Whether it's summer, vacation or not, at one time or another you have to spend time cleaning, right? And to do it we can get straight to it: perhaps a rag and a broom will suffice, but if we want to go a little deeper, no. This seemingly simple poem works on many more bands than it seems.
And it is that Maria- Mercè Marçal (1952-1998) prepares a list of what may be needed to clean. She even tells us about some utensils that hardly have a name today. Do we need a bucket, a basin, a basin and a bucket? In any case, the accumulation can make us think of the multiplicity of dirt. And we don't have enough with just one type of soap, and we can still add lye or etching, not to mention sand or ash... Or netol for metals, or blue for clothes.
And once we have the utensils at hand, to combat. We face the battlefield as a “warrior”, and here is another double reading, because there is the woman who can literally feel reflected, who cleans like all the women who have taken care of the home before her. And she is, at the same time, the woman who has the battlefield precisely in offering this universe to a man, and somehow she has to fight him. We organize the supposedly feminine imaginary to reinterpret it, redefine it, to fight against it.
And why does it have to be a woman, if it doesn't say so in any verse? The unconscious marks us, the culture of patriarchy everywhere. Will it be a battlefield to find the most feminist reading? To vindicate the woman who confronts the past of her gender or to insist that we are all responsible for taking care of the home? The possibilities are many, each one his own, and in the poem, after all, cleanliness is the excuse, of course.
Let's read it. Let us think, for example, if we only need to clean the house where we are, the house where we are leaving, or that cleaning is not also a job and not a task. Do we really need a battle?
The soul also needs its tools to clean, to put itself in order. A poem can be a good entry into ourselves, a good book, a song, a sunset, or the dawn, even the spirit of a mountain. And well, yes, we have become cheesy as the poem of an author who avoided this tone did not ask for. We take a break, we do Saturday even if it's Thursday and then we relax.
Catalan version, here
