“When we are born, we are all Moors”...

...says a character in Àngel Guimerà’s play La filla del mar (The daughter of the sea, 1900.)

Agata, this fictional female whose “origins are unclear” was born among Moors and for this simple reason she is despised and considered to be a heretic. The theme is just as relevant today. Human beings still judge and discriminate against other human beings over aspects of our identity that are beyond our control. We still love hating.

Xavier Fàbregas believed that “the theme of the misfit, the outsider” is a reoccurring one in Guimerà’s Catalan literature and partly puts this down to the author having parents who were unmarried.

A wet nurse, a Jewish boy, a mad woman – Guimerà’s choice of individuals to focus on his writing seems to confirm his affinity for society’s overlooked.

According to Ramon Bacardit “He wrote about conflicts of passion that, at bottom, implied power relations, frequently highlighting issues of non-adaptation…[as] the backdrop onto which he projected relationships containing…elements of masochism and tormented sensuality.

The street I am soon to live in is named after Àngel Guimerà.