Juma B. Barratxina
- Spain -
Juma B. Barratxina (1994) was born near Barcelona. His two grandmothers taught him poetry in their final years, when he was still an adolescent. His paternal grandmother, Núria, gave him the complete works of Joan Maragall; his maternal grandmother, Maria, recited endless poems by Verdaguer by heart. In 2015, he went to Chile to meet the Cristo del Elqui. He founded the magazine Poetry Spam, conceived with Joan Deusa in 2019, with the aim of opening a crack where the lost ones of her generation could find themselves. Following the Valencian footsteps of his mother and grandfather, and his relationship with Deusa, he has found a solid poetic friendship with La Safor, which she considers her welcoming region, side by side with her strong roots in Vallès shire in Catalonia.
“Un estany que vessa” (A Pond that Overflows) is his first book. Before, he has appeared in the visceral pamphlet “La Tempesta” (ed. La Calúmnia), and in the fanzines “Cafès Pendents” (Barcelona) and “Ojo Silva” (Valdivia, Chile).ž
It is always difficult to write poetics, because the poetics is precisely inside the poet’s poems, on the one hand, and in the poet’s acts, on the other. As Ephrem the Syrian sayd, a word can be silver, but silence is gold. For me, writing is a teaching towards having nothing to say, it is a path to a definitive silence. However, I will have to write all my life, keep it alive, because as long as it is urgent to sustain the pain of the world in the face of so much injustice, so much misery, so much loneliness, in such an inhuman society, we will have to continue writing, because the literary tradition must continue to be written, updated, making readers sensitive to the world around them. Words do not create any reality, but the poet has to fight to maintain the sensitive capacity that they can evoke, the gestures and acts that can suggest to the one who reads them; in short, however much the homogenisation that the market system carries over all forms of human expression, making it mobile from a system of consumption, the poet writing helps language resist to be assimilated in the instrumentalization of the capital. The ancient prophets of Israel, their allegation against idolatry and injustice, to me are an intact tradition that will allow art to recover the language that is its own, and not to be assimilated by economic grammar. Trying to speak in the place of the one who has nothing, of the one who is carried away to the quietest margin, to the one who constantly crashes and drifts in our present, is one of the tasks that urges the poet to continue to exist, and, above all, invite him to succeed in his name, to sacrifice himself, to not be ego, to give himself a penny of a great love that still can everything. One love for the Other, a love for freedom, and a love, too, for one’s own language, Catalan in my case, whose literature is precious and ancient, but which strives to be valued in a world that has fewer and fewer languages and under a state that wants to divide it into parts and reduce it to a localism. There is no more poetic, therefore, than a silence that says: what is said, it is said truly; love is love, and not affection, freedom is full freedom, and not an amount of elections, silence is silence, and not mutism.
- Juma B. Barratxina
Poetry
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Mutilated / Esguerrat
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Often / Sovint
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I want to be the one who / Vull ser cell qui
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It doesn't take me like the little bourgeois / No em pren així com al petit burgès
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now that I can see / ara que hi veig
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I go where I met you / Vaig on vaig conèixer-te
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Don’t obey / No obeeixis
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When it was ambiguous / Quan era ambigua
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The Court and the Empire / La Cort i l’Imperi
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Drink wine / Beu vi
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circles / cèrcols
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social poetry / poesia social
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I want to be the one who arrives / vull ser aquell qui arriba
