The complicit silence surrounding Ivette Nadal

BarcelonaToday I begin with some uncomfortable data: 25% of the adult population has suffered physical abuse in childhood, and 18% of girls and 8% of boys have suffered sexual abuse (UNICEF, 2017). Polish psychoanalyst Alice Miller delved into the concept of Black pedagogy, which she defines as a parenting model based on emotional repression, humiliation, and uncritical obedience, where violence (physical, verbal, or symbolic) is presented as necessary for education. This pedagogy not only wounds, but teaches us to justify the wound ("They did it for my own good," "The standards of the time were different"), and in this way, the pain is buried under a layer of loyalty, and the cycle of violence can perpetuate itself unchallenged.

Miller describes how abusers and mistreaters often project large amounts of blame onto their victims to suppress their emotional lives. This prevents children from experiencing what would be a normal and healthy reaction to abuse and cruelty—resentment—and thus fails to question the abuser's behavior or rebel against it. The author argues that we must learn to listen to hatred because it informs us of our wounds and our values. If we hate lies and toxicity, says Miller, we give ourselves the right to fight it or walk away.

I've thought a lot about all these concepts, while reading Poetic justice, the diary that poet and singer-songwriter Ivette Nadal has just published in Pòrtic. The author explains her long struggle with anorexia and some of its triggers: the abuse she suffered at 14 by an admired poet who was over 50, and at 16 by another poet in the same circle, who was married and in his fifties. The author doesn't describe these situations as abusive, but rather as "unbalanced love."

The book moved me deeply for several reasons. One is the normalization of these relationships. unbalanced within artistic or intellectual circles. As Anna Punsoda denounced at the presentation of the diary at the Ona bookstore, "if instead of being poets, they were high school teachers, monks from Montserrat, or mechanics, they would already be in prison." I wonder: of all the people who frequented the Horiginal, didn't anyone notice anything? Violence isn't just the violent act itself; it's also the silence that surrounds it. If we adults don't ask, we look the other way, we keep quiet, or we laugh at the jokes of older men who have a mistress. young girl, what we do is perpetuate the cycles of violence.

Another point that bothered me is precisely that Navidad herself doesn't describe these relationships as abusive. She is free to rethink her experience with whatever words she needs, but as a child psychologist, I know that the toxic webs of loyalty that abusers build are difficult to destroy. At the end of the book, however, Nadal makes a selection of poems and songs. For me, it's the best part of the text because, through his poetry, Nadal calls out, and it is here, halfway between dissociation and lucidity, where he finds his poetic justice. There is no revenge, no complacency. Only his voice that rises, elegant and profound (feel free to sing, I recommend it), above all else: