<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Antoni Riera]]> 10 <![CDATA[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.

]]> <![CDATA[Yes, that they ask forgiveness]]> Today there is much talk of strained relations, areas, and societies. We must not forget that 'tension' is a natural fact of human coexistence. The struggle between those who hold the reins and those who feel like the oil that the master moves wherever he wants is a tension, once again, that extends beyond the most ancient times.From the time of Joanot Colom, from the time of Simó Ballester, lo Tort. From the time of the foreign revolts and the guilds, up to the Civil War that devastated the island during the 20th century, this tension, this popular nervousness, has been a constant. "This land is ours, let the lords know it," wrote Guillem d'Efak. "We do not need capes to lead us by the hand, we are not children of honey and sugar, and we know how to govern ourselves," sang the shack-dwelling sorcerer. Things have changed from green to blue, but, in the end, everything remains more or less the same, only perhaps with some of the goose's roles changed.Antoni Tugores has always explained that during the Civil War the most rabid right-wingers were not the lords, but the peasants who, pampered like lice in pasture, did not want to lose their nouveau riche status. At school, when we talk about the Middle Ages, we do so by remembering that it was a class-based society, with immutable categories and two large classes: the privileged and the non-privileged. The former were the landowners. The latter were those who worked them. The former did not work. The latter, bent their backs doing it. The former were rentiers. The latter, those who paid the rents, and moreover, the taxes.The land in Mallorca is no longer the pantry that directly feeds us. Neither grain, nor legumes, nor vegetables. Neither cows, nor sheep, nor chickens. Now food arrives in the form of brick and concrete. Every two "quarterades" (a Catalan unit of land measurement), a villa with a pool. And in the village, if you have a house, fix it up a bit, because you can still rent it for a young canary's price three or four months a year.These are the furious ones, now. There is a businessman from Manacor, very dynamic on social media, who day in and day out asserts himself: “I will not apologize, nor will I be ashamed to fight like a goat and have a good life.” Well, perhaps yes, many of these “small owners” do have to apologize. Well, perhaps yes, it is worth apologizing, without being ashamed of it, for asking for 1,500 or 2,000 euros for an ordinary rent, when the interprofessional minimum wage is 1,221 euros per month. Other standard-bearers of this fight appeal to the "mallorquinitat" of these 'small owners', as those most harmed by an eventual limitation of rental prices. A measure, on the other hand, that is a complete fantasy, as President Prohens has already warned us. Yes, very "mallorquin" are these 'small owners': there is data indicating that in Mallorca one in every four properties is already in foreign hands, and that there are municipalities like Calvià and Andratx where this percentage soars to forty percent. The majority of these properties, moreover, are destined for tourist rentals, for second homes, or are simply empty waiting for the speculative market to offer them the opportunity to be sold at a price unaffordable for the "mallorquins" who earn money by working.Because yes, that's what the topic is about. The conversion of housing into a business has allowed thousands of people in Mallorca to see the possibility of earning money without working, which is what landlords have done all their lives. The sick person has a bad wound, because there are few things sweeter than earning them sweet. And those who rent villas for 1,000 euros a weekend earn them just as sweetly, as do those who rent renovated flats to school teachers and healthcare professionals for 1,500 or 2,000 euros, as do those who put a kitchen in a stable and ask for 1,000 euros a month, as do those who charge 400 euros per room for sub-standard housing. We can no longer talk about supply and demand when talking about housing. We are talking about necessity, which is what exists. It is time to stop this shame.

]]> <![CDATA[Who makes more noise on social networks: who shouts or who tells lies?]]>

In linguistics, noise is any interference, barrier, or disturbance that distorts, alters, or prevents the correct transmission and reception of a message between sender and receiver. In a way, we can say that noise is an alteration of the communication channel, so that the message cannot reach correctly from the sender to the receiver. A door in the middle of two rooms is noise. Lack of phone coverage when we are in Son Macià is noise. A parallel conversation at a table of people dining that sounds louder than your own is noise. Cataracts in the eyes that make it difficult for us to read a message on a screen could even be considered noise.

