The literary debut of Juana Dolores (El Prat de Llobregat, 1992) with Bijuteria (Galerada, 2020) won the Amadeu Oller prize, made a lot of noise, especially because of her controversial opinions, which put her on the map and in the eye of the hurricane. especially in networks. Writer and actress with the vocation of enfant terrible, today she presents a new book, Catalan Requiem, at the Joan Brossa Foundation’s Free Arts Center (7 p.m.), with a performance included. And if a nation parades on a red carpet (Edicions Poncianes), a short text proposed by the composer Marc Migó.
After Bijuteria and two plays, a requiem.
The Cor Canta asked Marc Migó for a piece to premiere at L’Auditori –premiered on March 5– and he thought of the national requiem format, like Brahms’s German Requiem, which has been the soundtrack of the book. I am a very slow writer and a perfectionist, I get very scratchy, I need my time and although I had many proposals from large publishers, writing on request makes me very nervous and creates a lot of anguish, because I owe something to someone who is normally a company. But I would never have imagined the possibility of being a librettist.
He was excited.
I was very attracted to it, and writing, thinking or imagining a Catalan requiem was a challenge. I came from many difficulties and controversies at the national level, above all because of my Marxist and independence ideology, more than because of the quality of my literature, it is super shabby and super sad, but it seemed to me a way to continue reflecting on what Catalonia is and to do it from a Catalan perspective, rather than pro-independence, which are not exclusive.
Did you stick to the music?
The condition is that they let me do what I want, but I learned a lot about the structure of the requiems, I heard a lot, I wanted it to have three parts because the number 3 is very important to me, and the parts have the names of some of the mythical and typical parts of the requiem, because I wanted a formal reference that was related to tradition, always from a contemporary perspective, above all because as a writer I like to be rigorous and take the act of writing seriously.
In the book the speaker is a nation.
A nation, yes, and not the nation, the choice is important. But I am a nation, it is totally identified in my person, and it presents itself not only as a desirable figure although it has lost the power of seduction, but there is a supernatural power, with its most monstrous facet, and she is aware, but also she is old and she also has a heart and she also has hands and she also has sex. The natural and the non-natural coexist, the wonderful of magic and the not so wonderful but terrifying for being non-human. I lived these parallels, it was a very sad moment in my life, and when you’re sad you don’t just cry, you also hurt the people you love, in this case my partner for a year and a half.
And it hurt him.
It hurt her because she was crazy. Marguerite Duras in an interview says “she was writing and suddenly I found myself screaming and I didn’t know why she was screaming, I didn’t know why she was screaming and screaming because she was afraid of driving me crazyâ€. This was the mood of the requiem.
And it seeped into the writing.
All the sentimental crisis and the sensitivity crisis was closely linked to a political crisis and a literary crisis. Politics for so many years of process, a time of disappointment.
And literary?
Because of the current crisis in Catalan literature, without an organized vanguard, because represented by individuals it doesn’t make much sense. We become characters instead of forming a driving group that reflects on our literature. Catalan literature is very poor, but that does not mean that there are no wonderful things.
Too many cliques?
I don’t have writer friends, really. The only one I consider my friend is Albert Roig, one of the best poets, if not the best Catalan poet alive right now after Dolors Miquel. Miquel’s pink plastic glove is the great poetry book of the 21st century, and La dona que mirava la tele is great, and for me it was very important. What makes me reject, and it is a mistake, is that Catalan writers think that by writing in Catalan we are already excellent, or that we can only claim our own Catalan culture. There is not so much to claim and nothing happens, because we are a small country. If we were older, we’d have more shit and more cool stuff, it’s a matter of proportion. We have very little self-criticism. But even though I don’t have writer or poet friends, like that, I’ve done more interesting collective work than any of them. And I’ve just set up and created my own production company, Castillo de Diamante, to be free and independent on a scenic level, above all. I can send to hell and hate many writers and poets because they are seedy and tacky but I will know how to value their work.
You see a lot of patriotic sentimentality, today.
