Benvolguts guiris espanyols

I have a relative who is a teacher in an adult school, she teaches Catalan language (mostly to immigrants). Some days ago, they were doing an activity about Catalan holidays, and two of her students said that Tió should be banned and that it's the worst thing they have ever heard. My relative was very shocked and asked why they could say such a thing (imagine, it's like saying Santa Claus should be banned in the USA). Their reasoning was that they completely misunderstood everything about it. These people are native Spanish speakers and assumed that the Catalan word "tió" (meaning "log" 🪵) means the same as the Spanish word "tío" (meaning "uncle"), even though both words are pronounced differently. They believed that the Tió represents a man and that we tell children to beat people up, so much until they poop themselves, threatening them to give us things. They said it promotes violence to children and that it's disgusting. Nothing further from the truth.

This is not an isolated incident because a few days ago I saw a post on Tumblr repeating this same mistake. I texted the person who posted it saying that it's not called "Poop Uncle" but "Christmas Log" and they said that this was what they were taught by their teacher (this person is from a different continent), and haven't taken down the post. I have also seen comments on Instagram repeating the same and making fun of how gross and violent it is.

The real meaning of Tió

The Log is a way of symbolically passing down our relation with nature. This is how the tradition works:

In early December, we get a log and bring him home. We take care of him: we keep him in a warm place, with a blanket over him, and we feed him things like orange/clementine peels and walnut shells. On Christmas day, all the family comes together. Children get wooden sticks and go get ready in another room, meanwhile adults place presents under the Log's blanket. Children come back and hit the Log while singing a song. There are many local variants of the song but they all come down to asking the Log to poop us good food. When they have finished singing the song, the children remove the blanket and discover the presents that the Log has pooped. Years ago (now this is only done by some farmer families in rural areas, but back in the day this was generalized), the Log was burned in the house's fireplace and its ashes were spread on the fields, believed to act as a magical fertilizer.

Notice what this whole "ritual" has been about: we take care of nature, nature takes care of us, we are part of a whole and there's no real difference between "nature" and "us" because we all give life to each other.

We take a log from the forest and bring it home. We do this for the Winter Solstice because it's the time of the return of light and the rebirth of nature after the winter sleep, and wood symbolizes the most important things for human life: food, warmth and light. It's difficult for us to imagine nowadays because we are used to electricity, but for our ancestors who only had oil lamps, fire and candles, darkness was almost absolute for many hours in winter, and that's why the Winter Solstice was very important because it meant that light is coming back. We want something from the Log, his fire will allow us to cook, it will give us light, and keep us warm. So we offer him the same: we feed him (notice what we feed it, too: a kind of compost, which is complimentary to human food), we keep him warm, and we love him. Then, we hit him with sticks (mimicking the motion of cutting down a tree) and ask him to give us food, and he does. Then, our ancestors used to burn him for warmth and light, and then take him back to plants spreading his ashes so it will give life to the fields. Which in turn will give us food again, which we will poop and it will fertilize plants again. And it's a cycle that never ends, we're all part of a whole.

We give to the forests, the forests can grow with the remains that all living creatures leave on its ground: leafs, excrements, the remains of parts of our food like nuts and fruit peels. These things give life to the forest. And the forest gives life to us: gives us fruits and wood (=light and warmth). We take these things, and in return we give to forests once again.

Nowadays, the part about warmth and light is often lost to kids, but the part about food is still obvious, even if subconsciously. This is why the Log is not the horrible barbaric tradition that the "haha poop and violence" crowd would make you believe.

And don't get me wrong, it can still be funny! We're the first ones to make jokes about it. And you can, too! But don't spread false ideas: the Spanish word "uncle" appears nowhere near this tradition because it doesn't have anything to do with uncles nor with Spanish-speaking cultures. It's called the Christmas Log (Tió de Nadal, Soca de Nadal, Tronca de Nadal, Tizón de Nadal, etc depending on the area, all meaning "Christmas Log") and it's celebrated by the Catalan people and a part of the Occitan and Pyrenean Aragonese people. The word "poop" (as an imperative verb, as in "please poop for us") appears in the song, but not in the name.

(Sorry for the late answer.)

Yes! That was the annual flower offering to the statue of Rafael Casanova in homage of the defenders of Barcelona.

