Moha

Not too many days ago I had a bump with the car. Nothing of great importance, more than a slightly dented door and the documentary and management hassle that the thing entails in the following days. This week I went to the workshop assigned to me by the insurance company to have it appraised. A workshop run by Manacor people of the kind they now call 'of a lifetime'. 'You'll have to wait a little, because the young man who takes care of it starts at nine', and I went back into the car and spent some time there scrolling through my mobile phone.After a few minutes, "the young man who takes care of it" appeared, smiling. "I'll take a couple of photos and send them to the house. If they don't see any signs of fraud, we'll move forward and you won't have to bring it back until we have to fix it," he told me amiably. We entered the office: "I'll jot down my direct number for you," and he gave me a card with a name written by hand. I'm not wearing my glasses. "Who should I ask for?" "Moha," he told me.If you had heard us, you would not have made any difference. Both of us adapting to the slightly formal and a little distant and cordial tone that the communicative situation required. Both of us in a 'lifelong' Manacor Catalan. Basically, because both of us are, 'lifelong' Manacor residents, from my life and from hers.And we'll leave it at that, I'll call him. There's no more difference between Moha and me than the origin of the name, within the professional relationship we've had. Obviously, then each to their own home, and the dogs to Coll's, as they say. Already in the car, I delve into my linguistic and cultural musings. I've thought about our great-grandparents in Havana, or in Buenos Aires, which are the two mythical names with which people of a certain time summarized the Majorcan diaspora in America. How must they have done it? They must have learned and spoken the language of the place, of course. But they must have looked for each other, they must have formed a community. What language did they speak to their children, if they formed a family there? All sorts of situations must have occurred. It depended on whether both parents were from here or not, whether they saw themselves returning to Mallorca someday, whether they thought that to ensure the future in the new land it was convenient to speak to them in Spanish or whether, on the contrary, they didn't want their children to lose the language their parents had taught them in any way.Just like all the people who arrive in Mallorca and who right now represent a third of the population. The narratives, depending on who articulates them, use different, sometimes antagonistic vocabularies: “coexistence”, “interculturality”, “integration”, “assimilation”, “cultural substitution”, “invasion”...We are moving in slippery terrain that allows for two interpretations: the most raw and uninhibited capitalism has settled within our homes. It is as if the United States had disembarked its model directly on this small island of ours in the middle of the Mediterranean. Incessant and tumultuous movements of population to feed the monetary greed of a handful of new rich and speculators, so that they can continue to pluck the golden goose of tourism on the backs of others; and a society divided into isolated communities, into stagnant ghettos that seek no other bond than the commercial or labor one, and even then. Rootedness and sense of belonging are weak. It is a way to keep communities poorly anchored to the territory, with no interest in defending it, and divided, with no possibility of organizing collectively, of uniting for a common cause, of questioning this or that policy together.However, let's talk about the second reading. Languages and cultures can be linked to a territory, but they can also be linked to a community. Neither of these two assumptions makes them better than others. Nor worse. All cultures, all languages, are necessary to sustain the global 'lingosystem'. Each way of speaking represents a way of understanding and interpreting the world. As humans, we cannot afford to do without any. Neither the others', nor our own. No one is in a position to tell another what language to speak, nor what form their cultural expressions should take. And we Catalan speakers in Mallorca know this well, because, however little we want to keep the presence of the language alive, we come up against ignorance, contempt, and affront.The singer and creator Joana Gomila (what would we do without her?) recently gave us a new idea: the right to cultural opacity. The idea is from the thinker from the island of Martinique, Édouard Glissant, who says that people, cultures, and languages do not have the obligation to be completely transparent or understandable to others. The idea of "translating everything" into one's own frameworks is very much linked to a way of understanding the world that is very colonial, perhaps even supremacist.Let's think of all of us, of all the Majorcans of today, those who were born here and those who have come. Whatever their lineage and their names. All have the right to preserve an irreducible part of their culture, the right not to be completely translatable, the right to exist without having to justify themselves according to external categories. Let's think about it, we Catalans of Mallorca, for ourselves, in this essential depth of our way of seeing and understanding the world. If we do, we will be more capable of empathizing also, for that very reason, with all this otherness that is now so ours, so from here, and that does not arrive as a threat to dilute us, but as an opportunity to make us richer, and I'm not talking about money.Because suspicion, obsession, and hatred, in general, are not usually cultural, even though the Spanish far-right, and now also the Catalan one, want to dress it up as such. Hatred, obsession, and suspicion, unfortunately, are class-based and the rejection of difference is arbitrary and depersonalizing.Moha's case from the workshop sends me back to school, which is, for now, the only meeting space we have managed to set up. That's where this normality comes from. From there, empathy must be able to emerge and suspicion towards difference must be dismantled. And from there, the building material we need must be able to emerge to construct the necessary bridges and meeting spaces, also in adult life, to become a plural, healthy society and, yes, call me naive, with the Catalan language as the backbone of it all.