Cap a una geografia líquida: Anna Murià i els camins i fluxos de la commemoració

Abstract

This article sets out to address the presence/absence of female writers in processes of commemoration of literary figures in contemporary Catalan culture, focusing on the case of Anna Murià (1904–2002). Recently included among the ten “classic” writers presented as part of the volume Women Writers in Catalan (Huerga, 2017), the process of her recovery for a possible feminine – let alone feminist – canon has been complicated by the fact that she dedicated the majority of her life, after 1939, to consolidating the “voice” of her husband, the poet Agustí Bartra, in exile in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico and the US, and after the couple’s return to Catalonia in 1970. Considering different moments of Murià’s commemorative labour and reception – from the moment of return; through the death of Bartra in 1982; to posthumous reframings after her own death in 2002 – the article explores the debates and ambivalence surrounding her significance, as a figure which, depending on the perspective of the reader, can be employed to represent: Republican memory; the continuity of exile; the experience of being a woman; feminism and feminine creativity; and/or the subordination of her own subjectivity to that of her husband and life partner, Bartra.  Rather than attempting to resolve this ambivalence, this article will show how a more attentive, genealogical reading of her work enables us to contrast the inescapably patriarchal politics of monumentalizing associated with national memory cultures with the more fluid and relational ethics that characterise her own commemorative labour and writing of the self: as a call to imagine and begin to formulate alternative practices of memorialization.