Carles Rebassa: "Since I was 13 years old, I have received attacks for not switching to Castilian"

PalmSome remember him as the monitor who, during the 1996 colonies of the Association of Young Writers in Catalan Language (AJELC), held at Colonia de Sant Pere, ran down the hall shouting "I have the mission to save the Catalan language". Thirty years later, the Mallorcan Carles Rebassa (Palma, 1977) said more or less the same thing in a very different context. It was when he collected the Sant Jordi prize for the novel Prometheus of a Thousand Ways, which will go on sale on March 24th. "We must have legislation that makes Catalan essential for living in the Catalan Countries", he said.

Have you been congratulated more for the prize or for the speech?

— More or less the same, for both reasons. I had the speech well prepared, because when you have a microphone you should take the opportunity to say certain things. I think it's more interesting than saying whether I'm happy or not. It's out of a sense of responsibility, especially at a time like the present, when it seems like everything is going well and it isn't.

Does it seem so? This Monday PP and VOX have agreed to eliminate the Catalan requirement for teaching positions in hard-to-fill areas.

— Margalida Prohens always says that this is not a legislature of conflict. And when I see the little response there is to the strong attacks we receive, I get the impression that we live in a time of conformism. As if you were killed little by little and you didn't defend yourself. The same happens in Barcelona and in the Principality, with governments that talk about pacification after the revolt, while news reaches you saying that the use of Catalan decreases every day. The lack of policies to defend ourselves is going against our rights. They are rights recognized in the Statute and in the Constitution, which are not ideological.

There was a time when important steps were taken in this regard, but it seems they have come to nothing.

— In recent years nothing has been done. And I'm not just talking about the PP and Vox, Armengol's government was characterized by doing nothing to prevent the disaster we currently have. There is an obsession with relating language and certain political ideologies that is perverse. Catalan is associated with independentists, separatists, racists... In Barcelona, it is associated with people with money, as if the working class did not speak Catalan, or with something old.

His speech on Saturday has been widely applauded. I don't even know whether for being extraordinary or for being necessary.

— It is very good to celebrate that books are made and prizes are given, but it must be made the central theme that the main cause of discrimination in Barcelona is speaking Catalan. People who do not understand you, people who receive insults... Delirious cases that are racism: social racism, xenophobia and, in short, Francoism. Catalan literature is a minority literature, which lacks the facilities of other literatures that have a state behind them and linguistic policies in their favor. It is very necessary that all sectors involved in the language, and I'm talking about writers, but also teachers and journalists, make a call to demand measures to reverse this situation.

Thirty years ago, he was already preaching that his mission was to save the Catalan language to some AJELC colonies in Colonia de Sant Pere, I don't know if you remember.

— The truth is that I don't remember much, about those colonies, because I must have been making those shouts in a situation of alcoholic joy [Río]. But I've always had that thought. I became linguistically determined at 13 years old and from minute zero I received attacks for not switching to Castilian.

What happened when I was 13 years old?

— That I saw that in my class there were either boys who only spoke in Castilian or boys who changed languages, and I decided that I was not going to change anymore. It was a way of finding myself, of giving myself identity as an individual. I have always liked to read and I felt this affiliation towards Catalanidad as part of me, as a way of being in the world. I decided to stop chatting in Castilian, which was how I had been taught I should do it.

And then did you receive attacks?

— Yes, I remember going to a flower shop to buy a bouquet for my godmother and being rejected by a woman. The florist, who was the one who had initially spoken to me in Spanish, even defended me. Because that woman could not tolerate that there was a nobody who would do this. It was a way of making up my mind, which I think all Catalan speakers should do. Make up our minds, say "enough is enough".

More than forty years ago, then, of this determination of yours, and continue with the same conviction, even though there have been so many setbacks.

— It's just that I believe in these things. I don't want to shrink from this general pessimism, because I believe things can be reversed. Everything can be reversed, but to do so, as to create, requires will. If there is will, anything can be done, and politics is that: the realization of will. People like Margalida Prohens and her fascist friends have the will to destroy us, to turn Mallorca into a tourist theme park and leave us as something anecdotal. They have the will to do it and, if we let them, they will.

This change that Mallorca has lived and is living, and specifically Palma, is present in Prometeo de las mil maneras. The novel connects with his experience as a waiter at the now-defunct Mundo de Ciudad café.

— It was precisely when I was working there that I started to think about writing this book, in 2000.

When El Mundo closed, the closing of defining sites in the city still surprised us.

— Franchises had not yet arrived. I don't think Café Món was one of the most established in Palma, but it was a good place. At that time, if a place closed, it meant something was ending. The current dynamic is that another one begins which is generally a lie. They are not places with personality, they are settings that repeat themselves and cause a homogenization of life, in addition to the precariousness of the workers, who work in bad conditions and with bad expectations.

What was the seed of the book, those first ideas from 26 years ago?

— I wanted to bring some things together. First of all, Prometheus as a myth. This son of Zeus who deceived him by getting close to men and who stole fire to give it to them and who, because of it, was severely punished. I wanted to combine it with the life of a boy from Palma who does this job but who, as they say, 'has a screw loose and isn't all there'. I also wanted to add theAuca by Bartomeu Rosselló Pòrcel, a poem that is a description sometimes ironic, sometimes enthusiastic and sometimes critical of Palma. I felt like talking about this city, mine, with which I have a relationship of attraction and rejection. I see it so changed, so sold out, so busy and so Hispanized that, at times, it's as if it were no longer Palma.

Is there any corner that still is?

— Look, there's one that appears quite a bit in the book, the plaza de Can Tagamanent. It seems like time hasn't passed, with that hail and the tranquility of Sant Bartomeu street. On the other hand, where I lived as a child, near Plaza París, it's a completely different place. I learned to ride a bike there, in the vacant lots behind the Slaughterhouse. My father taught me there, and back then, going to the old jail was like going to the other end of the world. None of this remains.