Marta Montoliu - English

Haiti

2010-01-28T10:54:00.001-08:00

After the tones of information that we have received these last days, I felt I could not add much more.

Only the drawing of a kid with eyes full of hope.

Annie Leibovitz

2010-01-10T05:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, zapping in front of the TV one lazy day during Christmas, I found myself looking at a documentary about Annie Leibovitz’ life and work. I didn’t know much about her work before. Only that she is called “the photographer of the stars” and that she has shot some of the most famous photographs of the last 30 years, like the one with John Lennon hugging Yoko Ono and the one with Demi Moore (very) pregnant and naked. As you can see, it was not much, and the beginning of the documentary didn’t offer much promise either, as it consisted in a series of well known characters praising her work with, what I would say, sounded quite like empty words, specially as they were talking to (guess what!) Annie’s sister, the documentary’s director. It really matched my idea about people accepting her work as genius just because it was a “Annie Leibovitz” photograph.

But it was not so.

Annie truly has a gift. Her photographs, continuously showed during the documentary, were real gems. Especially the ones taken during her work for Rolling Stone, in which a lot of rock stars appeared in a way you had never seen them before. They seemed to show their true self in front of Annie´s objective. ¿Her secret? People who were there during those time said that she was able to appear as she was not there, but continuously take pictures, so people would end up not noticing that she was there.

But what really impressed me were the hints given in the documentary about Annie’s relationship with Susan Sontag. Susan always pushed Annie to give a different angle to her work. A, let´s say, less frivolous angle. And, looking at the images Annie took and listening to the ones who were there to witness the intense intellectual relationship that both had, I thought I knew why Susan did so. I am sure Susan understood like no other that Annie had that gift.

I have drawn Annie, the one always behind the camera objective. The one who said that after so many years taking photographs, sometimes she felt that she had not really lived. Or not so much like the ones that she photographed.

Goodbye, Mario

2009-05-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

Last week poet and writer Mario Benedetti left us. This weekend I have been looking for a drawing I made of him some years ago because I wanted to include it in a homage-post, together with one of his poems. When I finally found the drawing, yesterday, I realised that it was incomplete. It didn’t occur to me finishing it up now. I think it is a good metaphor of his work left unfinished.
Like this poem, Chau numero tres. Written in Spanish, I am not willing to translate (sorry for those of you who don’t speak Spanish).
He left us. With our lives, our jobs, our people – as he says in the first sentences of the poem.

Goodbye, Mario.

Chau número tres

Te dejo con tu vida
tu trabajo
tu gente
con tus puestas de sol
y tus amaneceres.

Sembrando tu confianza
te dejo junto al mundo
derrotando imposibles
segura sin seguro.

Te dejo frente al mar
descifrándote sola
sin mi pregunta a ciegas
sin mi respuesta rota.

Te dejo sin mis dudas
pobres y malheridas
sin mis inmadureces
sin mi veteranía.

Pero tampoco creas
a pie juntillas todo
no creas nunca creas
este falso abandono.

Estaré donde menos

lo esperes
por ejemplo
en un árbol añoso
de oscuros cabeceos.

Estaré en un lejano

horizonte sin horas
en la huella del tacto
en tu sombra y mi sombra.

Estaré repartido
en cuatro o cinco pibes
de esos que vos mirás
y enseguida te siguen.

Y ojalá pueda estar
de tu sueño en la red
esperando tus ojos
y mirándote.

Helen Suzman

2009-03-30T14:52:00.001-07:00

My first 2009 post arrives a little bit late, because of lack of time – which is never a good excuse. Since it is the first post in 2009, I will dedicate it to a great woman who died the very first day of the year. Helen Suzman.
She is not much known in Spain, but she is a public figure in her native South Africa.

She was first elected for Parliament in 1935 and soon was noted for her strong public criticism of the South African governing rules and the apartheid system. She openly criticized the regime, sometimes completely alone. She fought for over 36 years and e was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. People who knew her wrote that in person she possessed great charm and a melodic, soft voice. I can only look at images. A woman of fair and luminous skin, long face, ultramarine blue eyes and firm smile.
I like to imagine her in the Parliament, making other members uncomfortable with her inconvenient questions. She was once accused by a minister of asking questions in parliament that embarrassed South Africa, to which she replied: "It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers".

