Barcelona Metropolis

Twenty years after her death, the work of the poet and fiction author who was ‘three times a rebel’ in her own words, is seeing a renewed vitality in the political and cultural atmosphere of the day.

Twenty years after coming to a premature end, the work of Maria-Mercè Marçal (1952-1998) is still alive and is seeing a new and incisive period. During these two decades, more material has been published from a legacy that reaches heartstrings of a present continuous. The body, sexual identity and creative freedom. Women’s art and its systematic invisibility, but also continuity and energy. Contemporary maternity, with a renewed awareness that is different from that of the generations before classical feminism. Love and the rules we do or do not follow in this complex terrain. A work whose imaginative and creative basis is the strength of an oppressed language and the obstacles facing it parallel to the difficulties facing women in cultural and political life. Resistance to misogyny, in short, as the keystone of a real social transformation and as a tool for creation, revolt as a creative instrument. This year, with its courageous 8 March and its intense Catalan life, resonates with Marçal.

A radical in art and in life, in the way she understood being in the world and how to act in it, how to work and at what price. The writer who was ‘three times a rebel’, according to her well-known youthful catchphrase, has left a solid, intense work. Again the battle cry sounds enthusiastically; ‘I thank fate for three gifts: to have been born a woman, / low class and in an oppressed nation. / And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel. A cry which in the final years she saw as though it were not her own; sometimes with the pride of the poem that loses its authorship to become popular poetry; sometimes with the wonder the years cast over the old fervour and over hope. What never changed in Marçal was the female gaze: she described herself above all as a woman who wrote.

The ‘linguistic situation’ was one of her concerns to the end. It hurt me to see how she suffered because of a debate which, as I understand it, was almost always approached Pharisaically without any real wish to get things right. Until I realised that her linguistic rages were, as well as a constant exercise in analysis by an ever active intelligence, her way of protesting about the disease. It was not enough to fight against all sorts of publishing and cultural intemperances to do the job she had to do, writing. Nor continuing in teaching, even though it took away so much time for writing. She bore cancer with composure and fought until the end. She only let her anger show when she read the newspaper and very often it was because of the so-called ‘linguistic situation’. ‘If I survive’, she used to say, ‘I’ll become Slovene’. What she meant was that she could not stand a culture having to exist over and over again always in a state of self-affirmation, of protest, of vindication. A bit like what happens with women’s culture, in a persistent state of self-vindication that often prevents its finest practitioners from getting on with their own work. That was not her case. In this sense, Maria-Mercè Marçal was remarkable for the time she devoted to rescuing and studying the work of past women writers, a devotion that brought an extraordinarily rich and versatile coherence to her own work.

Women poets search her out now as an interlocutor. They are reunited above all in the last two books of poetry, Desglaç and Raó del cos, and also in the poems about motherhood. This is the deepest Marçal. The poem ‘Triar’ (‘Choose’), which the poet dedicated to her daughter to tell her that she, her mother, had chosen to have her, is one of the poems Blanca Llum Vidal mentions to me. It too shelters under the political umbrella of all of Marçal’s poetry, ‘poetry committed to freedom and humanity, political poetry from the body and from her own experiences of vulnerability, exclusion and courage’, she writes to me. Maria Sevilla is focused on the novel about Renée Vivien and it will be a pleasure to read it when the time comes, the novel still has not been much studied. Maria Cabrera, Mireia Calafell and Míriam Cano are also following her. ‘And the male poets?’ I ask. It seems they read her less. Not so the common reader, who are not all women. Marçal generously took care over expressions of love, adjectives and images, so that they could be spoken by women and by men. The most erotic sestinas can be spoken by any and every gender. Her love poems have a powerful intensity to them which extends to a multiple and universal gender with many faces.

This year she would have been 66 and it would be wonderful to discuss the present with her. She would keep getting furious and she would bring a lot of humour. The same ironic humour she cultivates in so many of her poems and writings.