No one doubted that Ali Smith would deliver a vigorous speech in defense of public libraries, but she has given them invaluable worth in the Sant Jordi proclamation this Wednesday at Barcelona City Council. “Books are so powerful they infuriate tyrants!” she exclaimed, before further reinforcing her idea. “Libraries are one of our sources of collective power,” she added in a speech of love for books and reading, which ended with a dialogue with her Catalan translator, Dolors Udina. Meanwhile, from Plaça Sant Jaume came protests from the city’s library staff, who are on indefinite strike.
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Scottish writer Ali Smith (Inverness, 1962), known especially for How to Be Both (2014) and the tetralogy that began with Autumn (2016), is unable to conceive of life without books or without the institutions that provide them in abundance. “Without libraries? We will wither,” she emphasized in her speech prior to the day of the book and the rose, which is celebrated this Thursday throughout Catalonia, giving books the same value that water has for human beings. “I know I am 75% water. I suspect I am also 75% books,” the author stated about the need to read.
In the ceremonial Saló de Cent, the Scottish writer denounced that “libraries are once again threatened” by countries like Russia and the United States that “loot libraries and censor their collections.” “Attacks on libraries always reveal that tyranny is in action, that someone, somewhere, wants to control the narrative,” she remarked in reference to war conflicts, in an event organized, precisely, by Bibliotecas de Barcelona, which has been held before Sant Jordi since 2003.
In 2015, Ali Smith dedicated an entire book to these temples of wisdom, titled Public Library, which included stories from different people about their experience in libraries, an idea that came to her as a response to their closure in the United Kingdom. After the publication and with Brexit, the situation has worsened, she said. “Everything is getting worse at all levels because there is no money for the cultural sector,” she lamented.
If the situation in her country is critical, she sees everything worse in the world. “Tyrants and demagogues hate all arts because the arts are more powerful than them,” she defended. In her opinion, when states attack or disparage books, libraries, or their workers, “what is really happening is the opposite of freedom.” Moreover, she added: “attacks on libraries are attacks on the source of all of us, on our access to truth and our roots.”
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At the same time, Ali Smith had words of hope for the “small enclaves of unexpected libraries, like wildflowers, that sprout on the front lines of ravaged cities.” An appreciation that led her to consider libraries open to all a “source of collective power,” full of imagination, history, thought, knowledge, understanding, inventiveness, mystery, possibility, and philosophy, as she enumerated. “The world is a library,” she concluded.
As examples of what these spaces of knowledge house, she cited from Simone de Beauvoir or Virginia Woolf to Javier Marías and Irene Solà. Of this last Catalan author, she affirmed that she knows how powerful languages are, that “they can even move mountains and make them dance,” in relation to her novel that has been translated into more than twenty languages, Canto jo i la muntanya balla (2019).
During the speech, two library employees who were inside the hall raised protest signs, critical of the management of public libraries and calling for the resignation of the Culture Councilor, Xavier Marcè, who was also at the event. Only four workers were able to enter the proclamation after about fifty colleagues received the cancellation of their reserved tickets on the same day they became available, according to Blanca Brea, a library assistant, told this newspaper.
The event continued with a conversation between Ali Smith and her Catalan translator, Dolors Udina, published by Raig Verd. “I am very happy to be next to the person who writes my books in Catalan,” she stated about this veteran of the profession who, precisely, wrote about the experience of translating her in the Sant Jordi supplement Quadern. At the exit of the event, Ali Smith was photographed with the fifty employees gathered in the square, who are calling for the resignation of the manager of the Barcelona Libraries Consortium (CBB), Ferran Burguillos, and the Culture Councilor. According to them, every year they have made a respectful show of force, but this time they were denied entry.
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