She opposed capital punishment and argued against the banning of the Communist Party and the banning and other restrictions imposed on individuals and organisations were others. During 36 years of Parliamentary service and beyond her retirement, she built up and retained a wide circle of friends in the black community.

After her death, the Helen Suzman Foundation will continue to work to safeguard and strengthen South Africa’s new democracy. There I found an illustration that caught my attention because it shows, in a simple way, what her life was. A constant struggle for her beliefs. A small woman with big courage.

If

2008-12-08T12:48:00.000-08:00

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

Kristallnacht

2008-11-09T09:06:00.001-08:00

Today is the 70th anniversary of the KristallNacht (now commonly translated as “Night of Broken Glass”). The night between the 9th and 10th of November 1938 the Nazi government coordinated a so-called social revolt against Jews in Germany and Austria. In theory it was due to the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish teenager, enraged by the conditions of the deportation of German Jews to Poland (including his own family). However the Nazi Government was waiting for an incident to put their actions against the Jews in motion. Stormtroopers participated in the riots wearing civilian clothes, which gives an idea of the level of orquestration of the whole incident.

That night synagogues, cemeteries, shops and houses of Jews were destroyed and more than 30.000 people were arrested and sent to concentration camps – without taking into account that a high level of Jews were murdered that same night, in what was a sinister first chapter of the “Final Solution”, which had already started.

I have not found images of that night. Only photographs of the day after, with people passing by or looking at the terrible consequences: Ruins of synagogues, broken windows or “Jude” and David stars painted in what were shops. All of that was left as a silent witness of the start of atrocities that took place during the following years.

As my drawing, like any other work done afterwards, can only show the facts once already happened or the humble emotions of the artist, I thought it was very appropriate to draw just that: the remains of the night, shattered glasses that littered the streets and were metaphors of a society that was disappearing. In my drawing a German man passes by, and I wonder what the man was thinking. If he was scared, if he felt horror or maybe if he was just happy not to be a Jew. At the end of the day, Goering himself said, after that night, that “I have to admit I wouldn’t like to be a Jew in Germany”.

Albert Camus and "the Stranger"

2008-10-26T11:39:00.001-07:00

These last days I have been reading “the Stranger”, the famous 1942 short novel by Albert Camus. I have done so by recommendation of my literature teacher, not because I felt like reading it again (I had read it in the past). It is kind of curious to start reading a novel without much energy and when you start hearing a known voice, like the one of an old friend, which talks to you through the pages, remember then why you wouldn’t have gone back to it if you were not asked to. Camus, not only in “the Stranger”, but especially in that novel, caused me a sweet and sour feeling. I read it when I was a teenager and I felt weird, because the feeling of absurd, of lack of ethic that governs the life of the main character. Of course back then, when I read it, I was very young and I had though a life full of ideals for me.
Many years have gone by and now, reading it again, I have developed an understanding not only to the sincerity shown in the novel but also to the ideological background that Camus puts into every fact, trivial or transcendent. I really like the accuracy when transmitting a lack of moral that now I perceive with much clarity. In my youth I could guess it, even put it in words, but I could not feel it, really understand it.
Camus was born near Argel, where the action of “the Stranger” takes place, and with his literary works he fought all types of abstract doctrines (from Christianity to communism). When I looked for pictures of Camus to draw, I found him smiling, with a light, even happy, expression. I thought he was going to look more serious, but it surely was a preconceived idea, based on stereotypes. At the end of the day, Camus put emphasis in the fact that human condition is one of mortality, believing that this can produce a greater appreciation for life and happiness. I have therefore drawn him with a happy face, and a cigarette in his lips (like his always-smoking character in “the Stranger”, Mersault).

