a look around us to see that this is so. Or remember how literary and audiovisual narratives prepare us to face a sentimental breakup, but not a friendship. We lack rituals to face a broken friendship.

It is singular that the voice speaking in your novel is the most morally imperfect.

— In friendship stories like My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, or Donkey's Belly, by Andrea Abreu, the narrator is the good one, the one who follows the rules. I was looking to avoid a story that could be divided between good and bad. Sometimes, when we look back, we can end up feeling guilty about things we thought we were innocent of.

Surely many readers have asked you if you feel closer to Jone's voice than to Polly's.

— And the answer is that if I had been able to choose my role during adolescence, I probably would have been closer to Polly. I was Basque and I showed my commitment to Basque culture. I repressed many things, for show.

Like now?

— When my friends at high school commented on the shows of'Operación Triunfo I pretended I knew nothing about it. But at home I followed them...

Did you also like the Spice Girls?

— The Spice Girls say many things about our generation. The title of the novel, Pleibac, has to do with returning to those songs from when we were teenagers. Recovering them through the group of friends, and also to open the focus towards other relationships, such as the one Jone has with Adri, which is very tormented. It allows her to leave the neighborhood and feel that she is part of the group of boys, with all that this implies.