2024-05-01 20:10:04
There is an invisible and impalpable thread that unites the protagonists of Clara Morales’ stories. Her stories are not set in the same place or time, but they are built on the same base: memory. A survivor of a concentration camp, a teenager who can’t cope with her heels on an uncertain night, an old woman who is going to be evicted, a homosexual at an anarchist rally, an exile who writes to her sister from afar, a girl who stops being one while the Wanninkhof case is eviscerated on television. These particular but universal stories are brought together in the volume I almost don’t remember anymore which has just been published by the Tránsito publishing house and which marks the author’s debut in fiction.
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Morales is not new to the world of letters because in the not-so-distant past her professional field was journalism. In 2021, after writing in media such as El País and serving for six years as head of the culture section of Infolibre, she took an exam (a very popular option in recent times), passed it and now works as a librarian in the Complutense University of Madrid. She doesn’t miss the old side of her too much because “when you have better working conditions it is difficult to miss the previous side,” she tells elDiario.es.
However, something remains of his old work in his way of dealing with writing. The documentation he carries out to put together his stories is exhaustive – at the end of the book he details all the references – because much of his fiction takes place in reality: there was torture during the Franco regime and a first LGTBIQ+ demonstration, there is confusion in adolescence and people who are kicked out of their homes and their country. “How are you going to start writing if you don’t know how people spoke at a certain time or what they ate or what the streets were like. It is very difficult for me because I don’t have a super-developed imagination, I don’t think I could write science fiction,” she says. “Then I have to resort to documentation, like so many people. In that case, maybe I have learned a little about journalism but, in reality, when we are interested in something we all ask questions, read books, press articles or ask people if we have access to it,” he responds.
The story Cause 105, included in the volume as an epilogue, is based on a very specific true fact that is directly related to its author. It is the story of the doctor Antonio Gil García, father of his paternal grandmother, who went to prison on October 19, 1937 accused of having belonged to Freemasonry by the Franco apparatus. Months later, he fell ill and was transferred to his house where he was kept under house arrest until he died. It was curiosity that led Morales to investigate this great-grandfather about whom he hardly knew anything other than that he had been condemned by the dictatorship.
And we know that for horrible things to happen someone has to support them, excuse them. I thought it was interesting to get into that.
Clara Morales — Writer
At the beginning of his research he did not find much information, but one day he interviewed the historian Francisco Espinosa – probably “the great researcher of the Civil War in southwestern Spain,” he points out – and, among other things, asked him what the path could be. to follow. It was he who told him that the Huelva Provincial Council had digitized part of the documents that affected retaliated Huelva residents. “I went into a search engine, entered the name and a result came up. This is because there are people who are making it easy here, because there are many other places where it is not so simple,” he clarifies. The fact that the story is related to her ancestry has to do with the desire to know what had happened but also with the fact that it seemed to her that she did not have permission to use the document of a person who had nothing to do with herself. . “It seemed immoral to me, so I did it with someone in my family, with a bit of modesty, to be honest,” she says. Her relatives are now learning the final result of that investigation: “I had told them what I had seen in the file and this Christmas we were talking a little about it. Now is when they are going to read it, but I think they are experiencing it with emotion.”
Fragments of a collective memory
Morales’ characters, most of them female, narrate personal experiences that, together with those of many others, make up the collective memory of a society. We carry a new world in our hearts It stars a homosexual man who is among the 300,000 people who made up the audience at the CNT rally in Montjüic (Barcelona) in 1977, which was also the first LGTBIQ+ march in the State. Where am I going to go? is what the old woman asks herself when a vulture fund wants to throw her out of her house and in Life is a tombola A retired police officer believes that he behaved well with those retaliated by the Franco dictatorship, that other people’s hell is others. “There are a lot of people out there thinking that he didn’t do anything wrong,” he explains about that only villain protagonist of the book. “And we know that for horrible things to happen, someone has to support them, excuse them. It seemed interesting to me to get into that.”
“The characters are lending me their voice so that I can play with it and do something that I like and that I want to share,” she answers the question of how she manages to get into the skin of those protagonists who are so different from her. “I would like to be a medium, to have the ghosts of the past manifest through me. But since I don’t think I have that gift, I have to resort to this substitute that is literature,” she says. However, although she is giving the floor to groups that have not had it for a long time – and that have to continue fighting to have it –, the writer considers that what is necessary is that everyone has the possibility of expressing themselves. “It is not only that many people have not seen the story told about her, but that many do not have the time or resources to express themselves. So that not only the stories of a few are told, many more people have to be able to write, speak and do what they want with their time,” she says.
Feminist awareness has first come from talking to your friends, your mother or your grandmother.
Clara Morales — Writer
On the other hand, she is skeptical about the true power that literature has to change the system, to have real effects on the world. “It seems to me that sometimes it is more an expression of frustration than of real ability,” she muses. “But here we continue, we write and read. I don’t know if it’s in the hope that something will change through this, but as one more manifestation of our desire for change, of our fight and of our desire for things to be different,” she says. Furthermore, she recognizes herself as “a naturally optimistic person” and she thinks that a better society will be achieved. “If not, life would seem like a much grayer and harder place to me. We are achieving it, also knowing that there are no total victories and, therefore, there are no total defeats either,” she alleges.
The longing for memory
Morales began his book with the intention of reflecting on memory from joy and not so much from activism. “To begin with, I believe that all writing comes from the pleasure of writing. “No one writes first out of social commitment,” she says. “Then there is a question which is ‘what do you write about?’ and I soon became clear that I wanted to write around the idea of the effects that the past has on the present. I think that in this country we remember badly. I don’t know if we lived in another country we would say the same thing, but in Spain, of course, we remember very poorly and there is a lot of will for us to forget,” she says.
One of the sparks that ignites the desire for change is the collectivization of personal memories. The author of I almost don’t remember anymore She sees it very clearly in the rise of feminism that, for many people, was demonstrated in the great demonstration on May 8, 2018. “Feminist consciousness has first come from talking to friends, to your mother or to your grandmother.” . And to realize what was happening, what continues to happen and that what happens to you, happens to all of us. Suddenly, your small experiences take on a collective dimension by talking, reading, listening to each other. And if we think about the LGTBIQ+ movement, I think the same thing happens,” he comments. “I don’t know if it’s the only way to be aware of something, but it certainly seems like the most immediate to me,” she concludes.
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