"Both Wise and Valiant" -- Women writers in Spain's history

María de Zayas, novelist of the Spanish Golden Age

Credit:Wikimedia Commons

 "Centuries ago, Spanish writers challenged gender norms and barriers...

An exhibit at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid focuses on some of the most important — but largely ignored — women writers of Spain's 16th and 17th centuries.


Think "Spanish literature" and you might come up with "Don Quixote," by Miguel de Cervantes. But there's so much more to classic Spanish lit than "Man of La Mancha."

That’s the focus of "Both Wise and Valiant," an exhibition at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, which looks at some of the most important — but largely ignored — women writers of Spain's 16th and 17th centuries. 

The exhibit opened in March but closed due to COVID-19. Now the exhibit has reopened and will be on display through September.

“What is surprising is that we haven't known many of these female writers until very recently," said Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez, curator

“What is surprising is that we haven't known many of these female writers until very recently. They are better known now, in the academic world, but not so much for the greater public. I think that’s something we have to keep working on, and that’s the idea of this exhibition,” said curator Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez, who is also a professor at the University of Iowa..."

Read more (and listen to a podcast of the story at PRI here.

"Sant Juan:" An explosive night

One thing that shocked me soon after moving here was that there are parents in Spain who are quite blasé about letting their young children play with fireworks. 

We personally witnessed a very nasty example of this at our first Sant Juan’s Day celebrations, over a decade ago.
  

A (then 5 year old) friend of my son’s had been allowed to play with firecrackers by himself for several hours and with little direct supervision by his parents.

This boy was standing very close to a small bonfire in the square where we were and he threw some kind of cracker into. 

As was likely, it exploded, injuring a girl nearby as well as damaging this boy’s face and eyes. My wife had the presence of mind to throw water in his eyes and he was rushed screaming to a hospital for treatment. 

Judging purely from the size of the blast from the fire, I would say the boy was quite fortunate to have not suffered permanent eye damage. 

(Perhaps the only pleasing result from that is that because our son also saw this happen to his friend, he still has a strong fear of firecrackers years after the event.) 

Another who shares these concerns is Juan Pedro Barret, the head of the burns unit at the Vall d'Hebron hospital in Barcelona. 

Doctor Barret is fed up of seeing injuries caused by the misuse of fireworks, including the need for hands, fingers and feet to be amputated.

He believes that the night of San Juan is always one of the worst times to have to be on duty in the accident and emergency department. 

According to him there is a constant flow of injured people but that after the mid-nineties when safety measures improved the number of those seriously harmed has decreased somewhat.

In one El Pais newspaper poll (of 2165 people) 70% supported the placement of restrictions on festivals with fireworks due to danger.

"Weightless" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

What is wrong with this scene?

Excited children playing together in a Barcelona street, their parents standing nearby watching, chatting, smiling.

Of course, only a few months ago, there was everything natural, normal and perfectly ‘right’ about this everyday picture. 

Now (at least at the time of writing) the responsible adults in the scene are breaking the law and can be fined for it. Something that was as wholesome as a summer day suddenly became an awful sin.

So, how are people in our part of the world dealing with this and other similar flips of fate?

One person who has a sharp insight into how Catalonia is coping at the moment is Australian psychologist Leigh Matthews [pictured above,] owner and founder of Therapy in Barcelona. In mid-March, flying back to Barcelona after visiting the Alhambra for her 43rd birthday, she travelled from the pleasures of Granada into a city under lockdown.

Leigh believes that Covid-19 has all the ingredients of the kind of collective, traumatic crisis that she routinely deals with on a personal level in her work: the element of surprise, a threat to essential aspects of life and loss of control.

She says she is able to bear witness to the stories of her international colleagues and clients. In her opinion, they bring expat powers of adaptability and a comfort with ambiguity to difficulties that are firsts for everyone here.

As a comparison, the current number of infections in Spain stands at 264,663 and deaths at 26,620 whereas Australia’s are at 6,941 and 97. “This disparity is great,” Leigh says. “Here we are tormented with a huge toll and suffocating restrictions, but Australians, with their elaborate economic rescue package and comparatively mild threat, are also gripped with uncertainty, grief and exhaustion from groundhog days of confinement.”

To Leigh, the pandemic reminds her of the engineers charged with saving the lives of the astronauts in the Apollo 13 space capsule almost exactly 50 years ago. They solved the crucial problem of making a square filter fit into a space that had only been designed for a round filter. 

In her view, what governments in Catalonia and Spain have to face is something very similar to the Apollo 13 scenario.

