Soo, by Fabio Carreiro

January 25 2024 (19:05 WET)
Updated in February 18 2025 (11:22 WET)

Soo is to Juli Mesa what Alén is to the Galician poet Luz Pichel. Memory, origin. As I open Juli Mesa's book of poems, winner of the 1st Ana Santos Payán Prize and recently published by La Bella Varsovia, the first thing that comes to my mind is a memory of Juli reading his copy of Alén, Alén (La uña rota, 2021) on a plane. Later I would have the fortune of him reciting a poem just for me. We were in La Palma, it was night, but I could feel that the unmistakable wind of Lanzarote was carrying a whole stream of voices, of words that made up that extensive and surprising poem. 

If Alén is the village of Lalín where Luz Pichel was born, Soo is the town of Teguise from which part of Juli Mesa's family comes. Alén in Galician is an adverb that means "beyond" so in addition to being a place name, it has a deep and metaphorical meaning. The name of Soo has a darker root, probably aboriginal. It retains a phonetic feature foreign to our language, its pronunciation leads us to a persistent sound. The place, on land flooded with jable, protected between volcanoes from the prevailing winds and the bravura of the sea, is very beautiful and we could conclude that it is somewhat secluded, also "beyond" (although less and less) of the tensions of tourism and gentrification of the island. 

In short, we are faced with a place that represents one of the last strongholds of that traditional Lanzarote that we inherited, that we would like to preserve and that we will lose very soon if we do not find a remedy. But what is our position there? It is not enough to sit down and read a book. At first, no doubt, confusion will invade us. That invitation to bewilderment excites me because it is less and less common to find a fresh reading of poetry like the one we find in Soo. A reading that is a challenge, that worries you, questions you and forces you to investigate outside and inside yourself. What can we transmit from our experience? What can others understand about us? Perhaps this is not the most important thing in the book, but it is one of the first questions I felt I was facing when I began reading it and felt confused among poems full of references, dialogues, echoes, sayings and romances in a difficult search for identity, for tradition. 

The life of before in a place. The great continuity in the customs, in the ways of life and production of the inhabitants of Soo from its settlement by the Moors until almost our days, what is about to disappear, is the environment where these poems are illuminated. From a perspective of continuity, from the long-lasting economic and social structures on which Braudel began to theorize, in the contradiction with the liquid times enunciated by Bauman in which we live resides the central core of the book. Recognizing in the multiplicity of poetic voices, from the darkest to the uncontrollable and, in particular in the most forgotten of its women, that past that is present is the great effort of Juli Mesa. All his audacity is demonstrated when it comes to rescuing those voices. He takes great risks when transferring to paper the fruits of orality in a bold, genuine proposal, generating a plurality of sensations. 

Foucault, in his Archeology of Knowledge alludes to the fact that in each era it is established what should be known or even what can be said or not. In the search for a tradition, Juli Mesa leaves, of course, aside the great historical narrative to go beyond the hegemonic discourse and focus on some aspects of a particular daily life, in the path of Ginzburg's microhistory. If it is not possible to link this book with a tradition, a specific genealogy in its place of origin, will it be necessary to found it? To say in this way what has not yet been said? 

In the ruptures, in the cracks we find some light. What we keep versus what may disappear, what will disappear inevitably. Disappear is a key word in this book. The initial quotes announce it. In this sense, the poetic voice dissolves into a community, collective discourse based on the orality that permeates the entire book and gives it its inner rhythm. Juli Mesa tries to collect all the nuances, the experience as a wind that stirs everything up, that drives the reader crazy. Precisely the madness of the grandmother opens new possibilities of observing reality and conceptualizing the alluded past and the new possibilities of the present. Juli Mesa makes use of all the resources he finds at his disposal and considers necessary to transmit the experience of Soo: monologues, dialogues with annotations, communication through mobile phones, correspondence, etc. He even makes use of onomatopoeia and emoticons. 

So many words to fill the mysteries of those we have next to us says one of the verses of the book. The key, the lucidity. He is able to disappear to go further. It is about choosing the right words, those that reveal the transmission of inherited knowledge in the rural environment. A use of language to turn the everyday into poetry, to transform reality into poetics, to address that narrow and strange communication between the human and nature, is there any separation? 

So much light dazzles us like the walls of the houses painted with lime in Soo and it is not easy to give an answer. The genuine voices that accompany us in this book do so through various areas: pain, illness, family relationships and care, sublimated and explicit sexuality, the weight of the agrarian economy, religion in contrast to family myths. Powerful, almost savage images will reach us. 

As for the influences or affinities found in the work, it is worth highlighting from Trilce by César Vallejo that it was a misunderstood work and was described at the time by the critic Luis Alberto Sánchez as an "unknown and repudiated island" to Mana Muscarel. And Soo was described by the jury that awarded it as a "very powerful dialogue with Latin American poetry". However, there are also many other relationships with current Spanish poetry (Pichel has already been alluded to, but reference could also be made to authors of generations as disparate as Chus Pato and Berta García Faet) and North American. In this last case, from the love for the animals of Marianne Moore (to whom a reggeaton is dedicated in the book of poems) to some tonalities of A Village Life by Louise Glück is found in Soo. 

But Soo is not an easy or complacent book to read. In the proposal made by Juli Mesa, it is finally worth highlighting how the form is at the service of the content as had already happened in his previous book Lucio Blanca (Ed. Fundación Mapfre Guanarteme, 2023). And although writing things is putting a name to them, what is suggested in this book of poems will always be much more than what it simply tells us. We must be attentive. 

One of the greatest virtues that I always attribute to a book is that it can make me change, that it can help me see a landscape, a place, in more depth. It happened to me years ago, when I read Lancelot 28º-7º by Agustín Espinosa or Mararía by Rafael Arozarena for the first time, my vision of Lanzarote changed. It became a literary island that was later enriched with many other contributions: readings, authors and friends. Now, because of Juli Mesa, despite all the personal meaning that the town had for me -an untransmissible meaning- I will never be able to return to Soo and see it in the same way, without its voices, without its wind. 

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