Congratulations, Fatima (Photo: Martin Roberts)
“She awoke without rancor thanks to poetry. She knew how to cuddle me with verse-like hands and swaddle me with stanzas by great writers.”
That’s what award-winning poet Fatima Frutos said, speaking of her grandmother, who brought her up while reciting poems she had learned by heart, because she could neither read nor write. The Jerusalem Post has an article about here; the Reuters article is here. Frutos beat more than 200 international poets to win the 2011 Kutxa Ciudad de Irun Poetry Prize, Spain’s second biggest poetry prize.
The award honors her collection, Andromeda Encadenada (Andromeda Enchained), commemorating “unsung heroines” including Irena Sendler, who saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Sendler is hardly unsung – I’ve written about her here and here and here and oh so many other places, like the History News Network here.
“The visibility of such women needs to be vindicated, the ones who have been deemed secondary, who have had no recognition but deserve that and so much more,” Frutos said.
“I start out with the anecdotes and build on them with lyricism and poetry, to vindicate them verse by verse,” she said. “It’s not just about giving visibility to invisible women, but also to 20th-Century geniuses whose work has yet to shake up 21st-century consciences.”
The volume also honors eminent Italian 17th-Century painter Artemisia Gentileschi and Spanish 19th-Century writer Carolina Coronado, who both struggled to achieve recognition in fields then dominated by men. It also celebrates Carl von Weizsaecker, a 20th-Century nuclear physicist who later became a philosopher, German 18th-century mystical writer Novalis, and 19th-century lyrical poet (and another German) Friedrich Hölderlin. (Both Reuters and the Jerusalem Post manage to misspell Hölderlin … but then, they also misidentify Novalis as a philosopher.)
Congratulations, Irena.
But her main inspiration as a writer has been Miguel Hernández, known as the “people’s poet,” fought Francisco Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War and was later sentenced to death for his poetry. The sentence was commuted to a long prison term, but Hernández died in prison at the age of 31 in 1942 .
“Hernandez has inoculated us with the blessed poison of poetry so that we may grow without rancour, but with the strength to vindicate social justice,” said Frutos, who works as a local government equality officer. Her grandmother recited Hernandez’s poems to her from childhood.
In an awards ceremony on May 28, Frutos dedicated her price to her grandmother. “I am a poet because of her. It needs to be said that an illiterate woman who lived in poverty also knew how to raise an international award-winning poet.”
Tags: Artemisia Gentileschi, Carl von Weizsaecker, Carolina Coronado, Fatima Frutos, Francisco Franco, Friedrich Hölderlin, Irena Sendler, Miguel Hernandez, Novalis