She believes the question for the authorities is essentially the same one for many people: doing what is possible. “Identify a problem. Throw the resources you have to deal with it onto the table and figure out how to manage the problem. Variation in contagion and death rates aside, we all face the “Apollo 13 exercise” daily – fumbling for solutions to working from home while crisis schooling, mastering the Virabhadrasana pose in online yoga and simultaneously managing stress, grief, trauma and death anxiety with the menace of infection and economic impairment looming over us,” she says.

“As a psychologist I can give you the shopping list of coping strategies. I can tell you there is resilience to celebrate, but resilience is intersected by privilege and the domestic, political and economic theatres we inhabit. The cohort of people in my life are well resourced, but the pandemic is as multitudinous as each story of every person living it. Many stories won’t have an Apollo 13 finale. They came up with something adequate and so can we, even if it’s just wearing a mask to take care of others or writing a “new normal” that embraces everyone.”

Personally speaking, some days I feel the gravity of the situation holding me down. On other days, like the Apollo 13 crew, I am weightless. I almost float.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2020.]

On beating Corona, a new order and kindness...

[Photo: Lluis Romero]

Author and journalist Matthew Tree's latest penetrating article in Catalonia Today magazine (published under the title "Ringing in the new:) 

"Last month, Maria Branyas, the oldest woman in Catalonia and indeed in the whole of Spain, and possibly in the whole of Europe, hit the virtual headlines when she survived a coronavirus infection at age 113. 

(She had also got through the First World War – during which the ship taking her and her family back to Barcelona from the United States was almost bombed -; the 1918 ’flu pandemic; the Spanish Civil War; and, of course, Franco’s wretched four-decade dictatorship). 

This extraordinary woman, born in San Francisco in 1907 and now resident in the Pyrenean town of Olot, broke the isolation of quarantine by tweeting clear and coherent messages to all and sundry, in one of which she said, re Covid-19: “I believe that nothing will be the same again... You will need a new order, a change in the hierarchy of values and priorities, a new human era.” 

She’s by no means the only person to think that the post-virus world will be completely different from the one we used to be used to. 

For example, Xavier Farràs, a professor at Barcelona’s Ramon Llull University, also sees major changes ahead, such as the ascendance of Chinese-type methods of social control and a huge increase in the number of people working at home. 

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek agrees that there will be no return to normality, and foresees the emergence of “a certain form of communism”. 

By contrast, a good friend of mine in London thinks that hardly anything will change, except maybe a certain reluctance for people to pay a lot more for a coffee served in a café when they’ve got used to making their own at home for a sixth of the price (and the same goes for any other drink you care to mention). 

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has stated publicly that absolutely everything will go back to normal. 

For what it’s worth, I was firmly in the ’nothing will change’ camp until I stumbled across an article entitled ’Greed Is Dead’ in the Times Literary Supplement by the economist Paul Collier, in which the author points out that ’Economic Man’ – a term coined in the 1950s to describe the type of person who does well in capitalist societies by putting greed and selfishness to economic advantage – is on the way out and indeed, must be frog-marched to the door if the rest of us want to survive. 

Recent studies of the evolutionary origin of successful human communities have shown that homo sapiens sapiens is a uniquely social species that functions best when it’s able to weave a “vast web of kindness and mutual obligations” (Collier dixit). 

In other words, exactly the type of web in which the successful capitalists of today would be unable to avoid throttling themselves to death. In a nutshell, we are genetically programmed to be prosocial, to exchange information and assistance without a profit motive, and to thus develop the ’collective brain’ we call culture, which is essential to future human progress. 

Needless to say, any aberration from this ethical model based on mutual aid is precisely that: an abnormality, a deviation, a mistake. 

Our business model of the past couple of centuries is thus a freakish wrong turn along which those who take it are given a licence to be bad, with fatal consequences: wealthy capitalists, far from being social successes, are as impossible to integrate into a healthy society as are psychopaths. 

These recent discoveries are the result of an increased overlapping of scientific disciplines (by way of example, one of the scientists Collier quotes is a professor of ecology, biology, sociology, medicine, data statistics and biomedical engineering), which have now made it possible for us to take a much better look at the still fairly blurry Big (Human) Picture. 

It could well be that the impact of Covid-19 will finally enable us to see it so clearly, we’ll be able to detect the devil in the details – and deal with him."

"A dream of trains..."

I have a love of trains. They feature in my latest book, "Slow Travels in Unsung Spain" but this Australian guy has also written and dreamt about them during lockdown...

"Sleeper trains, after suffering a decline in the first half of this decade, are making a big comeback in their European heartland after Greta Thunberg’s climate activism..."

Read more from source here.