The hard earth

I began to intuit that Barcelona was about to face a massive exodus of inhabitants when the narrative born from the city (generally, written by authors born here; from Generation X to the youngest) began to take refuge in the exaltation of rural themes. The phenomenon has been curious to experience, not only because Barcelona readers have embraced it with great enthusiasm, but above all because of the literary tendency to transfer a series of purely urban traumas and situations to the forests. Catalan literature has always persisted in the Planian temptation to flee the evils of Barcelona and Europe to take refuge in the crec-crec of a peasant chimney; in this sense, however much it weighs on our regions, Catalonia (or what "La Nostra" news programs morbidly call "the territory") has always been contaminated by a certain barcelonitis.

The grace of the matter is that, in the next decade, this purely literary gesture will become a demographic transformation with unpredictable consequences. In fact, the outskirts of our city are already beginning to suffer the inclemencies of the stampede of Barcelona expats who ---sooner or later--- will end up moving to their old second homes or buying rural houses in the Pyrenees to transform them into ecofriendly business headquarters and transfer their unbearable Castilianized phonetics to the most remote villages. The philosopher Anna Punsoda has written a diary about her country of origin, the Plans de Sió in La Segarra, which has the ability to distance itself from all this literary picaresque. First and foremost, because Anna left Barcelona to return to a place she knows well and loves enough not to castrate it or romanticize an absolutely dissected landscape.

While writing it, I asked the author what La terra dura was about; Anna replied that it was about what a Barcelonian like me would call "shitty towns." This was, literally, the impression I had when, some years ago, I accidentally landed in Concabella; in front of a half-abandoned tobacconist and glimpsing some dreadful pig farms, I thought that from there Anna (or any human being) could only vanish transformed into Susan Sontag or a serial killer. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the parts where I most enjoyed this diary are the fragments where the author's husband appears (the distinguished editor Ignasi Moreta, a man more Barcelonian than the scratches of Santa Eulàlia) addressing his neighbors using Frenchified terms or contemplating the compulsive slaughter of pigs in the Guissona Agrarian Cooperative as if he were in Birkenau.

Unlike the post-traumatic praises of peasants written from Gràcia, Anna glosses her home (in this I would say that a certain urban touch is also glimpsed) seeking the same dignity and mystique that imbeciles like me have found in the landscape of La Rambla de Catalunya when we returned home drunk from the Barri Gòtic. Recently, a compatriot of hers from the publishing world commented to me that living in the hard land is not a difficult task to assume due to the aridity of the landscape, but above all due to having to grow up in a society where feudal tics still prevail and in which the inquisitorial gaze of a godmother can make you return home with your head bowed. Our author has reconciled with her hard land by seeking the historical grandeur of the past, denouncing the abandonment policies that have made it an uninhabitable place, and scratching very hard within the dust to praise the intellectuals who dignify it. 

With the same loving rawness that playwright Josep Maria Miró has wanted to reconcile with the hard land in works like El cos més bonic que s'ha trobat mai en aquest lloc, Anna has taken advantage of fleeing the city to make peace with her home in the only possible way: through literature. I would say that La terra dura has been well received by the city public because we see (with envy) the possibility of carrying out the same process with Barcelona as very distant. We now live in such a dead, boring, and hurtful city from which making literature has become an almost impossible task. Lately, when I walk through its streets, I again feel that experience I had in Concabella, open-mouthed in front of the tobacconist of that dying hole, thinking about how we can extract literary oil from this place. Who knows if, to be reborn in the city, we will have to make a living in the shitty towns.