2023-11-26 14:41:00
Bahía Honda does not know that a 17-year-old girl is writing to him. The young Meury Valle is fascinated by the wonders of the coastal town. Her lyrics do not fill the pages of a diary, nor are they the corniness of a frustrated poet, but rather the first chronicles of someone who deploys a formidable arsenal to fight for her dreams.
What weapons does he have? Read carefully everything that falls into your hands, convert words into images… and master spelling to the point of participating in the national contest, recently held in Matanzas.
As the winner of the Spanish-Literature contest at the provincial level and a participant in the national contest for tenth and eleventh years, she was captured: after passing the contest in the province, she attended the event in Cuba.
Along with 15 other competitors, the Bahiahonda native had to correctly write 20 words in each round and, although she ultimately did not get a place among the three winners, she considered the test an extraordinary experience.
“I like spelling since I was little. In primary school I started participating in those contests. I was always fascinated by learning Spanish. I am attracted to knowing where words come from, even from Latin, because it is very beautiful, as well as contributing to the development of the mother tongue and not massacring it with errors and horrors.
“Rules and spelling memory help a lot, starting from reading. The other thing is dictionaries; It is good to turn to them.
“Nor do I limit myself to a single field of knowledge. If I take a classic this week, next week I choose a science book and the next one about accounting.”
A 12th grade student immersed in pages on accounting for pure entertainment does not seem common.
“I find it very interesting. I once read that accounting is the psychology of politics and the masses. Psychologically, you can analyze a person by their financial knowledge or decisions. That book even confirmed for me the economic origin of wars.
“And Spanish, which helps us communicate with its wide range of languages, is present in every subject; “You have to know how to write, both to be scientific and economic.”
Certainly, the young girl devours one copy after another.
“I love the novel Under the same star, by John Green; I really like Agatha Christie’s way of writing; I love Shakespeare; I enjoy Isabel Allende and the titles of the For Dummies collection (dedicated to revealing the basics of topics of interest: psychology, history, astronomy…, explained in the simplest way).
“A large portion of students read, you just have to find them. They do it using their cell phone and even hide; They do not tend to express it, they are introverted and prefer current novels, not the classics or those of the 20th century, or poetry.
“I am drawn to the one about Romanticism, like Bécquer, and I like the one about Alejandra Pizarnik.”
In the same way, she is passionate about playing with words, telling her own adventures, her vision of everything around her. So, she takes from one style and another, from realism and poetry, from narrative and Time.news. Without depths there is no paradise, she wrote about Bahía Honda:
“I once heard that beauty is a deep ocean. If you dive to the bottom you will discover that, in its fertile belly, Cuba houses a true treasure: a paradise of crystalline waters, history and magic surrounded by peace; a site of old streets with one of the few active sugar mills in the country, a port, numerous coffee plantations and the mountainous relief of the Sierra del Rosario.”
Meury wants to be a journalist, and his dream goes beyond a mere consequence of his desire for reading.
“To be a good journalist, you not only need to read, but also listen, learn, express yourself, write, reach others… Beyond the relationship between book and individual, journalism links people, by sharing news and opinions. It is very nice to transmit knowledge, with crude reality and imagination.”
Meanwhile, he picks up new books, learns the spelling of each text, discovers interviews by Liudmila Peña Herrera and Rodolfo Romero Reyes, and falls in love with the chronicles of Yuliet PC and Reinaldo Cedeño.
The voracious reader and aspiring journalist even conceives a conversation with Hazel Grace, the protagonist of Under the same star. She intends for her lyrics to appreciate life like she does, in the fullness of its beauty, and never again find the very green grass of Bahía Honda or the dew on the leaves common.
He wants to see depths and not surfaces, so that the true paradise is not hidden from him.
#depths #paradise