Maria Rovira: "With this turn to the right, anything you say of pure common sense is 'woke'"

BarcelonaFrom Maria Rovira, also known as Oye Sherman on stage, we knew she was tremendously witty and fun thanks to her monologues and media appearances. With Garlanda, her first book, she proves that she can also channel beauty and sensitivity through words, without ceasing to make the reader smile, and also laugh, with her intelligent and imaginative gaze. Edited by Blackie Books, it arrives in bookstores on April 8.

The subtitle warns us that the book is about “words, losses, and other celebrations”. How do these concepts come together?

— The idea of Guirnalda is precisely the thread of continuity that unites the things I like: childhood memories, grief, discoveries... In the end, the losses we suffer throughout life also make us who we are. And some are part of the natural course of things. It is also beautiful how we can make a toast, even with teary eyes.

What pains appear in your book?

— The most obvious is the death of my father, but there is also the grief for the loss of a childhood friendship, or for starting to see that the world is not entirely as you were being told. There is the grief of feeling a disconnection with your body, or feeling that you are growing and you are not following the metamorphosis you are undergoing much. There is the grief of not being able to communicate with the other... But there are also many celebrations. Luckily, life is balanced in this regard.

Speaking of grief for a father, there's a moment when you describe it as a “sweet hammering”. It's a powerful image, but the sweetness part is counterintuitive.

— It happens to many people, I suppose. Griefs are not solely an experience of pain, but they also bring closure and then give you back many things, especially many beautiful things. Someone stops being in a specific physical place, but starts being a bit everywhere: in any object, melody, situation... And you feel how you start to embody them a little, as if they had entered somewhere. I have noticed this incorporation of my father. And you think, how lucky, to be able to remember him.

Garlanda is, also, a book about the crisis at 35. You reference that phrase by Dante, when at your age he writes that ofEn el mezzo del caminn di nostra vita, but also Agnès Varda, when she has a character say “We’ve already shat half our shit”. I don’t know which of the two you identify with more.

— Well, I find both of them quite amusing, to be honest. Varda's fascinated me. It's an awareness of knowing where you are and conceiving yourself as a shit-filled container that is emptying.

Indeed, Dante says that at that age one is in a dark wood. Perhaps it is from the depositions already evacuated that Varda spoke of. Do you feel, then, at the equator of your life?

— I can't put myself to do arithmetic, because, of course, I have no idea how long I will live, but I do think it's an important turning point. And to think that it's gone half on autopilot and now I have to make a relevant change in perspective and in the way your head works. And also in how you look back at everything you've lived. I do notice it, I notice it differently.

What are your future plans, with this awareness?

— Ugh, we live in such a precarious universe that my dreams are like having a house, but no longer necessarily owning it, but rather under a classic rental agreement.

You publish books, you often perform shows, you collaborate on programs like Està passant, you do radio, you have a comedy hour on 3Cat. With all this level of activity, between zero precariousness and ten material opulence, where would you place yourself?

— Sure, I can't complain about what I have, but there's no promise of stability. In the end, there are many types of precariousness. I wouldn't put myself at the head of the collective of precarious workers in Catalonia. But being self-employed and doing creative things involves uncertainty, which translates into mental and, perhaps, physical exhaustion. Now, in the end, I got into this because I wanted to. No one forced me at gunpoint.

Do you see yourself doing monologues, for example, twenty more years?

— I hope so, because it's a format that I enjoy and allows me to say certain things in a specific way. Live interaction with the audience is very attractive. I'm not an actress and I can't connect with it the way an actress would, but I can as a stand-up comedian.

The book is a mushroom, is it something you wanted to get rid of and that's it, or do you aspire to make more books in the future?

— I would really like to write. In fact, my dream as a child was to be a writer, and in the meantime, then, I got sidetracked. It is true that I have been writing, one way or another. In Garlanda there is a lot of my personal material, which is a bit like the phenomenon of the first album, so other books would be different now.

Pure fiction?

— We are now with an animation series with Martí Mencion, which is about Saint George before he was Saint George, all of this.

In fact, in Garlanda you talk about Saint George. And how, the great braggart, only mobilizes when there's a princess to save, while he doesn't mobilize for all the children who have died in previous years.