]]> <![CDATA[All of Mallorca will be a city: the model that is destroying the island]]>

The entire island of Mallorca will end up being a large city. I first heard it about thirty years ago, and I couldn't say from whom. A spokesperson for GOB? A professor from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University? A militant from the PSM? It doesn't matter now.

]]> <![CDATA[Hooligans who make King Pig true]]>

"Only Vox can clean up what's there"Vox will clean house." Thus, quite naturally, employing two languages ​​within the same sentence—one to satisfy the loose ends coming from Palma and the other to remind himself a little of the one he speaks every day—Esteve Sureda, spokesperson for the far-right party in Manacor, referred to the municipality's need for cleanliness. He wasn't talking, however, about papers, trash, overflowing containers, or abandoned street furniture. He was talking about people. In any case, the conflict, the problem, and the row are theirs, those who made the video recalling "our customs" and "our godfathers" without hesitation to speak a language they never spoke. What, for him, should be "Mallorcan identity"? The far-right's cynicism is outrageous. The alarms, however, are all going off because of racism and the The xenophobia of this party, which shamelessly replicates the dehumanizing patterns of 1930s Nazism, culminated, it must be remembered, in one of the most shameful episodes in human history: industrialization.

]]> <![CDATA[Anxieties in a world that's going backwards]]> Memes and parodies about the way young people react to everyday problems are commonplace. Particularly witty is the Valencian influencer Ignacio Gil Conesa, better known online as Nachter. This man, with over ten million followers on TikTok, has left his previous job and now dedicates himself to "content creation," which is the new term for generating videos and other audiovisual materials with the aim of entertaining and, above all, making likes and followers.

]]> <![CDATA[Between therians and anti-vaxxers: how far are we willing to go in being deceived?]]>

These past few days, the whims of the algorithm have decided to make my feed Instagram phenomenon of theriansThese are people who feel an "inner connection with real animals." In other words, they feel like animals. If they are dogs or cats, they walk on all fours. If they are snakes, they slither with the elegant, scaly undulation of those forked limbs that so many people find unpleasant. Apparently, the phenomenon is viral in Argentina. Perhaps these are people who have realized that trying to be human under the chainsaw regime is impossible. But you don't have to go that far: in some schools in Mallorca, there are already families who empathize with these peculiar identity needs of their children.

]]> <![CDATA[He who changes his head scratches himself]]> Last week, Professor Gabriel Bibiloni, whom we who knew him when we studied Catalan Philology at the University of the Balearic Islands held in high esteem, He was the protagonist of an event which, beyond the annoyance it caused him, the shop assistant who served him and the managers of the establishment where it happened, is a reflection of the humiliating agony and scandalous contempt that we Catalan speakers must live with when we leave our tribal pebble, what is now called "the comfort zone".

]]> <![CDATA[The 'vos' and the loss of respect]]>

"These papers here will be yours..." a colleague from the high school told me the other day in the staff room. I suddenly understood that "yours" meant all the colleagues in the department, not just me. Today I went to buy the checkout, which is the only place we usually interact with someone from the department store, and a girl said to me, very nicely, "Would you like a bag, sir?" It's become clear to me now that perhaps the colleague from the other day was referring exclusively to me...

]]> <![CDATA[Saint Anthony, to re-edge in order to revive]]> Now that we're back from the sweet and festive Christmas celebrations, we're entering the big week of Sant Antoni. I took the opportunity to ask my students at IES Portocristo what songs they knew... And they knew quite a few. "Yes, teacher"Sant Antoni, for rain, inside you're making plants and clappers, to earn a few coins to make new shoes." "Very good, Yerai," I agreed. The Sant Antoni festival has taken off so much that even in a place of such impressive cultural diversity as Portocristo, the children of the newcomers... do they know what a "lova" is? Nobody in the classroom has the slightest idea, despite having heard and sung the song dozens of times. "And a claper?" Nobody knows that either.