Käthe Kollwitz

2008-10-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

I have not written for a few days now. I had good reasons for not doing so, but not really convincing if you take into account that after visiting the small Käthe Kollwitz museum in Berlin, I was looking forward to create a post about it.
Käthe is a great artist well known in her country of origin, but not so much outside Germany (she was born in Prussian territory that, funnily enough, now belongs to Russia). She married a doctor and moved to Berlin, where she lived for more than 40 years. Only in the very last days of WWII she was evacuated, already a widow, to Dresden. Her apartment was destroyed by an air raid and hundreds of documents and drawings were lost. However, she still left a broad artistic legacy, which describes vividly the times that she lived in. The horrors of war, the pain of mothers who lose their children or the desperation and hunger are recurrent topics of her dark works.
Käthe lost her 17-old son in the French trenches in WWI. And her grandson in WWII. It is not surprising that she was a vehement pacifist all her life, and that she tirelessly pictured not only the suffering during the war, but also the terrible economic depression that Germany went through after its defeat in WWI. Looking at the drawings of hungry kids of the 20s (“Don’t let Germany starve” – she wrote in one) I could only think of Hitler’s rise a few years later and the sad events that followed, well known by now. Käthe died a few weeks before the end of WWII. Neither she nor her husband could see the end of that horrible war, which took the life of their grandson and thousands like him.
This time, I have deliberately not drawn her face as I normally do, because I wanted to include one of her drawing and let its message shine through. Maybe one day I will draw how I see her, an artist who left a great deal of self portraits herself. But that is another story. Today I want to write about the message that she tried so hard to transmit, and that’s why I chosen the picture of a mother looking for her dead loved ones in a battlefield full of corpses. Is the woman in the picture Käthe herself? It really does not matter. What it does is that for me, Käthe is who best illustrated last century’s German tragedy.

The angel from Budapest

2008-09-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

I wrote in my last post that I was going to dedicate this one to a man who fought in the band opposed to Melchor’s one during the Spanish Civil War. But, like him, this man showed similar values that go further than political beliefs. I am talking about Angel Sanz Briz, a young Spanish diplomat who was working in the Hungarian embassy and who, in WWII times, saved thousands of Jewish people of a certain death and that because of his name was known as “the angel of Budapest”. A different angel, different political beliefs, different country and different war.
I have only found one picture of the diplomat from Zaragoza. In the picture he appears young and smart, in the typical image that man can expect of a diplomat from the forties. His eyes show strength and courage, but the photo is kind of stiff and not so different to the ones I have seen in old family photo books. I wonder if this typical image of Spanish gentleman was useful to hide his “illegal” activities from the Nazis.
As the journalist Fernando Diaz Villanueva explains in a good and detailed article, the diplomat died without any recognition from the Spanish government (although I have seen that, since 1993, there is a secondary school named after him in his natal Zaragoza). Angel saved the life of thousands of Jewish people distributing passports as they were Sephardis (Jewish of Spanish origin). He could only issue 200 passports (after bribing the nazi authorities), but he saved more than 5000 by creating different series of passports with numbers that were never greater than 200.
The history of Oskar Schindler is well known, as I also explained in my post about the extraordinary Irena Sendler. Angel’s one is not so famous, as many other stories of Spanish diplomats who saved hundreds or thousands of lives. Four of them are even recognised as “Righteous among the nations”, an award who honours Non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, at personal risk. Angel is one of them.

El ángel rojo (The red angel)

2008-09-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

These days, while in Spain there has been much discussion about the dreadful executions that took place during the Spanish Civil War, my friend Bea asked me to publish a post about a man who I didn’t know – Melchor Rodriguez (“the red angel”). It was not only unknown to me, but to the vast majority of Spanish people, taking into account how difficult it has been to find a picture of him to draw. I wanted to discover the face of that man who put into practice his strong beliefs (“You can die for your ideas, but you shall never kill for them”), risking his live many times. Melchor was a Spanish anarchist and syndicalist born in Sevilla, that even before the war involved himself in defending the rights of prisoners, whichever ideology they might have had (suffering prison for such actions). In 1936, when the war broke out, he was put in charge of the Madrid prisons, and from that position he managed (opposing powerful and dangerous communist personalities) to stop the “sacas” and the “paseos nocturnos”, common practices those days. The “sacas” were massive firings of prisoners without a trial in the outskirts of Madrid (normally in the infamous Paracuellos de Jarama) while the “paseos” where the suspicious and systematic murders, at night, of prisoners previously liberated from the Madrid prisons. When the war finished, he only served 1 year in prison – saved by the testimonies of important right-wing personalities, who remembered how Melchor had saved the lives of many during the War.
Looking at his picture I see a man who is fully aware that human soul can be capable of evil deeds but also of good, compassionate acts. And who fights to keep his own faith in human nature by doing righteous actions every day – no matter the difficulty of the situation.
My next post will be about other man who also saved many lives, but from the opposite war band. Even in civil wars it is possible to find, everywhere, people with firm values that go beyond their own political beliefs.

