Sheila opens the way to a day for women

It’s International Women’s Day on 8 March.

A good day to reflect on the drive for a still elusive gender equality. Obviously, that’s not a matter for a single day, but for every day of the year. Still, a single day to refocus our minds for the everyday is no bad thing. 

There’s nothing particularly original about what I’ve just said. I know it’s not original because I stole the thought from a remarkable woman, talented, intelligent and insightful, well worth spending an evening with.

Sheila Blanco surrounded by nine of her favourite poets

Her name is Sheila Blanco. Now, ‘Sheila’ seems to be a popular Spanish forename. However, as I’ve said before, it’s pronounced pretty much like the English word ‘sailor’. At least, that’s how the person introducing Blanco pronounced it, though I don’t know how she pronounces it herself.

The ‘sh’ sound disappeared from Spanish, I’m told, in the sixteenth century. As for ‘ei’, that’s pronounced like English ‘ai’, which in Spanish is pronounced like ‘I’. You know, the vertical pronoun. 

Gosh, international linguistics can get complicated.

Now, Sailor Blanco is a remarkable singer and songwriter. She’s a lot less well-known abroad than she (see?) deserves, probably because she writes and performs for a niche audience. To give you a flavour of what she does, she’s worked through a series of extracts of the music of great classical composers – that’s classical in general rather than for a particular period, distinct from say baroque or romantic – and written her own ultra-short biographical notes as songs to accompany them. So she sings her notes to their notes.

Her favourite seems to have been Bach, and her tribute to him is one of mine. It’s fun to listen to, and it’s helpful to find English subtitles on YouTube.

Now for what may feel like a brutal change of subject, but fear not, it isn’t, as will become clear shortly. 

Spain is rightly proud of its ‘generation 27’. This was a group, or at any rate a loose grouping, of artists that came together for a forum in Seville in 1927. Filmmakers like Luis Buñuel or painters like Salvador Dalí were associated with it, but its main members were poets. It pains me, as an adoptee of Spain, to admit this ignorance, but the only one whose work I know at all is the best-known of the group, Federico García Lorca.

Now the group thrived in the thirties and the thirties were the decade which saw the brief gleam of the Second Spanish Republic, quickly snuffed out by the 1936 uprising of a bunch of Putinesque generals and the three-year civil war, followed by 36 sombre years of fascism, into which they plunged the country. Indeed, one of the brightest lights snuffed out was Lorca’s. He was gay and had the gall to describe the fall of the Arab rulers of his native Andalucía to the Christian Reconquest, as a catastrophe for Spain. He was murdered by the rebels in the first weeks of the war and, so far, not even his grave has been identified.

What tends to be far less well-known, and Sheila Blanco is working hard to right this wrong, is that there were also women poets of this generation. They were called the ‘sin sombreros’, the ‘hatless’, for their temerity in going out of doors without hats in bold defiance to convention.

One of the central tenets of the Nationalist Catholic dictator Franco’s regime was that women belonged in the home, bringing up the next generation and looking after the men of this one. When he overthrew the Republic, he upended these poets' lives. Though many kept writing, mostly from exile, the curtains drawn by the dictator denied them the visibility they deserved.

So Sheila Blanco has taken to setting some of their poems to music and singing them to any willing to listen. Cantando a las poetas del 27 she calls the collection, Singing of the women poets of the group of 27. Here’s a poem that makes up part of one of her songs. It’s by Ernestina de Champourcin, who had to flee Spain as the Republic fell, as did hundreds of thousands of others. The Spanish is far better than the translation, but I hope this image of flight into exile amid the destruction of defeat retains some of its power.

Ernestina de Champourcin, singer of exile

Road on the run,
how the children cry 
next to that trunk, a world
standing open in the gutter.
There’s no room left in the house, 
the only one tonight?

A horse has died
by the side of the road
and not even the flies
have devoured it.

Soon the day will come
with its uncertainties,
when some will return 
to the unknown.

Others follow paths
that no one points out to them.

There on the border
a dark line rises up.

The image of the border as a dark line struck me as particularly moving. As did the notion of the exile following a path with no signpost. Or indeed the allusion to one who returns to a place once familiar but now unknown.

Can you take another brusque change of subject which you’ll soon see isn’t one?

Olocau is a village on the edge of the mountainous region known as the Sierra Calderona, in the province of Valencia. It’s tiny, with just 1800 residents. But town councils in Spain have resources (in England, they’ve been squeezed until their bones squeak), and Olocau has a dynamic mayor. Or perhaps a resident who knows Blanco. Or both.

So the town invited her to sing her songs for the Sin Sombreros as part of its lead up to International Women’s Day. We live 25 minutes away so drove across to hear her sing, at a concert which to my astonishment turned out to be free. The priceless, it seems, is sometimes costless. Blanco sang as beautifully as ever, to poems that were wonderful in themselves, but all the more so for the way she gave music to each, perfectly appropriate to its content.

Sheila Blanco in Olocau,
with another of her poets, Elizabeth Mulder

It was a memorable evening in a remarkable town. An excellent tribute to women who deserve to be better known, something to be promoted every day of the year but, why not, most particularly on International Women’s Day. And the whole performed by a conspicuously talented artist who opens eyes as well as hearts.

Who could ask for more?