Ana Penyas: "There are class differences in sleep: sleeping well is a luxury."

BarcelonaAna Peñas (Valencia, 1987) acknowledges that he has always been a light sleeper, but what leads him to dedicate his third comic to the insomnia epidemic is the need to portray the economic, housing and emotional precarity of today's society. Blank, which Salamandra publishes in Catalan and Spanish, is the new work by the author ofWe're all okay. (2018 National Comic Award) and Everything Under the Sun (ACDCómic Critics' Award 2022), a voice of conscience for the new Spanish comics.

Reading Blank You realize the extent to which a basic human need like sleep is affected by social class. When did sleep become a luxury?

— There are class differences in sleep; that's a fact. When I started researching the topic, I realized this has deep roots. Sleeping well has always been a luxury. In the Roman Empire, patricians slept alone, but in ordinary families, people slept crammed into beds, and slaves slept on the floor. Now, many more people sleep in individual rooms, but the way we sleep is influenced by work schedules, worries, and so on. And all of this affects our sleep.

Works Blank with a drawing of a prehistoric clan sleeping together in a cave. The benefit of sleeping individually is obvious, but what do we lose?

— Everything has two sides. Sleeping alone is a recent phenomenon. Historically, we've mostly slept together, which involves enduring the noise of others, but also a certain calm and solitude, a sense of community. Human beings have always felt vulnerable at night and have gathered to fight threats. The problem is that the enemy has changed form, and if before it was the bone or the lion, now it's the fear of losing our home or job, or anxiety about the future. We used to organize ourselves to combat it, but now we're atomized. We think it's an individual problem, but it's more collective than it seems.

The comic's approach is also collective: it features a handful of people who suffer from insomnia for various reasons. Through them, you portray a more general malaise.

— Yes, insomnia is the common thread used to create a kind of social X-ray. The collective idea for the comic comes from reading the collective essay. The year we didn't make the revolution either, which inspired me to portray the present through narrative collage, something in the style of John Dos Passos's novel, Manhattan TransferAnd the topic of nighttime sleep comes up because more and more people around me are sleeping poorly, people who never had trouble sleeping before. There are also more sleeping pills circulating, and suddenly you realize that half the people you know are taking anti-anxiety medication to sleep.

In the comic you make it clear that anxiolytics are not the solution to the problem, but a problem in themselves.

— Benzodiazepines are the band-aid your body uses to keep you functioning and productive, but pills aren't a magic bullet. I interviewed many people with insomnia, and even when you take prescription pills in a more or less consistent way, there are problems with tolerance, and you have to keep trying new medications. I wish everything could be fixed with half a pill, but it's not that simple.

Most of the comic's protagonists are women. Is the gender also experiencing insomnia?

— Yes, statistically, insomnia is more prevalent in women. The data is dramatic: Spain has broken the world record for benzodiazepine consumption, making Spanish women one of the most heavily medicated populations in the world with benzodiazepines. In some women, insomnia stems from having suffered gender-based violence that has left them traumatized and unable to rely on sleep. But there are also women who, without having suffered gender-based violence, are victims of a more subtle violence in the form of an unbearable mental burden.

You also talk about sleep hygiene, which refers to the external conditions that help you sleep better. But these aren't accessible to everyone...

— No, because sleep hygiene is an impressive class privilege. Street noise, for example. Who can afford to live in an isolated house with no windows? I suffer from it myself, because I rent a house where there's a lot of noise, but I can't replace the windows with double glazing, because I won't spend the money if sooner or later I'll have to leave the apartment.

How did you research the topic?

— I started reading about the history of sleep, and the reading was very interesting, but perhaps too philosophical and abstract. To bring it down to earth, I needed to talk to people, so I made a little poster, "What keeps you up at night?", and shared it with friends and contacts to reach people outside my immediate circle. I also called the Sleep Unit at the Virgen de la Macarena Hospital in Seville, and I was lucky enough that the administrator who answered was a comic book fan who welcomed me and allowed me to spend a day with the doctor in the sleep unit while she was seeing patients. Some characters are based more on the interviews, and others on the reading I did beforehand, but it's all basically fiction.

Your way of constructing the characters is somewhat reminiscent of the visual technique of collage, which you also use a lot in your work.

— Yes, absolutely. In fact, I've taken collage from the graphic realm to the narrative. I've always built stories through added fragments, but here it's more pronounced because there are more characters than in previous books, but also more graphic registers, for example, for the moments when I draw dreams.

It's curious that you don't treat dreams only as dreamlike and poetic experiences, but as a kind of sublimation of the everyday violence of precarity.

— This was a challenge, because I dream every day. I mean, we all dream every day, but I always remember what I've dreamed. But most of my dreams are very basic, to be honest. My subconscious doesn't let go of my skin. So I had to rely heavily on my imagination and, for example, combine images from the past and the present.

Your first book, We're all okay.It was about your two grandmothers. The second one, Everything Under the Sun, about the landscape of your land and its transformations. But in the third one you have stepped outside yourself to observe others.

— Yes, absolutely. This has to do with the project I did after Everything under the sun, An exhibition at the IVAM about domestic work and caregiving, for which an anthropologist friend and I interviewed a lot of women who do this work. I've always been more interested in talking about others than about myself, and working from a social science perspective gave me the confidence to leave my family and my own environment and go out to meet people who have nothing to do with me, like a man who sleeps on the street or a young man who works as a... rider.

The last time we spoke You said that "between us all" (press, awards, readers) we had made you a comic book author, but that you still didn't see yourself that way. And now, do you see yourself more clearly? Before, your style was a hybrid of illustration and comics, but in Blank It's closer to a comic book.

— Well, I do see myself in it a bit more, to be honest. Perhaps because I've stepped outside of myself in this book. But also because I'm gaining more experience in comics and I know more authors. I've seen that the world of comics isn't as traditional and rigid as it used to be, that there are very avant-garde ways of telling stories, and above all, that there are many people working in very different graphic styles, especially among the new generation of female authors. I hardly know anyone who has studied at a comics school. There are many of us who don't come from the classic traditions but from other places, like Bea Lema, and that doesn't mean we're any less part of the profession. It's about time we started believing that ourselves.