1. The history: 1714

Rafael Casanova was a general who led the defence of Barcelona during the siege in the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (to sum up very quickly, the war in which Spain invaded the Catalan Countries and Aragon because they were arguing about the dynasty that should be in the monarchy), in the year 1714. The Siege of Barcelona was at the very end of the war, when almost all the country had been occupied by the Spanish and French troops (France was allied with Spain), but Barcelona being the capital city, it was important that it resisted. The siege was very cruel for the population: they were being bombed and they had run out of food months before it ended, people were left homeless and had to eat rats and even eat the corpses of people who died in the bombs.

Still, the population of Barcelona resisted until the very last minute it was possible. On the 11th of September of 1714, the Spanish and French troops attacked the baluards and entered the city, and conquered it. This had horrible results for the population. On the political side, Spain militarily occupied Catalonia and considered it theirs by right of conquest, so they made the "Nueva Planta decrees" which abolished the Catalan institutions and laws and imposed the Spanish institutions and absolute monarchy "appointed by God" (Catalonia didn't have an absolute monarchy before this), imposed Spanish governors as the rulers, prohibited the use of Catalan language in official documents (only Spanish or Latin was allowed), Catalan people were forced to pay very high taxes to pay for their own occupation and were forced to host the Spanish troops in their homes, Catalans were forced to give a big part of their harvest to be food for the Spanish army's horses, Catalans were forbidden for having weapons (even kitchen knives had to be chained to the table), and a long etc.

When it comes to the population, the Spanish occupation made sure to punish as many as possible. For example, dozens of villages and cities were burned down after the had already been occupied, not as part of the war but as part of the punishment.

This map shows the places that were burned down -when it says “crema”-, whose inhabitants were massacred -when it says “massacre”-, and when it says “delme de forca” it means a kind of repression that the Spanish king Philip V used only against Catalans in which one tenth of the prisoners were chosen randomly to be executed.

The local leaders of the resistance were executed, and often through humiliating ways. One of the most famous examples is the general Josep Moragues i Mas, who was captured and put on trial and tortured, and was sentenced to death. He was executed in 1715, and nowadays maybe we would think that the bad thing is to be killed and not so much how you’re killed, but in the 18th century respecting honour was very important, even with your enemies, and he was humiliated because of that. He was forced to wear a penitent’s shirt and be barefoot and was dragged alive through the floors of Barcelona, tied to the horse that was taking him to the gallows. There, on top of what he had been put through, he was executed publicly with no recognition of his rank nor military honours, which is a huge punishment in the culture of the time. Then, he was beheaded and his body was then cut into pieces. His head was put inside a cage and displayed above one of the main entrance gates to Barcelona (Portal de Mar) with an inscription in Latin that said “Josep Moragues, for having committed the crime of a repeated rebellion, having abused twice of royal clemency, finally, the third time he was imprisoned and executed by justice” in reference to him resisting until the end of the war. His widowed wife spent years asking for mercy so that the authorities would take his head out of that public exhibition place. In the end, they agreed to take down his head in 1727, after 12 years of being exposed.

This is just to give an image of how the defeat affected the Catalan people. For this reason, the events of 1714 are highly symbolic to us, because they represent the moment that our independence was lost and the beginning of the repression of our culture, language and identity. For this same reason, the 11th of September (the day that Barcelona lost the siege, in that same 1714) is Catalonia’s national day, in commemoration of the fight that isn’t over.

2. The statue: made, lost, and found

In the 1880s, the Barcelona city hall was preparing to host the 1888 Universal Exposition. For this event, cities build avenues and buildings to hold the exposition that somehow represent their history. Barcelona made an avenue and commissioned statues of important men of Catalonia’s history: intellectuals, artists, statesmen, etc. One of them was this statue to Rafael Casanova, which represented a homage to all the Catalans who fought to defend the city and country in the War of Spanish Succession.

Ever since it was set up, people went to bring flowers to the statue. Then, in 1897, left-wing pro-Catalan organizations established the annual tradition of bringing flower offerings every 11th of September.

People gather around Rafael Casanova’s statue and cover it in flower crowns. 11th of September, 1914.

It wasn’t always easy. In 1901, the offering had become important enough that the police arrested people with the only accusation of having laid flowers to the statue. And it only got worse with Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship of Spain (1923-1930), a proto-fascist dictatorship with Catalanophobia as one of its pilars. The dictatorship prohibited the use of the Catalan language, prohibited exhibiting the Catalan flag, and any public display of Catalan identity. Any disobeying was harshly repressed, so for this reason, the flower offering was stopped.