]]> <![CDATA[Content creators... you choose!]]> Whether from institutions, social forums, or personal opinions like the one you're reading now, there's a tendency to promote content creators in our language, eager to project a positive spirit and optimistic expectations regarding the health of the Catalan language, which we so often tend to view through a victim mentality, or even from a negative one. And it's important to do so! I recommend following the Parlars Mallorquins page, which began as a website focused almost exclusively on linguistics, dialectology, and other philological curiosities, and has become a national reference point, and I would even say an anti-capitalist one. I also like to follow what @CasHorrach says from time to time; he's quite witty, that guy. Or President Àngel Aguiló, whose words are as eloquent as they are forceful. These are our own cases, with a lot of influence on social media and which also resonate in conventional media, such as IB3, which finds a creative source of information and a connection to the reality of the internet—a reality that is no longer clear whether it also reflects the reality of the street or not.

]]> <![CDATA[The sea will boil]]> The unbearable lightness of knowing what we think. The days leading up to Manacor have been intense. The sea has boiled, like a casserole in the oven, in the apocalyptic Ausiès-Marché style. The local cultural organization has canceled a conference on Chuetas and antisemitism because the speaker was to be the historian, and also self-proclaimed Zionist (that's how she describes herself, the label isn't mine), Laura Miró. The episode is incredibly complex, and nothing I say about it will escape accusations of being a Zionist or a Palestinian terrorist from supporters of both sides. I'm not aiming for neutrality. I want a free and sovereign Palestinian state. I'm disgusted by the genocide that the Israeli state is perpetrating against what some still cynically call "Holy Land." I don't want Israeli colonization of that territory, just as I don't want Spanish colonization of ours. Between the state and the oppressed people, my choice is clear. Cancellation is another matter entirely. It drives me crazy that we don't let someone speak, especially when we've already invited them to share their perspective (wasn't this the initial mistake?). If we've reached the point where we can't listen to each other, where we can't speak frankly, with all the nuances, all the complexities, and all the controversies in the world, then we've lost our way in this whole mess.

]]> <![CDATA[Cooking to eat, a delicious anachronism]]> Two weeks ago I bought a rabbit at the butcher's. I asked them to cut it into pieces. I put the thighs, shoulders, and meatiest parts of the loin, which I had seasoned with salt and pepper, into a pan with enough oil. When they started to brown, I added two small potatoes and, after a few minutes, a large chopped onion. I seasoned it well with salt. It was finger-licking good.

]]> <![CDATA[My little house, however poor it may be]]> "I had a little house by the sea, I had a flowery garden and a peaceful sky, I had a boat and some nets on the beach and a sweet dawn when I woke up...", thus begins the The Ballad of LucasThe habanera that Joana Pons popularized in Menorca to such an extent that the song is now part of the collective imagination of Menorca, and also of those of us Mallorcans who are occasionally tempted to make a trip to the neighboring island.

]]> <![CDATA[Everything that doesn't move, breaks]]> In the spring of 2022, I had the opportunity to interview Oriol Junqueras. He had been released from prison just under a year before. I began the interview by addressing the division among pro-independence individuals and groups concerned with preserving the unique identity of Catalan culture. Junqueras suddenly alerted me: in Europe, discussing identity issues is frowned upon, especially now with the rise of the far right and the fear that we are regressing to the situation before the Second World War.

]]> <![CDATA[The names of our hope]]> "Thank you very much for showing interest in women's football.". CE Manacor recently appointed a new women's football coordinator. Due to my work as an intrepid reporter, I became interested in this new position within the club's infrastructure. Alicia, the new coordinator, received our message and contacted us. In Spanish. I returned her reply, via WhatsApp, in Catalan. And all with spelling mistakes, and we agreed on a telephone interview. Hearing her voice and looking at her lineage, I asked her: "Weren't you a student of mine?" "Are you a Toni?" Spanish speaker. She was a student of ours, a good handful of years ago, at the IES Portocristo. I thought... "Whew, Toni, how are you going to do around here?" the waiter attacked me. Shorts, white shirt, trousers with pleats in dress and manner, in service and speech.

]]> <![CDATA[Against evil]]> Not many days ago, a woman posted a very dejected image on social media of one of the many parks Manacor has available for the enjoyment of its citizens. She lamented that, due to the water shortage, the City Council, or whatever entity was responsible, had stopped watering the lawn that gave so much life to an outdoor space so frequented by families with their children, or by owners with their dogs. At that point, one of those furious commentators blurted out: "They've had to stop watering because the Moroccans go to the free fountains to get water and get it stuck." Not a word about the swimming pools, the golf courses, or the hotels.

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