"While October 1st was here, Getafe teenagers were watching 'Merlí'"

BarcelonaTwo of the questions poet Mario Obrero is often asked are: how come you're only 21 (and have six published books) and why a kid from Getafe speaks Galician and Catalan so well. He has no answer to the first—"you should ask my mother," he says—but he does to the second: "I realized a void I had as a Madrilenian and a Spaniard. There's no problem if I eat a pan of bread or an ensaimada or some Padrón peppers, but getting to the point of saying 'good morning' or 'good morning» It seemed like it was a heresy. Coming from such a monolingual background, I discovered that I have accent mallet and this curiously also brought me closer to other languages. Just like Virginia Woolf I demanded my own room centuries ago, because I was interested in my own language because it allowed me to participate in an identity that isn't far from me. After all, I studied at a public school called Concepción Arenal, a Galician feminist school, and the town on the Getafe side is called Parla," she explains in Barcelona, ​​where she presented the poetry collection. Magical times (Beautiful Warsaw) at the Poetry Festival.

Worker spent two seasons touring the State literary with A country to read, the program on La 2, while in parallel writing the essay that Anagrama has just published, Cone and curcuspin. There are eight letters to the languages of the State: Catalan, Aranese, Aragonese, Galician, Castilian, Basque, Asturian, and Extremaduran. His approach is poetic, linguistic, class-based, progressive, and above all celebratory. He can cite so many Vicent Andrés Estellés like Ramon Llull, Antoni Benaiges, Mireia Calafell or Miren Agur Meabe and her "distance is my place".

The Obrero family had spent their summers near Dénia, and Catalan was familiar to them, but they didn't learn it until years later. "On October 1st, in Getafe, we saw the Civil Guard march out and the "They are afraidThere were more flags than if Spain had won the World Cup. I didn't know who they were. theyI had never even been to PortAventura. And when I thought about who these evil people were, upon discovering Maria Mercè Marçal, Mercè Rodoreda, Aurora Bertrana, I realized that I was also part of them, that they interested me and challenged me much more than those cries of hatred uttered from ignorance. Why didn't they cry out "They are afraid"In front of the government delegation that had cut healthcare or public schools, does that really hurt?" he asks himself. So at the age of fifteen he approaches Catalan through reading, music and television. "While here the 1-O generated cracks of violence and wounds, all the teenagers in Getafe looked Marline in Catalan because the translation wasn't very good," he recalls. Later, studying philology at university, he decided to learn it more formally, for pure pleasure and also for politics, because languages are neither far away nor useless to him. "Who constructs the idea of what is useful and serviceable? Aren't words victims of a power and an economic system? Why isn't it vitally useful to say Querote, Maite Zaitut either I love you "to someone in their language?" he writes.

An identity of one's own

"We all suffer from Spanishness, Spaniards too," the poet laments. "When Lluís Cernuda said, 'I am Spanish without desire,' it really angers me to have to be Spanish without desire and not be able to have a hegemonic national identity. I have to make others, and mine has to do with the Civil War library, with the Alicante native Francisca Aguirre fleeing through La Jonquera in 1939, or Pasolini himself giving talks about Catalan during the dictatorship in Barcelona. That is my homeland. The Basque writer wrote in Basque as the Castilian does in Castilian, a García Lorca writing Six Galician poems or a Rosalía de Castro writing poetry in Galician from Salamanca. This has also existed and is part of what I would like my country to be," he argues.

In the essay, Obrero dares to shoot (and takes aim) even at controversial concepts such as that of charnego or the Catalan/Valencian glottonyms, and he does so by interweaving geographies, etymologies, poets, news, and ideas. He rejects the Constitution or the consultation on Valencian in classrooms, if the latter supports "the right to ignorance" of languages, and denounces a simplistic view based on the notion that "if I understand it, it's good; if not, it threatens me." "Learning a language is complicated, but it's no more complicated than understanding the Ibex 35, the 037 form for self-employed workers, the tax return, or why we have a head of state who hasn't been voted in. In other words, complication and not understanding things are part of our lives. I don't understand the chemical composition of a past. I don't understand the chemical composition of a past. That doesn't mean giving up on it," he reasons. In fact, he thinks that rejection or minoritization is a bad strategy, even from an Espanyol perspective. "If centuries after a linguistic imposition, of a Philip V, of two dictatorships in the 20th century, they have not managed to murder the Catalan language, I think it is already very difficult and perhaps they should change their strategy or simply accept a reality that, despite all the violence, has made a claim for its existence, its dignity and its recognition."

The class discourse

His speech always reflects his family origins: son of a shantytown, grandson of rural migrants in the city. It's not for nothing that Mario García Obrero uses his mother's surname as his signature: whoever is a shoemaker, let them make shoes. This is also why he links linguistic vindication with the defense of other social rights. "I would be more afraid of the climate crisis, the rise of war, a genocide, which is a reality of our time, than of the existence of a language, which has never killed anyone, while the imposition of languages has caused deaths and executions." Of course, they've called him woke from the right. "We're very used to being insulted and redefining it. At least let's speak from a place of thought and reason," he says.

He also rejects the idea of lumping all young people into the "more right-wing" label. as the polls say. "You can't say young people if we don't say grown ups"I'm the same age as the Princess of Girona and I have nothing to do with her. Neither does she pay taxes because she's self-employed, nor do I have blue blood," he says, although he does view the state's political drift with concern. "I don't think we've ever really believed that democracy consists of being democratic, of talking about everyone, of talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. When you have a 50% cut in the Faculty of Philology in Madrid, it's very difficult to ask young people to have a democratic or civic mindset, because democracy is seriously failing us. You can't play the victim, the victimizer," says this poet and classical guitarist who aspires to be happy, which means free, "and that implies making decisions and taking responsibility."