The Church of Femés hosted this Tuesday the Solemn Academic Session necrological tribute to the recently deceased Canarian writer Rafael Arozarena. The act consisted of "honoring the poet, the novelist, the scientist and the man", as indicated by the president of the Academy of Sciences and Engineering of Lanzarote, Francisco González de Posada.
"Poet is what he wanted to be. Poet is what he largely was, in addition to being a scientist of a self-taught nature, fundamentally botany and entomology. Novelist as the most important. And as a man, a jovial, delightful, charming, endearing, eccentric, radically individual, personal, unique man?", adds González de Posada.
"Deep Canarianism"
The "praises of remembrance" opened the tribute with the reading of texts sent by different academics who coincided with him in Lanzarote, continuing with the presentation of the pictorial samples that he only presented on the Island: "Paintings by Arozarena" and "Specters of Lanzarote", concluding with the aforementioned laudatio, whose prologue was given by the mayor of Yaiza, Gladys Acuña.
The first mayor of the southern municipality read a text in which she highlighted the figure of the father of a romance entitled "María la de Femés", corresponding to the book "In the shadow of the crows" (1947). Acuña insisted on the "simple" character of Arozarena, highlighted "the deep Canarianism" of the writer who died at the age of 86 and, on behalf of the entire municipality, thanked Rafael Arozarena for "having immortalized the town of Femés and the municipality of Yaiza" with his work Mararía.
"To have him among us once again"
Regarding this work, González de Posada shared an anecdote about what the repercussion of this novel meant for Arozarena: "One of his concerns was that he said that the world knows Mararía and at most refers to "the author of Mararía", but no one knows that that author is Rafael Arozarena".
Francisco González de Posada was in charge of closing the act with the laudatio (funeral eulogy) to the Tenerife writer. A laudatio that its author defines, as well as the act of tribute, "on the one hand solemn but primarily endearing", since the intention of the president of the Academy of Sciences and Engineering of Lanzarote was "to remember him and have him among us once again, as so many other times".
