Since she can remember, Myriam Ybot has been accompanied by writing: as a channel for her emotions in adolescence and as a work tool when she started working as a journalist. This profession led her to Lanzarote, an island she saw as “just a stopover” and where she has now been living for 30 years, “the best 30 years of my life,” she claims.
Just like many before her, the land of César Manrique captivated her, bewitched by the landscapes and the atmosphere. “This land has a magnetic quality, it’s hard for anyone who comes here to leave.” Drawn like a magnet, the protagonist of her novel Eliza (Itineraria, 2024) also arrives in the Archipelago. Eliza is an restless young Englishwoman of noble birth seeking to escape the societal conventions of the time (early 20th century) that constrain her – literally, if one pays attention to the clothing of the era – and prevent her from becoming the intrepid explorer she truly wants to be.
The year is 1910 and Eliza Drake decides to embark alone – much to the surprise of all the ship’s crew – on a journey to Tenerife, where she plans to meet her younger brother who writes to her from East Africa to tell her about his adventures. Her yearnings are clear from the start when, through her diary entries, her impatience is revealed: “I can’t believe the day has finally come. After years of bidding my dear brother Anthony farewell with a handkerchief and a tear, as he was constantly embarking on explorations around the world, it’s now my turn to board the ship, it will be my silhouette that fades into the horizon,” she writes from London on July 30th.
Olivia Stone and the others
Ybot, with degrees in Modern and Contemporary History and Information Sciences, was struck by the idea of writing Eliza, her first novel, during a conference on Olivia M. Stone – author of Tenerife and its six satellites (1887) – a woman who defied the expectations of her time and set out to explore the world. Inspired by her and by other women such as the painters Elizabeth Murray and Marian North, who lived on the Islands, the writer creates the fictional character of Eliza, who is a relative of the pirate Francis Drake.
Guided by her desire for freedom, Eliza Drake arrives in Tenerife, where she is surprised by the strong English influence on the island. “I can’t quite discern whether I am in colonial England or in a society influenced by British tradition. Certainly, Tenerife is not what I expected,” the protagonist writes in her notebook on August 15, 1910.
Even so, despite the similarities with her homeland, Drake begins to notice that things are different in the Archipelago. “What a blessed liberation! One would think that Edwardian fashion has been designed to immobilise women within stiff armors of shiny and expensive fabrics. Those dresses that push the bust are nothing but a prison,” she writes upon realizing that there is no need to wear a corset on the island. This detail, along with the ability, for example, to go into the kitchen to knead dough and help with meal preparation, makes her start to smell the freedom she came seeking in the Fortunate Isles.
“She is uncomfortable in her own skin,” Ybot remarks with a smile referring to the protagonist of her novel. “She lives and enjoys that economic capacity, the possibilities offered by her status, but is very constrained by all the conventions of the time, from fashion to the challenges of travelling alone. She cannot emulate her brother, who moves around and goes out freely. In addition, she aligns with the suffragettes of the time, demanding the vote for women in London… And she is a voracious reader, has that curiosity, that interest in fulfilling her life beyond what her situation is leading her to,” the author describes, drawing parallels between herself and her character.
“For me, it’s easier for it to be a woman. Then I adorn her with values, qualities that I either desire to have, or that are inherent to me: equality, feminism, love for the land, its protection, culture, everything related to literature,” Ybot points out. In addition to portraying these values, she seeks with Eliza to pay tribute to the land where she has been living for so many years.
These qualities of Drake, including curiosity, are what will lead her to this second stop on her journey, a place where, this time, she will find what she was looking for and where the second part of the novel unfolds.
Lanzarote, another world
“Here, Drake finds a truth, a reality, a people, a way of life that seems sincere and without all the artifice of the upper classes,” explains Ybot, referring to the island of Manrique. “In Tenerife, she interacts with the local people and already senses that there are other lives. In London, it would be impossible for her to step into a kitchen. In the Canaries, all those rules are relaxed, and she starts to explore those paths that open windows to other realities. In Lanzarote, she disembarks into a lifestyle and a reality light-years away from her own,” the author describes.
In Lanzarote, Drake is genuinely surprised, with experiences like tasting jarea for the first time – “its intense sea smell has been amazing to me,” she writes – to seeing the liñas with fish strung that “flutter like the flags of a village fair in the coastal towns of the north.” It is here where she will truly achieve her goal, that of “opening her eyes to the soul of the Canary Islands.”
Writing Eliza has been, in addition to a well-documented journey to the era in which the novel is set, a healing experience for its author. It helped her overcome the fears and uncertainty of being unemployed at the time in her life when she started writing.
“The novel allowed me to write at a different pace than what us journalists are accustomed to. Being able to spend an afternoon searching for the perfect word, the right adjective, was like embroidering, very calmly. It was wonderful,” Ybot recalls. “Endowed with infinite patience,” as she herself points out, she also immersed herself in a meticulous research process to give her story real characters and elements. With calmness, like the one Eliza found in the Islands.
