“In the month of October 1963, in Rouen, I waited for more than a week for my period to come”. At 23, student Annie Ernaux wished she hadn't gotten pregnant. "I started writing in the agenda, every night, in capital letters and underlined: NOTHING". Assuming that her wish would not come true, the future writer found herself confronted with an experience for which she was not prepared. She first noted the difference between her body and that of men. Later, she that she did not want the creature. Next, abortion in France was illegal. And finally that everyone around her, even her supposedly progressive friends turned their backs on her.
When in the year 2000 Ernaux narrated her moving experience in a hundred pages, it could be seen as the confession of a lady who recalled a battle from another era. Twenty years later, the appearance in Catalan of L'esdeveniment (Angle editorial), in the framework of a highly laudable translation of the author's most significant titles, is extremely topical.
In the United States, a laboratory of trends many of which are later copied from other countries of the democratic West, the story of an American Ernaux of these days will soon be published. Abortion, which had been a constitutional right since 1975, ceased to be so in June when the Supreme Court repealed the current doctrine that allowed the voluntary interruption of pregnancy at the federal level.
In 1986, The Color Purple received eleven Oscar nominations for the Steven Spielberg film released the previous year. None won. There were not a few who considered that there were racial motives in the background because for many critics it was the best film of the year. A still little-known Whoopie Goldberg played the protagonist of the homonymous novel that Alice Walker published in 1982 and for which she won, among others, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Through the letters that Celie writes to God and her sister Nettie, Walker conveys all the rawness that surrounds the life of this African-American teenager from the southern United States in the early twentieth century, beaten and raped by the man she calls Pa. And then she is sold to a husband who enslaves her and separates her from her sister. El color porpra (Prow), which is now published in Catalan, is a novel about racism and violence against women. But also a story of personal discovery and overcoming and of the most generic good and evil that inhabit our environment.
Almost forty years later, in Hollywood, African-American actors have seen their status improve, but on the streets, black citizens suffer daily discrimination. In the case of women, the offense is more pronounced. Almost parallel to the appearance of Walker's classic book, an essay by Angela Davis on black feminism was published in 1981.
It has now been translated into Catalan. A Dones, raça i classe (Paper Tiger), the Marxist philosopher from Alabama delves into a question that is almost completely ignored in our societies. The fact that the demands of black women have been systematically made invisible and that this feminist struggle has been attributed exclusively to white women.
Davis, from whom the Catalan publisher has recovered other titles, reviews his history in the United States from the end of slavery until a few decades ago. "Black women have always worked more outside the home compared to their white sisters," says the professor at the University of California. As slaves, compulsory labor obscured every other aspect of women's existence."
The vindication of one and the other frightens certain segments and social classes. That is why today El color porpra is part of the lists of books that American republicanism most tries not to read. In 1970 Hannah Arendt reflected precisely on this fear. In On Violence (Angle editorial) the Jewish philosopher reflects on power and violence and concludes that, contrary to what is often believed, the latter does not appear when the power of a political actor grows, but when it decreases.
The reissue of this short essay in Catalan is pertinent because looking at the relationship between both concepts allows us to understand the reaction, furious in certain cases, of conservatism against any aspect that deviates from the pattern that places women one rung below the men.
Reflecting on the era in which Ernaux writes and the one that influenced Walker – the liberation struggles in all fields of the 1960s – Arendt argues that in certain circumstances violence “is the only means of restoring the balance of the scales of justice”. A violence understood in a broad sense of revolt and protest, rather than of blows.
Precisely, one of Arendt's texts, What is Freedom? revealed in Maggie Nelson the desire to reflect on a term that has lost value with the wear of time and that, linked to the feminine world, takes on a deeper meaning. “Can you think of a more impoverished, more imprecise, more instrumentalized word? Before freedom interested me, but now I am more interested in love”, a friend tells the author.
From here, in On freedom. Quatre cants de cura i restricció (L’Altra) the outstanding North American essayist spins a reflection with multiple ramifications and an extensive bibliography over four hundred pages on the obsession with achieving this freedom and feeling free and, at the same time, forgetting the search for it. Nelson provokes, "to expose the ways in which domination masquerades as liberation" and to "unmask economic ideologies that associate freedom with being willing to become a slave to capital." An appropriate culmination for a start to the season with the female dimension at the center of the editorial novelties.
