To be a puma and run beyond the limits

With Dietari del puma, published by LaBreu Edicions in this year that marks its 20th anniversary, Susanna Rafart offers us another work of prodigious literary ambition, a book that challenges the boundaries between diary, poetry, reflective prose, and travelogue to delve into a question of burning current relevance: the possibility of ceasing to participate in the world from human centrality. The puma here is not a simple metaphor nor an ornamental motif; it is a fundamental presence that transforms voice, body, and perception from the roots. Rafart undertakes an operation of great imaginative audacity and shifts into a wild animal to understand what lies beyond identity and to explore the murky zone in which memory, landscape, and disappearance merge into the same violent and liberating stream. The result is a free, demanding, and deeply personal book that turns metamorphoses into forms of knowledge.

Rafart's prose has many qualities that I have been defending for years, but one of the most notable is that it is simultaneously precise and exuberant, cultured without falling into unnecessary academicisms, capable of moving from detailed observation to poetic revelation, from artistic or scientific reference to the most physical or even physiological intuition. This journey of the puma is also an exploration of the history of images, of painting, of literature, and of the ways in which we humans have represented, classified, and often subdued our environment. From this perspective, the volume questions how we are and how we exist in the world, in the same way that other recent works also question it, such as the post-apocalyptic bestiary Plena de dons by Anna Gual at Proa or the essay L’Ull que tot ho veu. Matèria i terror by Lluís Calvo at Lleonard Muntaner, Editor. I would dare to affirm that these three current proposals are a trinitarian dialogue.

There is a great formal bravery in these works. Susanna Rafart does not seek the comfort or the continuity of conventional discourses: she, who knows so much, could repeat herself to the point of boredom by reusing her confirmed gifts, but, instead, she advances along other paths and gifts us with brilliant fragments, astonishing voices, and fascinating landscapes with a compositional audacity that responds to the very daring nature of her great literary project. To write, for Rafart, is an invitation to abandon the certainties of one's own personality as well as those of the species to face the confrontation of other options and consciousnesses. Dietari del puma is, in short, a prodigious book that invites us to risks and to fusions and to mutations, all while rediscovering the art of writing through a poetic intelligence that is not very common and a beauty, as was to be expected, deliciously wild.