As of this week, the country’s most important station welcomes its passengers with its new name: Madrid Puerta de Atocha Almudena Grandes. The mayor of the city, who did not attend the event, did not complete sixteen months after the “recognition of his memory and commemoration” was approved at the municipal general assembly meeting a few days after the author’s death. public road”. He is recognized and remembered in Chiclana, where a street from which you can see the sea is dedicated.
But the capital suffered another shortfall this week. Square Boreal Crown A woman from the Aravaca neighborhood woke up naked from a mural dedicated to Lucrecia Pérez, the woman who was killed thirty years ago in the first crime in Spanish history to be considered a hate crime with racist motives. Four neo-Nazis, including a civilian security guard, Luis Merino, went on a migrant hunt and ended the Dominican woman’s life in the ruins of her nightclub. The tribute, which was removed in 2021 by the Madrid City Council for allegedly “some improvement work” and that the municipality’s agreement to restore it had been violated, by the citizens themselves, discovered that it had erased it again. Neighbors demanding a colorful commemoration ceremony in this square, which is the meeting point of immigrants in the heart of the city, take the pulse of Consistory, who is trying to replace it with a plaque at a roundabout. And it’s not the same. The tributes are as important as their location. Because there is nothing unseen.
I read slowly arrival, It was translated into Spanish for immigrants and was not needed. And I say no need because there is not a single word on the 128 pages of the picture book. Silence. The book speaks of an immigrant – even if it is inaudible – and beyond not needing words, it needs this silence to take us to the sound of migration, where silence is the least common denominator.
The story is simple, well known: a man leaving his country with black tentacles hanging over him. We don’t know his name or where he’s from. Tentacles can be war, cruelty, hunger… Just one of the many situations you have to escape. Leaving his family behind, he embarks on a long journey, not knowing that they will ever meet again, to reach a place where words no longer work because people speak different languages, where everything new is incomprehensible to you and you do not understand. Know exactly what food and where it ends up being saved only by perseverance, hard work and the hospitality of those who came as refugees from other worlds before you were devoured by tentacles. Departure, arrival, integration and life cycle. But that’s not always the case. Most of the time you die first…
The book by Australian Shaun Tan, son of an Australian mother and Chinese father, was created in 2006, but it has that old and worn look. It depicts a world as fantastical as it is familiar to uproot; but languages and traditions that build a wall that we dare to jump when the need pushes us – hopefully – to get anywhere else. A world that could be any world, but still reminiscent of Ellis Island; Small islet in New York Harbor where more than twelve million immigrants entered between 1892 and 1954. One hundred and forty million of the current North American residents come directly from asylum seekers fleeing political and religious persecution, wars, drought… poverty. In the book, in the harbor gap where two colossal statues of native and foreigner shaking hands and accepting each other as equals greet the newcomers, was the colossal Statue of Liberty at Ellis. The French frigate Isère arrived in New York harbor in June 1885 carrying the statue, originally named La Liberté éclairant le monde (Liberty Enlightening the World), divided into 214 boxes. In this way, France commended the United States for 100 years of independence from British rule. But meanwhile, in the same year, the Berlin conference was held in former Europe, at which fourteen countries agreed to divide the African continent into colonies. None of these countries were African, but France or the United States were.
The Statue of Liberty faces Europe. A seven-pointed crown on his head symbolizes the seven seas and the seven continents; a shackle and broken chains at his feet, and on one of his walls are the lines of Emma Lazarus, the New York-born daughter of Sephardic immigrants:
“Give me your weary, your poor, your masses of people who want to breathe freely, the despised of your overflowing beaches! Send these to me, the helpless who are blown away by the storms.”
To be continued.