Identity and its relationship with literature, or how literature can help in the search for identity or, as the author says, for a “castrated citizenship.” Trifonia Melibea, of Spanish and Equatoguinean nationality, reflects on this question. The common thread is traced by one of his works, Women talk a lot and badly, edited by Sial/Casa África in 2018.
the book Women talk a lot and badlypublished in 2018, was born from my “castrated citizenship.” I am Spanish, a country whose national anthem barely has words, and Equatoguinean, a country whose national anthem was written by an alleged coup plotter – Atanasio Ndongo Bidyogo. At school, when I was little, and with the fascist salute, we sang the national anthem, responsible for officially celebrating blackness. With the singing of the national anthem we also immortalized Nazism, responsible for transmitting the omnipresence of a man dressed as a military man with a look of defiance, and inserted in a photograph stuck on the wall. My writing identity – or place of enunciation – is wrapped in a reckless identity, so Women talk a lot and badly It constitutes a compendium of short stories in which I dialogue with a Spanishness and a Guineaness unmarked by this castration.
The word “castration”, according to the RAE, comes from “castrate”, a term that means to sterilize, mutilate, apocar, uproot, etc. I disconnect from the book and with anger the identity of a girl, when I learned that “women speak a lot and badly”, an adage that in the text I use to remind Spain and Equatorial Guinea that I am already a citizen-woman and not just a woman condemned to silence. And the “castration of citizenship” in an Equatorial Guinea without a country identity and linked without institutional recognition to a colonial and postcolonial Spain, creates hybrid identities with bodies that live with the two countries at war and in harmony at the same time. In fact, in one of the stories in the work, “The Black One,” I narrate the life of a teenager who migrates from Malabo to a Spanish city. The awareness of the change from one State to another overlaps with an Equatorial Guinean identity that shrinks in the face of a fascist Spain that remained in postcolonial Equatorial Guinea with no prospect of leaving.
Women talk a lot and badly reveals that the Equatoguinean/Spanish Guinean population – regardless of the country of residence and growth – is obliged to adopt behaviors, identities and roles established as filters for social and political acceptance: filters unmarked from the principle of equality and alienated with the ideology of a blackness that essentializes Bantu. Normalization involves being a Bantu person. A good Bantu, a good Bantu, prioritizes her ethnic group before any other; prioritizes masculinity, the pure black man; prioritizes heterosexuality. But a subjugated woman who complains is not a good Bantu: she prioritizes the Africanized Catholic faith, the papacy is a white thing, and she prioritizes the black race because the white race has to go.
It wasn’t until 2016 when I finished writing Women talk a lot and badlyfour years after finishing his degree at the University of Murcia and returning to Equatorial Guinea. I found a country that was never mine and I left behind another country, Spain, that was never mine either. I had grown up with two identities that treated me like a subaltern. I thank my “castrated citizenship” that literature has offered me the right to speak. And yes, I did talk, but with the poisonous spiders from Malabo that climbed into my bed to sleep with me, potentially killing me. If I went to the National Bank of Equatorial Guinea and found it dirty, disorganized, I would take a chair and write, observing. For me, writing deserves to be direct, biting, cultivating and shameless.
And I returned to Spain, with my mind, because I wanted to insult her. She had learned since she was little that if Equatorial Guinea didn’t work, it was Spain’s fault. Equatorial Guinea returned me to Spain to insult it. And I ended up writing a heartbreaking book, Women talk a lot and badly, which I am afraid to read, which reflects a citizen in the past, castrated, without identity, full of fear. When I wrote this work I remembered myself with my Nazi arm raised, singing the national anthem, which is the masked “Face to the Sun”, until I learned, by writing, that I have to give the country to myself because writing gives me pleasure.