— It makes me laugh because, when we are little, the stories they tell us we don't know if they are true or false. And you take them very literally. I took the stories they told me very seriously and they became part of me, in a way, and I remember thinking: "Hey, this Saint George, why doesn't he do anything before? How do you eat this?"

You have done everything, then, in the media, but always as a collaborator. Would you like to lead your own project?

— Yes and no. There is a part that I don't know if I feel capable of doing. And, on the other hand, I am always more comfortable in a collective format. But it is true that a tailor-made program could appeal to me, of course.

Do you already have it in mind?

— Ah, no, it's just that there's a part of me that never projects, and that has good and bad things.

In the book, in fact, you often talk about a certain chronic vital dissatisfaction. And about a phrase that often accompanies you: “You should be having a better time”. What things make you feel good, without any caveats?

— There are many! My friendships, eating, traveling, being with animals... But it is true that from time to time there is always the typical travel day when things don't go well. If we zoom in with enough intensity on things, there will always be some reason for dissatisfaction.

How satisfied would you consider yourself?

— Nine out of ten. It depends on the day you ask me.

The working title of the book was “There has to be a better way to do this”. Why?

— It is a motto, a mantra, a pursuit. Fortunately, in recent years it has been decreasing, but it repeats itself to me. When I am in a crisis situation and something is not going well for me... the phrase comes to me. And yes, that's how the book had to be said, but Jan Martí, the editor, said «Well, we will keep thinking». Which shows that there must be a better way to choose a title for this book. In the end, it is a condemnation to dissatisfaction, this way of thinking.

Is it also part of the engine of your creativity?

— No, no. When I'm looking for another way to do things, but from enjoyment and from ambition, I'm not thinking that. "There has to be a better way..." is a kind of reproach. Like when you're assembling furniture and you start having extra pieces, or you're getting tangled up in a bureaucratic process and you think not only has there to be a better way to do this, but surely all the people you know are doing it better. They all know, they have the right formula, they know the way, and you're really stuck.

You write in the book about primal envy.

— In the end, you realize that chronic dissatisfaction is very common. And you feel like everyone is getting by with a kind of unknown energy that you don't have. But I think many people feel this way too, of course.

I interviewed you nine years ago, when you were just starting to do stand-up comedy. Back then, this industry was a field of turnips. Is it normalized now?

— There is now more programming by women, with parity comedy lineups, but there is still the pending work of giving main roles as presenters and directors to women in entertainment programs. Entertainment, in this country and in prime time, has been eminently masculine. The paradigmatic case is that of Natza Farré. She is a woman who is 50 years old, who had been doing humor in Catalan for many years, being a reference and with a specific character that everyone bought... but she didn't have a show. For me, it's like the canary in the mine. The barometer that tells us: well, that's how things are.

Where does the love for words begin?

— I think there was a day when I was bothering my brother and, to entertain me, he told me “Here, read this!” And he gave me the Great Dictionary of the Catalan Language. And I said “Ah, well, we’ll start reading this”. But I got tired very quickly: to abadessa. I remember thinking: “I don’t know what an abbey is, it’s not generating interest for me”. But this was my first contact with words as a unit, not just as meaning, but as signifier. Examining words with a magnifying glass is something I really enjoy doing.

Is there a preferred etymology?

— Well look, an interesting recent one is that of skeleton, which comes from Greek and means "I dry". I quite like these from Greek that come, I dry, like herpes, which is "I crawl". And of course, it is really impressive to think of a skeleton saying it. I am what remains when the flesh has dried. Interesting.

And any preferred Catalan word? Not whisper, which is the typical one for many people, please...

— Whispering is terrible. I think the equivalent of whispering, in etymology, is canteen, which is that it sings and it cries. Of words, I like many. Stomaching, for example, or to tonify. These beating verbs interest me. I thought it came from tomato, but rather from stomach, as in receiving a blow to the stomach, understood here as stomach meaning the whole thorax. Pretty cool!

You are a millennial. Do you identify with the stereotypes about your generation?

— Which ones do you think they are?

Narcissism derived from social media. That you are made of porcelain. That's what the boomers say, let's go.

— Today's young people have gone to therapy to talk about you, boomers! I don't think we're a bad generation. If putting issues like mental health and vulnerability at the center makes us very woke, then so be it. It's a reaction to a whole world we've found ourselves in, from when you discover certain mechanics of privilege and oppression. If they accused me of that, I wouldn't find it offensive, really.

