Long-term resident

In his 2018 Kessel Diary the Cata­lan film di­rec­tor Al­bert Serra de­scribes an ar­gu­ment he had in that West­phalian town with some film stu­dents who were help­ing him on a large scale film pro­ject there. They com­plained that he had no for­mal qual­i­fi­ca­tions and couldn’t un­der­stand why he was the one call­ing all the shots. He replied that he never trusted peo­ple who’d been to film school - like those stu­dents - and that the rea­son he was in charge and not them was be­cause he had ‘come from nowhere’. In fact, he comes from Bany­oles, a town of just under 20,000 peo­ple near Girona in north-east­ern Cat­alo­nia, but it’s true that he has no for­mal qual­i­fi­ca­tions or diplo­mas. This sum­mer, Bany­oles hosted one of the plethora of music fes­ti­vals that take place all over Cat­alo­nia every year (and which were amply de­scribed in the last issue of this mag­a­zine). This major event - called Aphònica - was opened by an­other Bany­olan ‘from nowhere’: Daura Man­gara, a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Afro-Cata­lan, who is rapidly on his way to be­com­ing Cat­alo­nia’s most gifted and con­vinc­ing rap­per (he raps mainly in Cata­lan, quite a lot in Span­ish and oc­ca­sion­ally in Eng­lish). Like Serra, Man­gara too has no for­mal qual­i­fi­ca­tions and on top of that he has, in the tra­di­tion of so many rap­pers every­where, been through a con­fused and tough time be­fore find­ing his true vo­ca­tion. Like not a few sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion Cata­lans with African par­ents, he found him­self liv­ing a dou­ble life (oblig­a­to­rily Gam­bian at home and nat­u­rally Cata­lan out­side it) which con­fused and frus­trated him. When he was sent to Gam­bia as a teenager for two whole years - ap­par­ently in an at­tempt to de-West­ern­ise him - he came back home more con­fused, and an­grier, than ever. Feel­ing lost and root­less, he turned to drink and drugs and in 2016, at twenty-two, got into a drunken brawl with sev­eral other peo­ple in­clud­ing his ex-girl­friend (he was so off his face he re­mem­bers only flashes of the event, and has had to trust the tes­ti­mony of other wit­nesses). He was re­ported to the po­lice, not least by the un­der­stand­ably alarmed ex, and made the (big) mis­take of try­ing to fight them as well. In a nut­shell, he had a re­strain­ing order slapped on him and ended up spend­ing over a year in jail. Since then, this sen­si­tive, in­tel­li­gent black Cata­lan has kept off the booze and pow­der and has carved out a ca­reer for him­self as a mu­si­cian and dancer. He also gives work­shops on rap and dance to school­child­ren and is an ac­tive mem­ber of the Afro-Bany­olan So­cial Move­ment - a cul­tural as­so­ci­a­tion - but has re­cently can­celled sev­eral con­certs, con­cerned that three years after the afore­men­tioned fight, he is get­ting a lot of flak (for the first time) from var­i­ous fem­i­nists, even though they are often not fully in­formed about the de­tails of his case - which are re­mark­ably com­plex - and de­spite his show­ing no re­cidi­vist ten­den­cies after hav­ing served a full prison sen­tence for his mis­takes (which no one - Man­gara least of all - has ever tried to jus­tify). A pity, be­cause his con­certs - to judge by the one he gave at the Aphònica fes­ti­val - are both pow­er­ful and so­phis­ti­cated, some­thing that fe­male and male spec­ta­tors of all ages have no hes­i­ta­tion in agree­ing on. In short, there is no ques­tion of ques­tion­ing the issue of women’s rights in this par­tic­u­lar case - or any other - but nei­ther (or so it seems to me) does a pen­i­tent and pun­ished trans­gres­sor with tal­ent de­serve to be put in the so­cial media stocks for life.