Enric Casasses: "I spent the last two years of Franco's life in exile abroad."

Barcelona"The revolution will come disorganized or it will not come at all," he writes. Enric Casasses (Barcelona, ​​​​1951) in his new book, The police will be in force (Documentos Documenta, 2025). The volume, with drawings by Tura Sanglas and a "blue-collar" cover, takes the reader on a roller coaster of emotions following the referendum of October 1, 2017. Casasses, recently recognized with the Jaume Fuster Award for his lifetime achievement, welcomes us on a corner of the Eixample district to talk about his spirit of protest and the sense of humor that permeates much of his work. He grew up in post-war Barcelona, the son of chemists Enric Casassas and Simó and Pepita Figueras i Cros, who instilled a love of literature in both him and his sisters, Anna and Maria, who have dedicated themselves to translation and graphic design, respectively.

In your new book, we read a "résumé" that begins with: "Born the year and time of the tram strike." It's a way of saying you have a revolutionary spirit within you, isn't it?

— That strike was legendary, the first declared anti-Franco movement. It was powerful. At home, they had to search me on foot, and they had to wait a day because the fucking strike was on.

In that same text, you add: "From a very young age, I started not reading newspapers." It's another way of protesting, in this case, against current events and the way the media sells them.

— It was my mother who taught me to read. I must have been about three years old. I loved reading everything: signs, labels, stories... But I was annoyed with newspapers, and I still take pictures now. One memory I have from when I was little is Dad coming home for lunch from university. He'd walk up the street reading the newspaper, which he must have bought after getting off the subway. I'd see him walking and think, "I wonder if he'll hit a lamppost!"

And it crashed?

— No. I'd come home, have lunch, and once I'd finished reading the newspaper, I'd ask him, "What does the newspaper say?" And he'd reply, "We'll be so good!" We'd have this conversation every day.

Do you share your father's sense of humor?

— There's a kind of legacy from both him and my uncle Oriol. Both had a quick wit, eager to take everything apart. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they were born in Sabadell in the 1920s...

It was a place and time known for the humor of the Sabadell Alloy, of which they were part Joan Oliver, Francesc Trabal and Armand Obiols, among others.

— My uncle was a friend of the painter and novelist Joan Vilacasas, who also has that Sabadell sense of humor. He has a very good novel, Viaduct Operation, which is a whole dialogue in direct style without adding "he said" or "she said", but you never get lost.

You told me that it was your mother who taught you to read.

— Yes. Her mother came from L'Escala, from a family that salted anchovies. She was the first to go to university. Victor Catalan He had noticed her, but they did not establish a relationship because the mother was very shy.

Until not long ago, my mother still came to see you recite.

— She died at 101 and a half. She seemed immortal! Each time you saw her, her energy diminished a little, but she wasn't in any pain. She was in good spirits until the end.

In the book, you declare yourself "allergic" to cards. Do you remember when you started to go against the grain?

— I suppose it was gradual. Partly it came from me, but also from the group of friends I met. When I was 14, I began to admire the idea of eccentricity. Since I wasn't particularly outrageous, I would indulge in small eccentricities, like wearing my pants buckle backward.

Do you still do it?

— I've kept it until now, yes I brought back the long hair.Peel off, we don't know if you're an uncle or an aunt...." Later I formulated the idea that extravagant characters end up being the most characteristic of an era. From Victorian England we remember Oscar Wilde. From medieval England we have in mind Ramon Llull, who was stranger than anyone. Those who best define an era are the weird guys.

You say that "you go around disguised as a citizen, that is, as a subject, that is, as a normal person," but that in reality you are one of those who are "not admitted anywhere."

— I've never been with anyone or anything. It comes, in part, from bad influences, as my mother would say.

Friends?

— Yes. A very important one, still current, was Miquel-Dídac Piñero Costa, from L'Escala and the CNT, a bookseller and amateur archaeologist. 36 otherwise. On the one hand, there was the influence of Miquel-Dídac, and on the other, the stoners: Pau Riba, Pau Maragall... I ended up there through other friends, who were more reserved.

Why is it a way of pigeonholing you?

— They must label you somehow, I guess. When they said that to me years ago, it pissed me off more.

You told me you started reading very early. When did you start writing?

— My passion for dirtying paper goes way back. The first thing I had to do was automatic writing and things like that. I was delirious in prose.

"If philosophy looks at the whole / poetry, art, looks at everything," you write.

— Philosophy interests me as something more than what exists. We must preserve the curiosity that dogs have for everything.

Haven't you lost your curiosity over the years?

— No. But sometimes I get distracted because something super obvious is happening right next to me, and I haven't noticed. I haven't been able to be as observant as Pla, who doesn't miss a thing, but everything can interest me, and I look everywhere.

When would you say politics, society, and the world began to appear in your writing?

