May 30th is not just a date on the calendar. Beyond the institutional, Canary Islands Day has become an opportunity to ask ourselves who we are, how we tell ourselves, and, above all, what stories sustain those of us who live on the islands in this present full of fractures.
Canarian identity is not inherited as a myth: it is written. It is formed, decomposed, and remade, word by word. Literature has always been a useful tool for thinking about what we are, what we were, and what we could become. In a territory surrounded by the sea, but open to the world, writing is also a way of building bridges, erasing isolation, and recording our journeys. Colonial traces, miscegenation, insularity, the memory of exile... All of this forms a story that never quite closes.
The literature born and cultivated in the Canary Islands has witnessed an evolution that reflects the richness and diversity of our identity. From the first anonymous poetic expressions such as the Dirges for the death of Guillén Peraza, to contemporary writers, Canarian literature has been a reflection of the landscapes, customs, and struggles of its inhabitants.
In this sense, it is no coincidence that this year the Canary Islands Literature Day has been dedicated to Alonso Quesada. His work Smoking Room is more than a collection of stories with a century behind it; it is an X-ray, an ironic and lucid look at the tensions between nascent modernity and roots that resist disappearing. Set in a city of Las Palmas in transformation, Quesada portrays with dazzling acuity the effects of tourism on daily life, cultural homogenization, and identity in crisis. A hundred years later, those same tensions remain open, and tourism, with its friendly face and its predatory reverse, continues to be one of the great dilemmas of our time.
And Canarian literature continues to grow. Writers who have decades of work behind them, such as Félix Hormiga, whom we recently honored at the Casa de la Cultura in Arrecife, or Elsa López, whom we were able to receive a few weeks ago in El Almacén, continue to explore new forms of expression alongside younger voices such as Andrea Abreu, who dazzled us all with her famous novel Donkey Belly (2020), or the poet Antonio Martín Piñero, authors who emerge and continue to shape the Canarian literature of the 21st century. And Canarian literature is not only nourished by local voices within the archipelago, but also by authors who, despite being away, maintain a strong bond with their land.
On this path, there are essential names such as those of Sergio Barreto and Sonia Betancort, with whom we had the opportunity to have a conversation on May 28 at the Insular Library of Lanzarote. There, between questions about the role of the writer in our society and about whether literature can be a form of cultural resistance, a shared certainty emerged: that writing, today, from the Canary Islands (or with the Canary Islands in the heart in the case of Sonia) is a way of not giving up. That words still have the power to name the invisible, to transform pain into beauty, to reconcile us, even if only for an instant, with the inevitable.
Sonia Betancort and Sergio Barreto, proud grandchildren of conejeros and two of the most lucid voices of their generation, have known how to combine the root and the critical gaze. Betancort, a poet and academic residing in Madrid, author, among other works, of The Smile of Audrey Hepburn, combines the poetic and the visual, the intimate and the symbolic, to reflect on fragility and beauty. Barreto, for his part, moves easily between poetry and narrative. His novel Vs, awarded the Benito Pérez Armas Prize, is a brutal allegory about violence and social decomposition. His poetic volumes Book of the Observatory or Apparitions consolidate a work that explores insularity from a depth that disturbs and reveals in equal parts.
Both, each from their particular aesthetic, contribute to expanding the limits of what we understand by Canarian literature: not as a regional genre, but as an exercise of thought from the periphery, loaded with critical universality. It is in his work where the
insular ceases to be isolation to become perspective, and where literature, once again, becomes an act of resistance and affirmation.