War

2008-08-17T05:19:00.001-07:00

The drawing is harsh, I know. While I was drawing it I was tempted to smoothen it a little bit, like as an interior drive pushed me to make it more lyric and less immediate, but I thought it was almost obscene not to show the suffering of a human being because the person who is drawing it feels a pain in her soul, or the person who will see the finished work may feel so as well. My lines have revealed energetic, almost angry. I have not been comfortable drawing it, but I have felt obliged to do so.
I found the picture in a photo gallery in a newspapers some days ago, and as it was not related any particular article I don’t know where it was taken, or which attack provoked the desperation of the elderly woman in pain on the ground. I don’t really care as all wars are the same; they are wars and always will be. There is no need to go back in time to our father’s wars (the fratricide Spanish Civil War, the horror in the trenches of World War I, or the holocaust and World War II). Wars always take their toll on our lives and feed off desperation, hatred born of fear. That’s why I am not going to talk about the war in Georgia, the war with which newspapers fill their August pages. There others happening in other places right now, just not in European soil. I am only going to leave my testimony in form of a drawing. When we dive into tragedies through the particularities of one person (even if it is an elderly anonymous woman), they seem more rel. I guess that it has to do with a sense of empathy, we feel that something terrible may happen to us, and then we start understanding the suffering other human beings are going through.
The woman in the picture may be already dead. And I almost feel ashamed to have used her desperate face to express my particular testimony against war, against any war.

Images from India (II) - Ananda Mai

2008-08-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

In my last post I wrote about the book “Vislumbres de la India” (Images from India). I didn’t want to include in that post the fragment of the book that I liked the most, because I wanted that to be in another post only for it. It is a simple anecdote, deep and lucid at the same time. In 1963 the writer received a telegram that informed him that he received the Knokke le Zoute poetry prize. Octavio had doubts on whether to accept the prize or not, because for him poetry was a intimate act. In his own words “a secret cult, outside the public eye”. If (also in his own words) the prizes were public and the poems, secret… should he accept the prize or not?
That was his dilemma when his friend, the novelist and essayist Raja Rao, when asked for advice, told him that she knew somebody who could probably help him. The following day she took him to a ashram (a mediation retreat) in the outskirts of Delhi. The spiritual guru was a middle age woman, of black eyes and hair, who already knew from Raja Rao the problem that the writer faced. The woman was called Ananda Mai. Ananda threw an orange to Octavio, almost as a game. When the writer caught it, Ananda told him:
“Be humble and accept the prize. But accept it knowing that it is worth nothing or almost nothing, like all prizes. Not to accept it is overestimate it, give an importance to it that probably it does not have. False purity, pride… The real disinterest is to accept it with a smile, as you accepted the orange that I just threw to you. The prize does not make the people receiving it better. It does not make you better, nor your poems. But don’t offend those who gave it to you”
As a different kind of prize, the writer described Ananda Mai in such a beautiful way, that I was prompted to draw the image of her. I found a black and white picture in the web, but I am not sure if it was her. It doesn’t really matter, I’ve drawn her more as I could see her through Octavio’s words, and I did it in colours, warm colours. I am sorry I can’t translate completely the description of Octavio, but I hope that somehow you will picture her through my drawing.

