Galician Women Writers: Language, Politics, Identity
Galician Women Writers: Language, Politics, Identity
Literature has played a key role in visibilising the distinct national identity of Galicia, the bilingual Atlantic territory located in northwestern Spain which has close cultural and linguistic ties to Portugal. Galician-Portuguese is the language of the cantigas, the lyric form that was a characteristic feature of Iberian culture in the medieval period. Following the formation of modern Spain in the fifteenth century, politically-motivated attempts to stamp out Galician with imposition of Castilian Spanish meant that the language lost its prominence and came to be stereotyped as an oral language spoken only by peasants.
Yet Galicia’s most famous writer is a woman, Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885), a Romantic poet and novelist who boldly took up the pen to write poetry in ‘o noso dialecto’ [our dialect] with the publication of her Galician-language poetry collection Cantares Gallegos [Galician Songs] in 1863. De Castro’s instrumental role in the revival of Galician-language literature has tellingly not equated to a steady flow of publications by women writers in the language, due in part to the systematic repression of literature in languages other than Spanish during the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) as well as the unstable patriarchal Galician literary system prioritising writing by men, with women gaining success through the medium of poetry only in the 1990s.
In the past twenty years, there have however been many reasons to be optimistic, with a surge in publications of novels by women writers writing in Galician who are finally being paid attention. So how do Galician women novelists represent Galicia’s distinct identity in their work? And where does that leave Galician women who write in Spanish?
I grapple with these issues in my book Contemporary Galician Women Writers (2020) through analysis of the novels of three women writers who were born and grew up in Galicia but represent divergent and often conflicting approaches to Galician culture, language and identity.
Teresa Moure (b. 1969) is one of Galicia’s best-known and prolific contemporary writers, a Galician nationalist whose commitment to her homeland is apparent in her literary production. Her historical novel Herba moura (2005), published in Galician and appearing soon after in the author’s self-translation to Spanish, was a bestseller when it first appeared on bookshelves in 2005. In an impressive feat for a Galician-language writer, the novel was also translated to Catalan, English, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Serbian, and an English translation by Philip Krummrich titled Black Nightshade appeared in 2018.
Moure continues to publish prolifically, yet her work has received less critical attention since she decided to publish exclusively in the minority spelling norm of Galician-Portuguese, a form of Galician closely tied to the shared linguistic root with Portuguese. This treatment of Moure’s more recent work is a reflections of the tensions within the Galician cultural sphere, in which the institutionally sanctioned language standard is upheld to the expense of other variants.
The second writer whose novels I consider is Luisa Castro (b. 1966), a celebrated bilingual poet who has published a number of novels in Spanish and is currently Director of the Cervantes Institute in Dublin. Castro makes for an especially interesting case study given that she writes in both Galician and Spanish, switching language according to genre as many bilingual writers do. She reports that she has written her novels in Spanish due to the publishing opportunities available to her, demonstrated by two of her novels being published by Planeta, the Spanish-language publishing conglomerate. In contrast to Moure’s explicitly Galician nationalist stance, Castro, who has lived and worked abroad for many years, takes a more ambiguous approach to Galician politics that is reflected in her narrative.
Finally, I examine the work of Marta Rivera de la Cruz (b. 1970), by far one of the most controversial writers in the Galician context who has openly snubbed the Galician language and stands in opposition to Galician nationalism as a prominent right-wing politician in Madrid. Given Rivera de la Cruz’s inflammatory politics, her Spanish-language novels have hitherto not been analysed in the context of Galician identity, yet they have much to tell about conflicting views in Galician society.
Read in conjunction with each other, these high profile and in some cases controversial writers make for an interesting comparison that reflects just how complex and conflicted Galician cultural politics continues to be. Taking an intersectional feminist approach to these issues is especially illuminating as women writers in Galicia have been doubly marginalised not just by their language or location, but also their gender.
While the Galician language continues to be under severe threat as Spanish continues to encroach on everyday life, it is encouraging to see an increase in women writers successfully publishing narrative in the language. Many of these works are not being translated, but as more of their works do gradually become available in other languages, hopefully international readers will begin to take note of the flurry of literary activity in this corner of the Iberian Peninsula, where women writers have much to tell us about pressing issues relating to language, periphery, sovereignty and identity.
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Dr Catherine Barbour is Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She specialises in contemporary Iberian literary and cultural studies, with particular interests in Galician Studies, multilingual literature, gender and migration studies. Her work has been published in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, English in Education, International Journal of Iberian Studies, Journal of Romance Studies and Parallax and she is author of the monograph Contemporary Galician Women Writers, published by Legenda in 2020.
With Danny Barreto (Colgate University), she recently guest edited a special issue of the International Journal of Iberian Studies entitled ‘(Re)Producing Galician Femininities: Women’s Creative Praxis in 21st-Century Galicia’ (2022). Catherine is an elected member of the Modern Language Association Galician Forum executive committee (2020-2024).
https://www.tcd.ie/research/profiles/?profile=barbourc
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Category: On Writing
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