An identity sentimentality, basically, but it has nothing to do with taking sensitivity into account as a space to claim and politicize. Because capitalism is bureaucratizing and systematizing us as individuals: we lead totally mechanical lives focused on production. There is no space to do politics from the affectation of individual sensibility, and writing is my way of conveying it without leading me to disorder or chaos. But to write I have to read, I have to know my tradition, my culture, and this is also a political commitment.
In the Catalan Requiem there is a constant religious element.
There is the Christian religious element, but also pagan, I try to do this syncretism. I am interested in mythology, and Christianity can be understood as mythology. Now I am obsessed with the figure of fairies in medieval times from the 12th century, especially from the texts of MarÃa de Francia. I am very interested in conversing with tradition and popular culture.
Where are the wise, the teachers of the law, those who know how to argue?, he says in the book.
In this country there is a lack of intellectuals and the few that exist are mistreated and ignored: the emptiness of not being able to dialogue with anyone.
And does that have to do with the country?
It has to do with capitalism and its neoliberal phase. Obviously it affects us in terms of the country, but also in terms of the State. European culture is in the doldrums, we live in absolute cultural mediocrity and the university is completely bureaucratized and systematized and the way to access it is to comply precisely with the bureaucracy and systematization that it demands.
Write that femininity surpasses any other power in gifts.
The feminine imaginary interests me a lot as an aesthetic, in a more literary, artistic or ideological aspect. I defend femininity as a cultural legacy with which we can create feminist critical thinking, as a more cultural traditional legacy. I am not afraid of the dichotomy between nature and society, nor between woman and man, and that does not mean that later I do not have a political opinion regarding the construction of gender, which is social and cultural, obviously, and unfair in many ways. But to write it serves me as a color from the palette to paint. But maybe ten years from now I’m writing about something else. Femininity has something that masculinity will never have, this kind of idealization and sacralization, which obviously has played into inferiorization at some points. Bijuteria is a collection of love poems that does not pose a deep reflection but rather a break in style with all contemporary Catalan literature up to now. I recently realized that I si una nacim desfila por una catifa vermella is a text about love, but also a myth about the Catalan nation from a feminine and above all glamorous perspective and also with a bit of hesitation, because I’m fed up that Catalonia seems so boring.
The waver is part of Juana Dolores.
And of my work. For example, Bijuteria has a connotation of vacile, and with a feminine and feminist dimension. The play Juana Dolores: Massa diva per a un moviment assembleari highlights being a diva. Then the audiovisual piece Miss Universes, which I wrote, performed and directed, is also part of that imaginary, like Hit me if I’m pretty, my latest play, because it is a rally. And if someone was born parades under a vermella catifa, interpreting the nation, I think it’s quite hesitant, right?
Is it surprising because a woman does it?
Not so much because I’m a woman but because I do it from an elegant, glamorous, self-confident perspective and imagining a nation as if it were a celebrity, Catalan in this case.
The part of the book with photographs obeys this celebrity impulse? It is surprising in a book of poetry, but when RosalÃa or Björk or Iron Maiden release a record there are a lot of photos and it seems perfectly normal.
Yes. I don’t find any kind of problem with it, but it is true that when I published Bijuteria, a lot of Catalan literature said that I was doing the performance and the show because I was an actress and because I came from the world of show business. Which cannot have less to do with me, because I don’t have actor or actress friends, I mean, I don’t have any friends from the theater world. There is a poem I wrote after Bijuteria called Carià tide 2, which said that God does not distinguish between actresses and poets. In the end I am an actress too, and in the book I interpret this nation not only by personifying it literally in my individuality but also by interpreting it in the photographs. The photographs are not fashion photos, there really is an interpretation of the Catalan nation. I believe that since it is not my second collection of poems, this book, because in the end it is a short text that is a requiem that I accompany with two separate poetic and narrative texts, gives the book a sense of artifact, of a political and artistic artifact. I will continue in this line, but above all I want to publish many books. I have taken too long to write this because it was wrong. I was dissociated between my writer person and my militant person.
Catalan version, here