Woke has become a very loaded word. It's practically an insult already...

— Sure, but it's an insult to a certain type of people. As we are on this turn to the right, anything you say of common sense is woke. Is it woke to think that everyone deserves a roof over their head simply for existing?

The far-right is dominating the discourse thanks in part to its ability to subvert words. They have taken freedom, despite their authoritarian tics.

— I suppose they are talking about the freedom to smoke the common good at any time and impose market logic everywhere. It is this freedom in particular. But, at the same time, this system they defend is denying freedom to many people, absolutely conditioned by the economic vulnerability in which they live. I mean they are not such fans of freedom, really.

And yet another sentence: “You can’t make jokes about anything anymore!”

— Saying that you can't make jokes about anything anymore means that you only found humor funny when it made fun of women, homosexuals, migrants, fat people... It's having a very small world. Humor is a code and you can make jokes about many, many things. In the end, what's happening is that they're not letting you be the bully you were.

If you were canceled now and couldn't do comedy, how do you think you would make a living?

— Surely I would dedicate myself to cultural dissemination. I have like three spheres, which are humor, communication, and culture. And it's a Venn diagram where many things are found. I want to think I would have a place there. I work better in the world of ideas than in the material.

Explain your synesthesia. When did you realize it?

— I thought everyone saw it that way: that everyone saw food in words and that everyone saw the same food. And one day I had to go sharing it and they kept telling me no, until a friend told me: «You´re right, it´s true, it happens to me too». And there I felt, I was enlightened, until she told me «Yes, because lettuce tastes like a computer». And I thought no, that it wasn´t the same. And then I think we both got a little disappointed. We went around thinking that our synesthesia was better than the other´s. There is a lot of arrogance in the world of synesthesia!

Does every word really have a food associated with it?

— Yes, it's quite general. Many correspond to foods I already knew when I was little. There's a lot of industrial pastries. There are many brands. There's a lot of chicken in many forms, for example.

How do you see "diario ARA" from your synesthesia?

— "Daily" is like a yogurt with peach pieces, "daily". And "now", said like that, "now" is a piece of tender boiled bean. But it can also be someone doing like this, with their hands. Of course, there are many gray areas. I don't have it all mapped out exactly, but it goes something like this.

Is it a superpower that helps you in the creative process?

— Not at all. I wouldn't call it a superpower either. In fact, it causes me problems sometimes. When I'm very hungry, I start to see the words people say and I start to salivate. It happened to me for the first time in high school. We had to finish the topic, and the teacher was saying, 'I know you're all very hungry, but class is until a quarter past two, and until a quarter past two.' And he was giving example sentences, and they were breaking down for me, as if I were at one of those revolving buffets. And I was having a terrible time.

In the book you record a brutal obituary of the actor Yul Brinner that, in five very short sentences, dispatches a whole life. When they have to write yours, we hope it is in many more than 35 years, what five sentences would you like to be said?

— Ugh, I don't know. Making an analogy with Brinner's situation, maybe I'm now in the phase they called circus and acrobats. We should assume I'm dying today... Since I have this habit of not projecting, I think I would say anything, right now.

But you would like to be remembered, beyond your own people?

— I would like to, but because it would mean that I have managed to do something that has connected with people, whether it be a humorous product, a book, or any of the things I have to do. Now, I also think that there are such bad people in the world that we remember that... I can be remembered on a small scale, that wouldn't be a problem either, because I don't have delusions of grandeur. It's just that I don't project anything. That's a problem.

Do you see it like this?

— I think it's also very beautiful to plan. I used to envy people who said, “Wow, I'll do this and I'll do that...” Afterwards, it doesn't mean they necessarily do it and they change direction when they want. But they have a direction, a place. And in going there, things happen to them. I guess there's something in the fact of not planning that is not believing yourself capable. So, I feel bad in this regard. I don't know, I don't know exactly where it comes from, but once I find myself in it, I move forward. Now that I think about it, I want to get my driver's license once and for all. I hope to be remembered by the DGT as a person who passed this damn hellish exam.

Where will you go the first day you can drive a car yourself?

— Surely to see my brother in Montseny. We will take my mother. My mother tells me I have to get my license to take her. Let's hope it goes well, then, and we reach a good destination, a good parking lot.