Vislumbres de la India (Images from India)

2008-07-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

This last weekend the book by the Mexican Nobel prize Octavio Paz “Vislumbres de la India” fell into my hands. It is an essay that (according to the writer’s own words) does not pretend to describe exhaustively the multiple aspects of the Indian culture, history, politics or society, but to give an overview of those areas from the love that the author professes to India. Despite being an “overview”, the insight of the book is excellent. Moreover, the writer explains plenty of experiences and impressions from his different visits to the enormous Asiatic country, which contribute to make the book easier to read (Octavio Paz was ambassador in that country from 1962 to 1968).
Personally it has been very interesting to read what it is explained in the book, even more if you take into account that there are 3 Indian people in my team at work, and I am nonetheless a complete ignorant of their culture.
When reading the descriptions that Octavio writes: detailed evocations of his sensorial and intellectual recalls, I felt that I share something with the writer. I have drawn Indian faces in multiple occasions. I have always felt something especial, difficult to explain, when I use my crayons to draft the face of a street kid in Bombay or a girl struggling in the Monsoon rain. This weekend, when I was browsing through the pages and found beautiful descriptions of Indian kids, a special drawing came to my mind: I drawn it a lot of time ago, but has always been special to me: The face of a young Indian girl, with big, dark eyes and amber skin.
Maybe it is just me being naïve, but it is a beautiful, almost magical sensation to feel that despite the difference in time, origin, talent or profession, I share something with a writer I admire.

Polar explorers

2008-07-27T13:45:00.001-07:00

Three days ago, the 16th of July, it was the 136th anniversary of the birth of the polar explorer Roald Amundsen. He became world-wide famous for being the first person to arrive to the South Pole, in an epic and at the end tragic race with the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott.
I first knew about this story by listening to a Mecano’s song, and maybe because of my youth, or my naïveness, when I found out more about the story I deemed it as a little out of date. Those men with romantic ideas, obsessed to be the first to arrive to the South Pole, sacrificing their lives in the middle of an ice desert without losing for a second their composure… I was not able to understand their underlying motivations or their way of live.
I disregarded the story, putting it in some place in the back of my mind, until last year I travelled to Oslo. There I visited the Fram museum: The museum dedicated to the robust wood ship that Amundsen used in his polar conquests. It was in the museum where I saw the picture that I have drawn. It attracted me from the very beginning. The Norwegian’s stare, which at first can be perceived as a tired one, is tough, almost defiant. His weathered face. The dark background, almost black, like Antarctica’s soul.
Later on, I have read a lot about him and his polar conquest. I’ve got to know old stories full of names that I had never heard before: Ernest Shackleton, Harald Sverdrup, o Fridtjof Nansen.. Men who were able to carry as much as 14 kgs of geological stones, despite of dying of cold and tiredness. Men like Amundsen, who despite of having engaged himself in a public flight with the Italian pilot Umberto Nobile, took his plane when he was 56 years old to rescue his enemy, who had had an accident in the ice of the Antarctica. Amundsen died in that rescue and his body was never found. I don’t know exactly why but now I can understand better their hopes of doing something really meaningful, of living while following principles which they really believed in.
I finish this post with the last verse of the poem “Ulyssess”, by Tennyson. This verse is carved in the wood stone placed in the place where the bodies of the Scott party were found: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Sadness in Manhattan

2008-07-08T07:10:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday the young model Ruslana Korshunova died after throwing herself out of the window of her ninth-floor apartment in Manhattan's Financial District. She was only 20 years old and had already been the cover of Elle and Vogue Russia magazines.

Reading such sad news it would be too easy to say that what our society sells as supreme happiness – beauty, youth, money, success – is nothing but an empty glass, and true happiness can only be found inside you. I thought that, but I also thought of art. I remembered the 1938 painting by Friday Kahlo, “The suicide of Dorothy Hale”. Painted exactly 70 years ago, it depicts the suicide of Dorothy Hale, who also jumped out of the window of her apartment in Manhattan. She had been an extremely beautiful cabaret actress who was left with financial problems after her husband died young. She was not willing to abandon her high-society life and tried to start a career as an actress, with no fortune, as she was seen as too old for that. She was 33 years old. Legend says that on 20th October she threw a big party for friends and she wore the 1000$ dress that a friend of hers, the millionaire Bernard Buruch, had advised her to buy. When she had approached him for help, he gave her the money and said it was "... to buy a dress glamorous enough to capture a husband”. With this dress she was painted by Friday Kahlo, lying death in the street, the painting full of blood everywhere.

