The official words name the Raval as a neighborhood of Barcelona located in the Ciutat Vella district in which some 48.000 people reside. It is located next to the port and La Rambla, the Sant Pau and Sant Antoni ring roads and Pelai street. Its inhabitants have come there from all over the world. According to the Barcelona City Council website, after the Spanish, the most present nationalities are Pakistani, highly concentrated in the southern Raval, and Filipino, who lives mostly in the northern Raval. Other words, such as those written by Akisha Ángeles, born precisely in the Philippines in 2005, detail what the neighborhood is like: “Sitting in the usual place, I silently observe the street, all kinds of people who come and go, and above all flowers that once died and were reborn next to the living green of the leaves. I am almost sure that I do not know the infinite stories that this place can keep, however, I know mine. Yours. And the story that was once ours." It is a fragment that is read in "Chit chat", a story signed by Ángeles included in Raval stories, a book in which 21 adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18 narrate their neighborhood, their Raval.
The volume is the result of a project carried out between February 2019 and March 2022 by the publishing house Blackie Books, the bookstore La Central and the public institutes of Barcelona Milà i Fontanals and Miquel Tarradell. The objective was to identify young people with a curiosity to write and a desire to awaken that latent narrative talent to tell life in the Raval in their own words. The first step was a story contest, which received more than 50 texts. From all of them, a sample was selected whose authors participated in a first workshop given in October and November 2019 by the writers Miqui Otero and Juan Pablo Villalobos. This joint work and the one carried out in the second course, held two years later, have borne fruit in this book whose sales will go entirely to associations and projects chosen by its young authors.
My neighbors are called Kureishi
On the first day of the workshop, Otero and Villalobos read the beginning of the novel to the kids The Buddha of the Suburbsby Hanif Kureishi. One of them commented that her neighbors had the last name Kureishi. “Yeah, I'm the one who said that,” recalls Nosheen Talat with a laugh. “I jumped up and said 'hey, my neighbors are called that'. She made me excited. Under my door are their stores, they are my neighbors, they live in the same block. I have known them since I was little, they have seen me grow up and go there in any way, in pajamas, in flip-flops or whatever is needed at the moment”.
Talat was moved to have the book in his hands, he can't quite believe it. She is grateful for her workshop, in which she learned to see beyond and express herself differently than she did. She came to the contest because her Catalan teacher had them write a short story in class for another contest held for Sant Jordi that she won. As a prize, the teacher pointed to the one organized by Blackie Books and La Central. In his workshop, she developed that text, the final version of which is “11 suïcidis”, a tough story that appears in the book. “What I did,” she explains, “was to express myself as the teenager that I am in this society right now. How we live our lives and how adults, although they also have their problems, forget that they were teenagers at the time and make today's teenagers have a hard time. It is true that the eleven suicides is a bit strong, but there are really many adolescents with depression and anxiety and no one realizes the pressure they are being subjected to, which makes them see life as something hard, ugly, and they forget how beautiful it is.
“11 suïcidis” is the first own text that Nosheen Talat has seen published, but she says that she has always liked writing. “What I do is express what I have experienced or what I have seen that my friends, people my age, are experiencing right now,” he comments. Among his literary tastes, he cites Blue Jeans and John Green, but specifies that she is not much of literature itself: "I am more of today's novels that you can find on the internet or people who have wanted to express themselves in such a way" .
The garden we don't have
Learning in the workshop went back and forth. In the book's epilogue, Miqui Otero acknowledges that the participants "are adolescents, they are gregarious, they are hypersociable, and they taught us that writing can also be a collective exercise, that there are ways to break the solitude of writing, that you have to learn to use the first person plural. The other teacher, the Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos, assures that "we do not have to model them, we are the ones who have to adapt, learn to write again" and choose his favorite moment of this process: "What I like the most is to talk with them, questioning the motives of the characters in their stories, the description of the neighborhood, the language of the dialogues. They still look without literary prejudices, and I always feel that they also teach me”.
The guidelines for the contest prior to the workshop were established with institutes and associations in the area "because they know the children better than anyone else," recalls Júlia Martí, coordinator of the project. This is how the formula of the short story with a theme related to the Raval was chosen. After the training and editing in the workshop, Martí is satisfied with the result that can be read in the 21 stories in the book: “There are fictional stories, others more autobiographical, but in all of them the neighborhood is seen in some way, from the streets and the squares that appear until the smells and the noises. There are things in the neighborhood that are repeated, some good and some bad. There are evictions, shouts from the police, noise, garbage, but also spaces where they play, walk, meet…”. With all these elements, she considers that the image of the Raval that she offers Raval stories It is very varied, which is “the main characteristic of the neighbourhood, where many different cultures coexist. I would say that 60% of the people who live there were not born in Barcelona; at the same time it is a neighborhood that is beginning a gentrification process, there are the most fashionable shops, modern bars, some houses are beginning to have exorbitant rents…”. According to Martí, “a tension that can be seen a lot in these stories walks through its streets: people who have lived there their whole lives, others who have arrived in recent years, tourists and new residents with much higher purchasing power. It is a neighborhood with a very marked complexity”.
