“Books are so powerful because they enrage tyrants! Tyrants and demagogues hate all arts, because the arts are more powerful than they will ever be.” The Scottish author Ali Smith is the Sant Jordi town crier and speaks of her early love for books, of how she was formed through that love, of her mother’s concern that she would end up a “bookworm” (although when her mother died, she discovered a book at the back of her closet, hidden among her shoes), of how “when we open a book, we open ourselves,” and that after all these years (she is 63), she has come to the conclusion that, like everyone else, she is 75% water and suspects she is at least another 75% books.
For the first time, the attendees filling the Saló de Cent laugh openly at the joke from the author of Seasonal Quartet, Public Library, Gliff, or A Woolf of One’s Own, while from Plaça Sant Jaume, the protest chants of a group of striking workers filter in. They are librarians and are taking advantage of Smith’s presence to demand that their working conditions be equated with those of other municipal civil servants. Smith will not refer to them at any point, but not even in their wildest dreams could they have imagined a greater defense of public libraries and those who work in them.
“Those who bomb countries always make sure to destroy all the libraries they can,” she explained. They are community spaces, essential for freedom, and that is why “geopolitical states ranging from Russia to the United States assault libraries and censor their collections.” The attacks “always reveal that tyranny is at work and that someone somewhere wants to control history.” “Without libraries, we wither,” she asserted, and further: “they are a source of community power.”
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In the morning, during a meeting with the press at the Sarrià Library, she already stated that the true brain of the world (“that’s why we have to protect and embrace them as part of our humanity”) is in these spaces, and after the proclamation, in an intimate and emotional conversation with her Catalan translator Dolors Udina, she explained that the threat against public libraries in her country is increasingly alarming.
Udina tried to coax her about her next novel, but instead, Smith gave her her next project, a fictionalized catalog for a future exhibition of Edward Munch at his museum in Oslo. “He is an artist who fascinates me,” confessed the author, who spent the day walking around Barcelona wearing a t-shirt with an enigmatic Madonna by the Norwegian artist printed on it.
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