Ruslana and Dorothy: Apart from each other by a century time, together in their extraordinary beauty and their tragic deaths. It is easy to draw beautiful people, but it hurts when you know that in their eyes they hid an emptiness that nobody could measure. I have done so in black and white, I couldn’t really use colours. They don’t look at each other, they don’t find anybody. They only stare at the void.

Ruslana had everything. Dorothy felt desperate at losing it. But the two killed themselves in Manhattan.

Fernando Vicente. "Literatura Ilustrada"

2008-06-15T06:18:00.001-07:00

Last Friday, wandering over in a book shop with a friend, I saw by chance the book “Literatura ilustrada”, by Fernando Vicente.
The book cover took my attention for its quality and also because I knew that illustration but I didn’t remember where I had seen it. I browsed through its pages and I realised that I knew the illustrations from the newspaper “El Pais” and its literary supplement “Babelia”. With the book I have discovered book covers that he has also created and I that I didn’t know of, and I have been impressed by the versatility of this “narrator who paints” (as Fernando Iwasaki defines him in the book prologue), who is able to create hundreds of images that combine a great graphic talent with a powerful will of narrating stories.

My friend, and English girl who had not previously seen any of Fernando’s works, was also fascinated by the little works of art that populate the book pages: smiles of little boys, Chagall-like landscapes with books as silent inhabitants or heroes out of black novels. We stared for minutes at the pictures, talking about those maps and those atmospheres from distant years. Now the book lays here at my side while I write these lines and discovers me new jewels when I search for the illustration that I am going to include in this post. It was a difficult task to choose just one, but finally I chose one published in El Pais in 2005. Those who know me know that I am a “faces” painter, so it does not come as a surprise that amongst Vicente’s works, the ones with characters are my favourites.

Merçè Sala

2008-06-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

If some days ago I was writing about Irena Sendler, today I want to write about a woman who died at 65 years of age two weeks ago, Merçè Sala.
Opposed to Irena, Merçè was an active politician. She was best know for being the first woman who presided Renfe (the Spanish railway company), but her career was much broader than that. However I don’t want to centre this post in her political achievements, I prefer to talk about her role as a leader and a woman at the same time. That’s why I have drawn Merce focusing in her eyes, positive and with a rare insight at the same tiem. Merçè seemed to always look at a future that she wanted to help building.

I was educated to think that, although there was still a lot to do, women had nowadays the same rights than men, and that we could reach any job that in the past could only be performed by a man. But after a few years of professional career I discovered that it is still very difficult to find women in senior executive positions, as team leaders or managing big an important projects (although maybe it has to do with the fact that I am in IT, which is a professional field with many more men than woman). Anyway, that’s why women like Mercè have been so important, for her leadership abilities, and the capacity of sharing her knowledge.

Irena Sendler

2008-05-31T06:09:00.000-07:00

In less than one week time two women who I would like to pay homage to have died. Two women very different from each other, from different countries and of different times, and who also died in very different circumstances. They are Irena Sendler and Merçè Sala. The first one died old at 98 years of age, the second one much younger to cancer, at 65. This post is dedicated to the first one, Irena, who I have drawn with all my tenderness and respect.

Irena Sendler died in a polish nursery home where she was living, after saving the life of more than 2500 Jewish children during WWII and living a life away from the public eye, under the communist regime. Ironically, it was a group of American students who discovered her story, after communism regimes collapsed. Her incredible story, full of details that are also very suitable for a movie, have made Hollywood industry prepare a film about her life. She was discovered by the Nazis, sentenced to death and saved at the very last minute by the polish resistance.
During the WWII in Warsaw, she managed to work in the Polish ghetto to fight the typhoid (which Germans feared could spread into the city). It soon became clear that the ultimate destination of many of the Jews was to be the Treblinka death camp, and Zegota, the polish resistance organisation, decided to try to save as many children as possible. Irena used the codename "Jolanta" and wore a Star of David armband to identify herself with the Jewish population. She saved the life of more than 2500 children using the most surprising ways: Some children were transported in coffins, suitcases and sacks; others escaped through the sewer system beneath the city. For example, an ambulance driver who smuggled infants beneath the stretchers in the back of his van kept his dog beside him in the front seat, having trained the animal to bark to mask any cries from his hidden passengers.
When I look at the last pictures of her, with her pure white hair and a permanent smile, I feel a strange peace. I can see in the pictures the face of a good person, in peace with the world and herself. I would like to guess how she saw her life in perspective, but I can only look at those vivid eyes and remember that, when people qualified her as a hero, she got angry and said that she only did what she was taught to do: help who needed it most. And so I have drawn her, with her eyes full of light and the smile in her lips.

