He came out on the stand in his jeans, with the air of someone who doesn’t pass by there, and when he sat down (in front of journalist Jessica Martínez, from Granada) this canary island of Icod de los Vinos (Tenerife) already dazzled the public that attended the Ñ festival awards ceremony this Saturday.
Andrea Abreu was born in that city in the north of Tenerife 28 years ago and published Donkey Belly (Barrett, 2020) as if she were throwing a bottle onto the beach, helped by her colleague and editor, Sabina Urraca.
Supported by its ability to navigate where the literaturethe one now awarded by Ñ has already dazzled literary humanity, from Spain to twenty languages of the world, with the Canarian language (some call it dialect, as if what is said, in Spanish, in the neighborhoods of Chapultepec or in Vallecas) that is spoken in her island neighborhood, near the Drago and, now, near everywhere thanks to this woman who, upon collecting her award (it is sponsored by Iberia and is called Talent on board), He has already vindicated his accent, his words and his journey with a book that seems like a gift to his land and to the sky that dominates it.
yours is of the most powerful voices of writing born in Canary Islands in the last half century, along with those of Víctor Ramírez or Félix Casanova de Ayala, whom he cited in a conversation that was interspersed with laughter whose origin is sincerity and destiny, the freedom to tell as it counts, without barriers, in his book so famous and so typical of the place where his relatives and his memory live.
Its roots are the neighborhood, for history, for language, but his training, that is, his contacts, are also the neighborhoods of Madrid and, for years, his fascination with La Laguna, in Tenerife. His work or livelihood has depended on one place and the other, but Donkey Belly It comes from the seashore, from style and from life, from a climatic incident that we Canarians experience even abroad, the foreigner being everything that is born from the shore, for example, from Playa de San Marcos, its beach. .
Of his famous book, and its title, donkey belly, She spoke abundantly on Saturday night in the Circle, before an audience marked by admiration of silence conveyed by the convictions of this island woman. As if she were listening to an envoy of Samuel Becket or James Joyce, she substitutes simplicity for wisdom, depth for literature, and knowledge.
For this reason, when the colloquium ended and she went to sign, the people who had applauded in the auditorium did not know very well if she had heard music (Canarian music, or universal music, whatever they want to deduce from her talent, from your talent on board, in truck or wheelbarrow) or silence, that is, literature, which is a greater form of silence.
Donkey belly. That title does not appear in the bookis part of her soul, of the island soul and, she said it: it is a title that comes from the way of being of the islanders, because from the moment it dawns, next to the sea and on the peaks, that donkey belly It falls like the curse of melancholy on those who rise early and also on those who rise late.
Having experienced that sensation, which produces asthmatics and sadnessis to have read at least the prolegomena of the book, what happens when it is not yet written. And now it is mythical because it is true to the blood of the tongue, which comes from the knowledge of another island factor lodged in the eyes: crying and laughing at the same time, when they don’t see you and you are at home, waiting for the borrowed bottle to arrive.
That donkey belly It is the climate of the book, but that nickname in which the first known work of Andrea Abreu is born It does not appear in any line of this work whose beginning, the cover, is already passion, neighborhood and literature. A woman blurts out (that’s what the gesture of joining her arms together in the middle of anger was called in my own neighborhood) while a boy, a bully, you could say, makes the gesture of shooting himself in the throat while sitting astride a butane bottle.
About that cover there is a relationship of praise, of admiration and underlining to this work of art that was born in the heights of Icod and is read in England, in Germany and anywhere the index that lands on the maps can reach. For example, Sara Mesa said of it, of the work: “I just finished donkey belly and I am overwhelmed. What a wonderful book, what a miracle.” Laura Barrachina: “A risky bet on her wild poetics and Jedionda, as Jedionda as she is sensual.” And Reading Fund, the first underlining sign on this cover that looks like a painting designed by Fernando Vallejo to describe the neighborhoods of Sabaneta: “One of the best first novels I have read in years.”
The most eloquent words I could hear on Saturday, while Andrea responded to Jimena in the literary theater of the Círculo de Bellas Artes, was silence. As he does not lavish himself, like his own silence, it is the world in which his daily life takes place.since she is nothing more than a writer who once worked in a haberdashery, and who does not boast of her studies or other music that has her own name as a banner, people listened to her as if she did not come from the cold (or the donkey belly) of his town, in the winters or on the peaks, but as if they heard him say part of a novel that he is not yet writing.
Not a bit of vainglory, my childcould be said as a summary of his way of refereeing the difficult game of having ascended to the glory of literature with a single book that, in addition, is a challenge and is art.
When the event ended, Sergio Ramírez received the award that his literary career deserves, his courage, now marked by exile. He was interviewed, with wisdom and underlining, by Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, literary director of the Ñ Festival. The president of the Círculo, Juan Miguel Hernández de León, demanded that the Ñ not be lost in digital, and Luis Posada, director of this festival that is already global, as donkey belly, he remembered with emotion the founder of this beautiful story, Alberto Anau, who died like a lightning bolt recently. The Círculo bookstore, which serves La Machado, was happy as if it were not the end but the beginning of what is to come. I hope that what comes next will continue to be, for example, this literature.
