"In Spain, there is a fear of talking about race"

[Photo by Maité Escarria and courtesy of Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio. Used with permission.]

Journalist Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio talks about racism and Afro identity in Spain...

"Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio is a journalist from Spain, the city of Madrid to be more exact. She is the daughter of a woman from Segovia, Spain and a man from Niefang, Equatorial Guinea in central west Africa.

Among other things, this multi-faceted reporter has published a Spanish-language novel titled “The Women Who Dared” (“Las que se atrevieron“), collaborated with multiple organizations such as Global Voices‘ partner Afroféminas, an online community for Afro-descendant women, and runs her own YouTube channel.

Global Voices spoke with Mbomío about her contributions to the fight against racism in the context of Spain, her thoughts about blackness, and her work as an activist.

Global Voices (GV): What are the risks or challenges of embracing the Afro or black identity in a society like Spain?

Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio (LM): In Spain, there is a fear of talking about race (acknowledging that races, from a biological perspective, don't exist and are a socio-economic construct), or let's say of dealing with certain topics that are uncomfortable or that, as photographer Rubén H. Bermúdez would say, ‘prove to be awkward,’ among other things, because it's assumed that it's something bad.

So it's not uncommon to hear phrases like ‘I'm not racist, but,’ as if that preamble were to invalidate the racist remark that usually follows.

For this reason, Mbomío says an important part of the fight against the injustices caused by racism depends on making the discrimination visible. And that in turn largely depends on the spaces in which those affected by it can be heard:

LM: Not long ago, Luis Castellví, a professor at Cambridge, wrote in an article: ‘For the white majority of Spain, racism is invisible, just like male chauvinism is for certain men, homophobia is for many heterosexuals, and a big etcetera. But obviously that doesn't mean that these kinds of discrimination don't exist. To know how much racism there is in Spain, the minorities who are affected and those who live with them must be given a voice.’

Well, this is what often happens in this society, that various -isms are discussed by those who have the privilege of not experiencing them and when we, the affected, offer an opinion, we are automatically accused of having a victim mentality without the understanding that listening to us is an opportunity to alter behaviors and, therefore, to contribute to the improvement of a country that we too belong to."

Read more from Sandra Abd'Allah-Alvarez Ramírez' original article at Global Voices here.

In France: "Literary Vending Machines Serve Up Short Stories"

IN GRENOBLE, FRANCE, the short story addict doesn’t have to go far to get their fix. 

Across the seven square miles of the central city, 14 orange-and-black machines* are dotted like Easter eggs in train stations, municipal buildings, and even the local museum. 

At the push of a button, each one will unspool a little piece of literature, printed on a long strip of paper, like a grocery store receipt. 

You can select for length—one, three, or five minutes—but precisely what you’ll be served up is in the hands of the gods. These are story dispensers, built by Grenoble-based publishing company Short Edition.

When the company began producing the machines in 2015, they were hardly set on global domination. But today, they are found around the world, with some 30 dispensers across the United States alone. (A map of the machines can be seen here.) 

In restaurants and hotels, libraries and government buildings, loiterers and literati alike can help themselves to these free stories, pulled from a digital bank of more than 100,000 original submissions.

The stories come from writing contests, with each entry carefully evaluated by Short Edition’s judges. At some point, they hope to translate them, and to “have some Asian authors read in Europe or America, American authors read in Africa or South America, etc.,” Loïc Giraut, an international business developer for the company, told LitHub. 

“We want to create a platform for independent artists, like the Sundance Institute,” Kristan Leroy, export director at Short Edition, said in an interview with the New York Times. “The idea is to make people happy. There is too much doom and gloom today.”

(* Dispensers cost $9,200, with an additional $190 monthly fee for content and software. COURTESY SHORT EDITION)

Read at source, Atlas Obscura.

Syrian refugees to finish university studies in Catalonia

"Students who were forced to interrupt their studies because of the war in Syria and who are now refugees in Lebanon, will finalise their degrees in Catalonia starting next year. 

The 20 students will be spread across 12 Catalan universities, thanks to a pioneering project promoted by the Generalitat. Each will have a grant of €10,000 a year to study and maintain themselves in a student flat."

Source: Catalonia Today (news.)

Review of "This Boy's Life" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

It’s a great relief to read something as authentic as this memoir of Tobias Wolff’s childhood.

In 2018, when (even for adults) predictable superhero and action movies are dominating the western world’s popular culture as a form of escapism, my bowels were nicely warmed by having come across a one euro second hand copy of this little printed gem in Barcelona. 

It had been republished in 1994, seemingly given away with an end of year issue of ‘Esquire’, a North American men’s magazine.

I happily absorbed all the low-lights of the author’s young life in Concrete, a small company-town just south of the Canadian border, dominated by a cement factory. 

The reader learns that Jack (as he preferred to be called, after novelist Jack London) needed to drag himself through an upbringing that had all the underhandedness of Spain’s ultra-conservative government and the punishing violence of a month in Syria. 

Punches and kicks at school were the norm and sometimes the same at home with added insults from Dwight, an ornery stepfather who drank to excess whenever he had the money to indulge.

Like plenty of working class women of her era, Jack’s bright and capable mother is shown to be trapped in low paying jobs and a string of abusive relationships. In a sign of what is to come, she and Dwight come back early from their two-day honeymoon “silent and grim, not even looking at each other.”

One of the refreshing things about this autobiography is how honest Wolff is about his own character. 

With the perception of a fine mimic, he picks apart his family and friends but he also openly acknowledges how he uses lies to beef up his status with the locals and how he steals like a modern-day financier. 

Wolff even details the deceptive methods he employed to swindle his way into an (unsuccessful) scholarship interview for an expensive private high school.

Touchingly, the author also explains where he found relief from the daily grind of school and unending chores at home. 

Through music he gained some mental freedom and earning boy scout symbols provided a way to “compel respect, or at least civility from those who shared them and envy from those who did not.”

The official scout publications (where the book’s title comes from) Wolff read with the kind of fanaticism that is common in teenagers. “What I liked about [their] Handbook,” he remembers, “was its voice, the bluff hail-fellow language by which it tried to make being a good boy adventurous, even romantic.” 

The Scout Magazine he reads in a trance, “accepting without question its narcotic invitation to believe that I was really no different from the boys whose hustle and pluck it celebrated...Reading about these boys made me restless, feverish with schemes.”

As you can see, for a book that was first published in the late 1980s its language is pleasingly still rooted in a much earlier post World War II rural USA.

As well as this, Wolff’s work stands out to me because it examines a cross-section of American society that is still badly neglected in English language literature. Today, these are the same gun-carrying people who voted Donald Trump into the White House, in the hope of something better for their receding lives and now dead or dying industries.

In a recent interview, Tobias Wolff quoted Auden’s line that “writing an autobiography [is] like being a leper showing his sores in the marketplace.” 

He could just as easily have mentioned Flannery O’Connor, who argued that anyone who survives adolescence has enough material to write about.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2018.]