As soon as that dictatorship ended, people went to make the flower offering again, with more participants than ever. But that only lasted until 1938, because in 1939 another Catalanophobic fascist dictatorship started: Franco’s (1939-1978). This dictatorship took down all the monuments that had to do with Catalan history or identity, as well as all leftist symbols. They took away the statue and destroyed the gardens where it was placed, but that night people filled the (now empty) place with flowers and someone left a sign that said “ja creixeràs”, which in Catalan means “your time to grow will come”. To avoid this action to repeat, the police watched the monument the following night.

Many statues around the city (and country) were destroyed by the dictatorship, only 5 bronze statues were saved in all of Barcelona, one of which was this, thanks to some city hall officials who argued that these ones were property of the city hall (unlike others that were property of unions, parties or organizations), and so the statue was kept away in a storehouse. Fearing that the fascists would destroy the statue even if it was not in a public space, they built a brick wall to hide the statue, and the statue was “lost” until after the dictatorship had ended.

In 1976, right after the dictator’s death, a committee from Catalonia’s Art Museum went to this storehouse and took the statues that were hidden there. But they realised that what the building looked like outside and inside didn’t match, and eventually found out the secret hiding place.

In 1977, they placed the statue back on the streets, in the place where Rafael Casanova had gotten shot in the battle of the Siege of Barcelona.

11th of September, 1977. A massive demonstration in favour of Catalonia’s sovereignty was held in Barcelona.

Since then, pro-Catalan unions, associations, parties, sports clubs, and many other kinds of civic associations bring a flower offering every 11th of September.

Barça football club takes part in the flower offering since the year 1919.

Did you know that there have been a handful of Catalan writers who were candidates to win the Nobel Literature Prize, but because of Spanish interference they never did?

The Nobel Prize discloses its debate and reasoning process 50 years after each edition. This means that we already know the details of what happened in the earliest editions of this Prize, which was started in 1901.

The name of the Catalan play-writer Àngel Guimerà (author of Marta of the Lowlands, Mar i cel, La filla del mar...), whose works have been translated to many languages and played all around Europe and the Americas, with many film and opera adaptations, sounded often in the Nobel committee. He was presented as a candidate to win the Nobel Prize 17 times in a row, since 1907 until his death in 1924. In the editions of 1917 and 1919, many were convinced he would win. However, the declassified documents show why he didn't: as written by the man who was then president of the Nobel Committee, Haralg Härne, Guimerà wasn't given the prize "to avoid hurting the national pride of the Spanish". In 1919, Härne writes that the objective of the Nobel Prize is to promote peace and thus to award Guimerà and show support for a minority culture would be to encourage internal conflict (🤦). The Academy decided that they couldn't give a prize to Guimerà "before awarding another writer who expresses himself in the most ancient noble language of the country" (weird way to mean "the official language", aka Spanish, because they surely didn't mean Basque). In summary, if a Catalan is to be considered, he must always be second to a Spanish man. Even when the Catalan is, in the words of the Nobel Academy, "the most eminent writer of our times", he can never be considered an equal, always must be behind.

Àngel Guimerà wrote in the Catalan language, which was discriminated against by Spanish and considered an enemy by the Spanish government and much of Spanish society. Guimerà was a firm defender of the right to use the Catalan language and that nobody should be forced to speak the imperial languages instead of their own, and was involved with the political movement for the rights of Catalan people. For this reason, every time the famous Swedish academy was considering Guimerà, the Spanish Royal Academy of Language (RAE) fought it with all its might. Nowadays, Guimerà's theatre plays continue to move thousands of spectators every year.

The same happened again with the poet Josep Carner. In the 1960s, Josep Carner was on exile, because he was a Catalan poet writing in Catalan and who stood against the fascist dictatorship of Spain, which persecuted the Catalan language and identity. Famous writers from around the world, including T. S. Eliot, François Mauriac, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Roger Caillois, supported Josep Carner's candidacy to win the Nobel, but the Spanish Government did everything possible to obstruct it. We don't know if Carner would have won or not, but he was deprived of even trying because of the Spanish government's hatred of Catalan.

Something similar seems to have happened between the 1970s and 1990s to three other Catalan poets: Salvador Espriu, J. V. Foix, and Miquel Martí i Pol, where they did not get any support from the Spanish authorities, so we don't know how it would have ended up.

Another example of what it means to have a state actively working against you because of bigotry against your cultural group.

Bon Nadal! Merry Christmas!

What is the one thing that can't be missing for Christmas where you're from?

Here in Catalonia, it's without a doubt this delicious soup 😋

Each person gets their dish with the broth and galets pasta, and in the centre of the table there's a dish with vegetables (carrots, cabbage, chickpeas, potatoes, leek, celery, onion) and another one with meat (pilotes -balls made of of minced meat with parsley-, ham, pork sausages...) and you add to your soup what you like most.

