Mallorca in transition

Sometimes there are books that are ahead of their time, or that, without being ahead of their time, capture the spirit of an entire era. They can even help us imagine future, or better, ones. This is the feeling I had with this novel. Monument, by Alba Noguera (Palma, 1997), winner of the VIII Antoni Vidal Ferrando Prize and published by the Calongí label Adia Edicions.

The plot is simple: Blai is a young man who returns to an island after living on the mainland for a while, and who sees how he and the island, in recent years, have taken opposite paths. He, towards himself, after (or during) a gender transition that has led him to assume that name and an identity closer to masculinity, but not entirely binary. The island, on the other hand, suffers the consequences of having fled from itself for too long, and now finds itself unrecognizable. Thus, with a clever and subtle interplay of reflections, Monument It presents the experience of a boy who is reunited with what was once his home and his people (especially his mother), while the island is being swept away by the undertow as if it had suffered a storm.

It is clear that the island can be identified with Mallorca. And the parallel becomes even more evident in the descriptions of this place: "Everything disappeared. Everything. Nothing remained of the island. Not a single grain of sand. Not a single person who spoke its language, no one who remembered how bodies moved in the sea when it was summer and there was no rush." Or: "The island's silhouette changed, and so did its density. There was no longer just the present. We began to live in a deferred time, stripped of the past that shaped us. [...] An ever-faster mass of people arriving and departing, treading on and altering the shape of the landscapes, the streets." Blai, on the other hand, experiences a process of constructing and consolidating his identity. "My name is Blai and I have a voice," he declares. He is "a body returning home" and learning to live in new ways thanks to the advice of, among others, his mother: "Always question fear. Always question joy." With complete clarity, he leaves behind dysphoria to embrace gender euphoria, love for the land, and those who inhabit it with him.

With MonumentAlba Noguera constructs a novel that speaks primarily of a character, Blai, but also speaks of us in a beautiful and meticulously crafted exercise of polyphony: because we hear his voice, but we can also read Duna's diary from when she was little, the interior monologues of her mother and Cel, the heart of "Us" and the heart of "Us" and the almost feverish heart of a dream, and everything in between. As Noguera says at one point in the novel, "returning home is always rewriting it." Monument It does, and it helps us imagine other islands, other bodies, other ways of being and living in community that flee from what is taken for granted, from what is established. It is a book that amplifies. And, for me, it has made me happy.