Honour Where It's Due

A young lady in Spain, Najat el Hachmi, has been awarded as the best author of the year of Catalan Literature. During an interviewed she was asked by a reporter how she felt about the distinction placed on her above the rest of the typical female immigrants in Spain. She answered quietly but firmly that she was not an immigrant. She had come to Spain as a baby because her parents had done so, not her choice or decision.

She said she had always consider herself Catalan, having been brought up, educated, trained, and getting her official footing in accordance with Catalan standards and culture. She expressed her surprise and perplexity, that she was interviewed more for her origin of being descendent of Moroccan parentage by all media, than for her own merit of being a novelist who had won the honour for being the best, in Catalunya precisely, which was given for the quality of her work, not where she came from. That aspect is totally irrelevant.

Hasn't she adequately proven that she has broken the cultural and social barrier, which are more difficult to cross than the geographic boundary? Wouldn't it be just as absurd if ones says that the others didn't win the title despite being Catalans?

There is no such thing as a typical immigrant, female or not. They formed a part of the society as a collective of different people from different origins, geographically, socially and of different intellect level.

She is Catalan like all Catalans, her different background shared with her parents manifested in part in the richness of her novels. It's about time people learn to recognise the achievement and contribution of a person to the society only by it's merit, and drop the condescending adscription like a sentence.

Tags:BestAuthor,Immigrant,Socialboundary

No Bees, But I Learned Something About Birds

On days when I learn something new, I always feel elated, happy, even though it's not a great discovery or very useful knowledge for me personally or my work. I know something about birds and bees, but what I learned today, by chance, is about a few variety of birds that have very peculiar characteristics. Four types, all new to me as, love as I do of just about animals of any kind, bird and insects are what I know least of all, most of them I don't even know their names. I am very glad that I can claim now I know at least 4 types of birds, all with rather unusual and peculiar characteristic and habits.

 

The Foundation of the Barcelona Zoo has published a manual of the enormity of diversities of the bird species which populate the city itself as if it's an orchard or their private garden homestead, paying little or no attention much less fear of human around them. The 4 varieties I find especially uncommon ~

 

1) The Wryneck - near the enclosure (or is it called compound?) of the lions, where visitors are amused to watch how the bird would every now & then stick out it's tongue to imitate the hissing of a snake!

 

2) The common 'Mosquitero' (I don't know the name in English) is the only whistling bird that is capable of consuming each day one third of it's body weight of insects!! I weigh today 40 kilos. Can you imagine I, or anybody, eating 30 kilos of food daily??

 

3) The Heron. These are the mysterious animals that caused great disorder and worry in the mid 80's with their extremely racy & vigorous flights all over the flat roofs of the city, calling up the frightful images of Hitchcock's scary film.

 

4) The Dunnock. Although they are small in size & similar colouring of the common sparrow, now in the month of October they come visiting Barcelona. They always seem to come in little groups of threesomes - one female with 2 males, or vice versa. Kinky!!!!

 

Tags: birds, bees

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