25th November 1905: the Catalan satirical magazine Cu-Cut! was assaulted, sacked and set on fire by the Spanish military, after the magazine had published a vignette making fun of the Spanish army. On the same day, the Spanish military also attacked the Catalan newspaper La Veu de Catalunya.

This act caused a movement of solidarity with the publications in Catalonia, but a movement in favour of the assault in most of Spain.

Galets are the most typical pasta from Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, together with fideus (short noodles).

Galets can be made in different sizes, from the size of a thumb nail to as big as an open mouth, but the bigger sizes are usually reserved for festivity meals like Christmas soup.

@FonsiLoaiza

Translation:

*When someone makes content in Catalan*: "is it so difficult to add the translation to Spanish so that we all can understand it?!"

*When someone makes bilingual content*: "why do you waste your time translating it if Catalans already understand Spanish?!"

And they always conveniently forget that not all Catalans speak Spanish. Catalan-speakers from Northern Catalonia speak Catalan and French (and not Spanish!), Catalan-speakers from L'Alguer speak Catalan and Italian and maybe Sardinian (and not Spanish!), and people from Andorra speak Catalan and don't have to know Spanish. And children of diaspora who live abroad and speak Catalan at home haven't necessarily learned Spanish.

https://twitter.com/samfaina_visual/status/1672900791982538755?cxt=HHwWhoC2qYWaq7cuAAAA

https://twitter.com/ryuzakyy7/status/1673009848319967235?cxt=HHwWhoC8rfrl3LcuAAAA

https://twitter.com/elmangazin/status/1673015937698594819?cxt=HHwWhoC84bPI37cuAAAA

🤦 No ho havia vist, no.

The social media managers of the publisher house Ivrea are angry that some Catalan people have asked them (with full respect) if they will ever publish some mangas translated to Catalan too (for context, this publisher has a headquarters in Barcelona but only publishes in Spanish). The comment that started it all was this one (in Spanish, so the publisher can understand without complaining):

Translation: Hi @/Ivrea, my niece asked me if some day she'll be able to read #SpyXFamily in Catalan? She's starting to get into manga now thanks to Dr. Slump and Night Guardians and she would love to read it in her mother tongue.

The official Ivrea account blocked Samfaina_visual right after saying this, and tweeted saying these are bad faith comments and that it looks like this is a troll. Ivrea has blocked the other users who commented saying they would like it too or showed support in favour of Samfaina_visual.

There's a Catalan online magazine that talks about mangas called Mangazine, they were blocked by Ivrea too because they reported about this happening, even though they have many times reviewed Ivrea's mangas (which is a way of promoting them without getting paid btw, they're not even thankful for that). They sent a very respectful message to Ivrea asking why they and other Catalan people who post about mangas were blocked, and Ivrea answered a very angry text full of anti-Catalan stereotypes (for no reason, nobody had brought them up before) and pure hatred for the Catalan language, and ends by saying that they will sue for hate crimes against Spanish. For having asked if they will publish in Catalan.

(It's the 3rd link. It's quite long so I'm not translating the full thing but if someone wants to know and doesn't speak Spanish, let me know and I will translate it)

See what we have to deal with? The mere fact that we still exist is treated as a hate against them, just because we survived these centuries of persecution and illegalization, resisted and didn't give in and abandon our language and culture to substitute them for the Spanish ones that they keep telling us are so superior. Nothing against Spanish, we would just like to be able to live in our language, like they have the right to live in theirs. But apparently that's a hate crime. This is the treatment that marginalized languages get in Spain.