Play: The Children of Morelia

2008-05-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to see the play “Los niños de Morelia” (the children of Morelia), in the small theatre Sala Muntaner. It is a play set up by the Catalan theatre company “La Jarra Azul” and the mexican “Conjuro Teatro”, and written by Victor Hugo Rascón Banda, a Mexican dramaturge who has written more than 54 theatre plays.

Five actors, three women and two men, explain the history of the exiled children of the Spanish Civil War who ended up in the Mexican city of Morelia.

The play is a succession of scenes charged with meaning that picture the drama of the exile in the skin of the youngest ones. The work of the five actors is awesome. It is not easy to play the role of children and adults, sometimes switching roles in such a way that only their words let us know, after a few seconds, that they are representing a different role.

There are several scenes in which the actors act in the most absolute silence. They sing, they fight, move their lips and even throw up, using a resource that I have seen more commonly in the cinema.

When children sleep they move in unnatural gestures, their dreams poisoned by black planes and letters that stop arriving. When they play they laugh about how different the way Mexicans speak is, learning step by step that they will never be completely Spanish, but they won’t be Mexicans either.

Very interesting final speech, in which the actors realise that they were used by all: by republicans and franquistas as mere propaganda, as the Mexican government did, by religious Mexican institutions as a way to get funds, and by other exiled Spaniards as cheap work force.

Conference: "The feminine universe of Mo Yan"

2008-05-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended a conference about “the feminine universe of Mo Yan”, with the writer, in Casa Asia in Barcelona. It was my first time in the building, which surprised me for its beautiful architecture. It is the Baró de Quadras Palace by modernist architect Puig i Cadafalch, in the Diagonal.
The Tagore meeting room was packed with people, with some attendees standing up because there were not enough chairs. Mo Yan talked only Chinese, so almost everybody needed an automatic translation device. Only a few Chinese nodded with some of the “Master”’s appreciations; the rest had to wait a few seconds to understand what he was talking about.
Mo Yan is a pen name which means “No talk”. The author explained that he uses it because for a long time he was fully aware that in China, the quieter you were, the better. Also, before turning 5, in the isolated farm where he was born, the writer didn’t have many people to talk to anyway. After that age he developed a big urge to communicate, so intense that his parents got scared and continuously reminded him of how sensible it was to keep quiet.
Something that took my attention was that he mentioned the lack of food as the main problem that he envisages for mankind, at least short-term. Having nothing to eat is the worst experience ever, he said. Coming from a person who was born in 1955 in China, just before the “Great Leap Forward”, it is surely an opinion to take very seriously.
When it was time for questions and answers (unfortunately we only had 5 minutes left as the conference overran), an old guy asked something that many others in the room suspected that was going to be asked: “Tibet, independent state or integrated in China?”. Some voices and some reprobation looks were heard and seen in the audience: “Why is this man asking this? …It is out of context… here we go, somebody had to ask that…”. Mo Yan answered nevertheless, but the translation device was not working (that is: the guy behind the translation device was not there) and we didn’t understand what he said. There we were, almost a hundred people raising their voices to find out what the writer had said. Actually the same people who just a few seconds ago were diminishing the question were then curious to know Mo Yan’s opinion. Two Chinese girls in the last row suddenly clapped energically, being the ones understanding what he said and visibly in accordance with his words. So it was then clear that the writer had professed an opinion indeed, instead of just sticking to the neutral speech of “I am just a writer”. What did he say? I don’t know. Later, when we were all returning our translation devices, I heard the rumour that he had said “A unite country lives in peace”, but that.. that could be only a rumour..