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43 u 3 Galician Writing and the Poetics of Displacement: Ramiro Fonte’s A rocha dos proscritos Kirsty Hooper We are not prompted solely by the defining of our identities, but by their relation to everything possible as well— the mutual mutations generated by this interplay of relations.   —Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation 89 Displacement, whether through forced or economic migration, political exile, or even leisure tourism, is a fundamental feature of modern life.1 As the quotation at the head of this essay from the Martiniquean scholar Édouard Glissant suggests, one crucial consequence has been the need for scholars and artists to develop a range of innovative critical and creative vocabularies adequate for understanding or representing a phenomenon whose very nature destabilises the comfortable boundaries of nations and their literatures. At the same time, as the example of Galicia and many other non-state communities makes clear, the pull of what Glissant rejects as the Western-Classical model of national-cultural identity remains compelling. A significant body of recent scholarship in Galician cultural theory responds to similar imperatives, as scholars such as Silvia Bermúdez, José Colmeiro, Joseba Gabilondo, Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, Cristina Moreiras-Menor, María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, or Eugenia Romero seek to relativize and thus to reimagine the structuring concepts of a universalizing—and therefore anything but universal—essence of “Galicianness” based on an unexamined conflation of language, culture, and territory . As I have argued elsewhere, the new cultural formations and productions emerging from movement to and from Galicia have a crucial part to play in this reimagining (Hooper, “New Cartographies”). In their desire to challenge the monolithic thinking that underpins not only Galician writing, but Western concepts of “national” literatures more generally, these scholars share a volition to seek a new 44 KIRSTY HOOPER critical vocabulary that reflects the new co-ordinates of Galician cultural and civic identity emerging—or, perhaps, being re-oriented or re-discovered—at the start of the twenty-first century. This essay takes the poetry collection A rocha dos proscritos (2005), by the Galician expatriate poet Ramiro Fonte (1957–2008), as a case study for the importance of a critical understanding of displacement in re-examining the co-ordinates of Galician cultural identity. Like many of his fellow Galicians, Fonte spent much of his adult life outside Galicia, first as a teacher of Spanish at the Spanish School in London for almost a decade, and subsequently as director of the Instituto Cervantes in Lisbon, Portugal, a position he held from 2005 until his early death in Barcelona in October 2008. Primarily known as a poet (his first collection of poetry, As cidades da nada, was published in 1983), he also published essays and a trilogy of autobiographical novels. The experience of displacement is a key concern in the collection of poetry that is the focus of this essay: A rocha dos proscritos (Poemas complementarios, 1994–2004). The edition of A rocha that appeared in 2005 was, as the full title suggests , the culmination of a decade-long poetic project. It comprises three distinct collections: O cazador de libros (dated Vigo, November 1994–March 1996), O detective histórico (Vigo-Londres, April 1998–February 2001), and O pasaxeiro inmóbil (Londres-Vigo, June 2001–December 2004).2 For Fonte, a key aim of the project that comprises A rocha was to (re)integrate Galician literature into the Western canon, a project that had been fundamental to Galician thought since the emergence of fully-fledged cultural nationalism with the Xeración Nós in the 1920s. As he explained in an interview given at the time of publication: As grandes obras que se escribiron en galego dialogan doadamente coas correntes espirituais do seu tempo. Lendo a Rosalía temos a impresión de estar dialogando con Holderlin, con Leopardi. . . . Lendo a Curros, facémolo con Hugo. Se sabemos buscar en Cabanillas atoparemos a certo Baudelaire. (qtd. in Fortes n.p.) (The great works that have been written in Galician dialogue effortlessly with the spiritual currents of their time. Reading Rosalía we have the impression of being in dialogue with Holderlin, with Leopardi. . . . Reading Curros, we do so with Hugo. If we know to look in Cabanillas, we will find a certain Baudelaire.) That Fonte conceived of this project in terms of geographical imagery and metaphors is emphasized in an interview given towards the end of 2007, where he described his objective in writing A rocha dos proscritos as...

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