I hadn't seen this case before anonymous sent me this ask, but it did not suprise me at all, taking into account the amount of Catalanophobia there is. Very often there are cases like this, or where Catalan speakers are denied healthcare in public hospitals in Catalan-speaking territories because the staff are Catalanophobic: an example from last month, where a man was being served dirty food and denied water and mistreated by the hospital staff in Palma; or when a man called an ambulance and the person who answered the emergency number refused to call the ambulance until he repeated it all in Spanish and started giving him lessons on the phone saying why he must speak Spanish and that "you are not Catalan here" for some reason instead of calling the ambulance; or when a doctor refused to treat a patient for not speaking in Spanish, when this patient had a psychic disability and Catalan was the only language she spoke; or the many, many, many, many, many, many cases where doctors have refused to attend Catalan speakers because they spoke to them in Catalan. Or how people are kicked out of services like a hotel, a bank, a taxi, a petrol station (this one with an extra of anti-Catalan slurs), a press conference, or an airplane for speaking Catalan. Or the way that the Spanish police arrests or fines people just for speaking Catalan (again, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times) and sues them because speaking Catalan to a policeman is considered disrespect of authority. Or the hoards of Catalanophobic insults that content creators who make stuff in Catalan get online, or the way that tragedies like airplane crashes and terrorist attacks are celebrated on Spanish social media because Catalan people died, or the way that Spanish nationalists (talking about individual citizens here, not just the police) have beaten people up for their ideology, even the Facebook group of Spanish people living in London called to "hunt independentists", among others. And this is without getting into what the Spanish media say or, even worse, the politicians, that reaches points like a mayor of PP (the Spanish conservative party) that publicly said "we must erradicate Catalan and its carriers" (I translate as "carrier" the term "agente portador" which is the wording used for someone who carries and spreads an illness).

All of these cases happened here in Catalan-speaking territories btw, it's not like we go somewhere else and expect to be attended in our language (unlike others ehem), it's in our own country that we're not allowed to use our language.

Dani Gallardo was 22 years old when took part in a demonstration held in Madrid (Spain's capital city) in solidarity with Catalonia, right after the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced a group of Catalan civil society leaders to prison for their involvement in the Catalan independence movement. The demonstration also stood against the brutality of Spanish police against Catalan people and in solidarity with Catalonia's right to self-determination. It was the first time that a demonstration like this was held in Spain (outside of the occupied nations like the Catalan Countries, the Basque Country and Galicia), and the protestors were met with police violence as well. (At the same time, on the other side of the square, there was a counter-protest organised by a fascist group who opposed the solidarity protest and rallied in favour of the indivisibility of Spain. That one was not attacked by the police.)

Dani Gallardo tried to help his friend Elsa, a young woman who was being violently reduced by 5 anti-riot policemen at once. Then, the policemen beat him up and arrested him and Elsa. In total, 4 protestors were arrested that evening. That protest happened on October 2019, and since then Dani's life has changed completely.

All the detainees were insulted and threatened with violence by the police, and Elsa (being a woman) was constantly sexually harassed and insulted with misogynistic insults and very vulgar sexually explicit comments that I will not replicate here. Dani kept shouting to defend her, so they beat him with a stick with nails on the head. He says that Elsa was the one who got beaten up to a worst condition, but in the end Dani was the only one who wasn't freed.

Dani spent more than a year in pre-trial jail, while waiting to be judged by the Madrid Provincial Court. Then, he was freed on probation but, later, he was sentenced to 4 and a half years of prison for "basic public disturbance" and "attack against authority", because a policeman says Dani hit him. He appealed this decision but now (June 1st 2023) the court has confirmed the sentence, and Dani will have to go to prison.

The trial was a joke. The policemen declared things that contradict what happened, or pretended they hadn't seen anything. The doctor's report that was used to claim that Dani had attacked a policeman was signed at 9:30pm in Plaza del Sol hq, when he was arrested at 10:45pm at Tirso de Molina. This shows that the police had decided that they would accuse someone of this crime even before they arrested anyone, and then went out to look for some protestors who they could blame for it.

More than 4,200 Catalan people have been repressed by the Spanish courts since September 2017 for their involvement in the independence movement. This number includes people who have gone to court with many different outcomes, from prison sentences to more commonly fines, and also people who have been arrested and retained by the police, some of whom have denounced being tortured. Dani's case is unique because he isn't Catalan himself, he is Spanish. But this didn't save him, because the Spanish State has wanted to make an example out of him: this is what will happen to any Spaniard who dares to stand in solidarity with the peoples oppressed by Spain.

Dani has talked about why he supports Catalonia's right to self-determination. Dani is an anarchist, he doesn't believe in states, so he believes that everyone should have the right to self-determination and understands the want to get away from Spain and its fascist institutions.

He has also talked about the support he has received since he was arrested. He has received lots of support from Catalan people at all levels, from all kinds of social organizations and local assemblies to many individual people who sent him letters, and politicians who have him their support. On the contrary, he denounces he hasn't received any support from Spain (only a small support from the Madrid anti-repression movement at first, but they never followed up), and has not even heard a word from the Spanish "progressive" political parties. In fact, during the time he was out on probation, he moved to Catalonia because it was the only place where he knew he'd find help and solidarity.

We are very thankful to Dani, Elsa and everyone else who has showed their support.