— It was there from the start. I actually had to get it out so I wouldn't become an anarcho-propagandist. I try not to make it a dogma, but rather an attitude.

Maintaining a resilient attitude in the final years of Franco's Spain must not have been easy.

— The group of outlaws I was with were part of the student movement, which was dominated by people with various membership cards. There were all sorts of communist leanings: those from the party, Red Flag, the Trotskyists... The anarchists were those who had CNT membership cards, and then there were us who opposed the student movement. We were into the playful vibe. We were part of a situationist line without knowing it.

I imagine the parody must not have been fully appreciated...

— I dropped out of university, or it dropped me. Some of our group went to Puig Antich and the real, more or less armed revolution, and ended up badly... Others fell into drugs, like bad and they also ended badly. And others of us left.

In the end, it worked out for you, but you, for example, had to leave the country.

— The police were all over us. I was part of the last generation of exiles: I spent the last two years of Franco's reign abroad. I celebrated the dictator's death in England.

Were you in danger?

— Both my sister and I were tried for rebellion. When they arrested us, it was to see if they could reach the others through us, those who were more seriousThey accused us of recruiting naive people for the anarchist movement. I got three years, but I was already out. My sister didn't go to prison either, because her family appealed the sentence. Her trial was still pending when we were pardoned.

The shadow of Franco and the dictatorship is still quite present in The police will be in force.

— The outbreak of the spontaneous revolution that occurred around October 1, 2017, came at a time when the generation scared of '39 had already died. What happened back then was brutal: people were scared for decades. In 2017, the desire to talk about everything reappeared. It was a masterclass of disorganized revolution, despite the political parties. The whole thing ended when they started arresting Catalan politicians, and they spoke in Spanish during the trials. That was the big mistake.

Your book begins just after the imprisonments of Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez.

— I went to the demonstration that night handing out this poem: "The dictator didn't fall. / The dictator died in bed / And the dictatorship endures. / And now that we're just touching him / The curb is seething / As if we were scorpions / Killable by footsteps." Etc.

The referendum and what happened in the years immediately following were moments of euphoria and also of indignation, right?

— Yes. Both the enthusiasm and the anger were very strong. The feeling was that something was finally happening. It seemed like we were going for real. In the end, it turned out not to be.

Would you say that optimism predominates in the book?

— Optimism or pessimism are realms of the future. The realm of my book is a present in which there was euphoria and hope.

Was it worth going to vote on referendum day?

— In all the years of democracy, I've never voted. I made an exception that day, when the clear option for independence existed. But I didn't vote dogmatically, but rather thinking: "Look, the Spanish state could break up, let's see what will come out of it..."

Didn't you vote for organization, but perhaps for disorganization? You write: "Get disorganized and stand up to them, and don't let them stop you from doing your thing."

— When I was arrested in 1973 and taken to the Via Laietana police station before being interrogated Serious They put a guy in front of me and started asking me questions to test me. Some friends had rented a house in Mirasol where we were going to fuck around. blind people already listening to Black Sabbath. The policeman's first question was: "What organic relationship unites you with the members of the Mira-sol commune??" I responded with two questions: "Common?" "Organic?"We were a group of friends who had a good time together, and a lot of it. Since the organization couldn't take anything away from me, the cop told me:"Well, what drug were you taking??" I replied that I smoked Bisonte. He didn't quite believe it: "When we entered, he had such a stench that he knocked us back..."I insisted that I only smoked Bisonte, and in the end the cop told me:"So what were we, a commune of faggots?"

In the book, the idea of revolution is also linked to love.

— With love, art, and art theory. They are two important forces.

There's a constant search for freedom in your poems. As you've progressed, have you felt more capable of doing what you wanted?

— In part, yes. At the same time, I would love to be able to recapture the inspiration I had when I was 30. Something I read about learning from someone said: "When you've learned enough to write, Anna Karenina you can't write anymore War and PeaceWhat you gain on one side, you might lose on the other. The older I get, the more I realize what happens to me. I used to be more scared. But I ended up doing it anyway.

It was from the reissue of That thing In 1991 in Empúries you started publishing regularly, right?

— When it came out That thing, the prevailing feeling was: "Oh, kid, you're going to get scolded. This isn't done."

When do you think you started writing without any kind of obsession?

— I still see now That thing It was a very daring book. But it won the Serra d'Or Critics' Prize. I kept publishing and winning more awards. I thought the world would come to an end, and instead, the world was telling me, "Oh, how great." In a way, it was a disappointment, that pseudo-success.

With the Honorary Award for Catalan Literature Was the feeling different?

— Yes, because it was a different time. I reaffirm what I said, that suddenly I found myself playing at the older table. I had just joined all those people who seemed like they were the real deal and had received the award earlier. I thought it was fun. They started calling me "young poet" when I was 40, and it's stuck with me. I'll end up in a wheelchair, and they'll still call me "young poet."