secondWhen the poet and hospital launderer Begoña M Rueda realized that there was not enough space, the first wave of pain of the Covid pandemic had just begun. Public base For all those who work in the country’s overcrowded and often under-resourced health system.
“At eight o’clock, people walked up to the balcony to applaud the labor of doctors and nurses/but very few people applaud the women sweeping the floor and mopping the hospital/or those of us who wash the sheets for the infected people/with bare hands,” Rueda was posing her Wrote in a poem in the latest collection.
The laundry service has won the prestigious Hypo Poetry Award, Is a primitive, painful, angry, gentle, and sometimes even interesting, emanating from the sultry, invisible realm of washing machines, dryers, detergents and body fluids.
The first half of the book tells about the pandemic seen from the laundry room of the Punta Europa Hospital in Algeciras, Andalusia, where the 29-year-old poet has been working since 2019. The second part was written before Covid became popular and explored the anonymous lives of the people who worked in it and other laundries.
Rueda said: “I want to see not only the pain and suffering caused by the pandemic, but also the joy of people who have successfully overcome the virus and recovered.”
“I also want to draw people’s attention to the working-class work of laundromats. Traditionally, some people look down on it as a job, and I also want to empower women who do this work-most of which are done by women Finished work, although this situation has begun to change.”
The poetry of the Covid era is full of fear and horror of the early pandemic-this fear and fear was quickly normalized, because Rueda noticed that the shroud piled up like a mountain, belatedly waiting for the release of the mask-“Paper Gun To prevent us from barking to death”-and watching a truck of soldiers disinfect the entire hospital, but forget to fumigate the laundry room, “just like the linen will wash itself.”
Rueda said that the poem about the soldiers “was completely correct from the first to the last. The soldiers showed up, parked their truck at the door of the laundry room, and disinfected every part of the hospital except We. Then they broke up. It was shameful.”
In the second half of the book, anger and doubt give way to a series of sharp reflections on her work and its meaning. On the one hand, Rueda irons children’s pajamas, wondering if the last person in blue pajamas has been discharged from the hospital. In another article, she smelled a scent of perfume when she folded her pajama top, and remembered that those facing death sometimes comb their hair and apply cologne, “as if death was just another walk on Sunday morning”.
“You can sterilize the linen and wash it at very high temperatures, but sometimes you can still smell the perfume and you want to know how this is possible,” Rueda said. “There is a humanity on the sheets, and sometimes you can’t wash it off.”
From time to time, Rueda looked away from the door of the laundry room and saw the “cross-cutting” Rock of Gibraltar and the strait of the “highway”. Anti-drug ship” and A cemetery for immigrants and refugees who tried to cross North Africa with their boats.
Other poems chronicle the lives of her colleagues, who went home from work after a long day of get off work, washed more clothes, and waited for their family members.
The purpose of these poems is to let the reader feel Rueda’s feeling in the laundry room-and provide a record of the pandemic.
“The laundry room is across from the morgue, and I see coffins and coffins,” she said. “I just hope that people who read this series in the future will see how we survived this pandemic and how we survived. We must not forget, otherwise history will repeat itself.”
The judges of the Hiperión Prize, the seventh award for Rueda Poetry, stated that the laundry service “abandons decoration and techniques in order to create humanitarian poems about common diseases, especially the aftermath of a pandemic”.
Rueda, who had to give up research on Spanish language and literature due to economic reasons, said that although these awards are popular, they are an stimulus rather than a goal. “The purpose is to sit down and write and enjoy it. Poetry Let me become a more humane and humble person, and bring me closer to my spirituality. These are things that make me happy. If I can communicate it to other people, if they can enjoy it, and if it can help them see life in a different way, then this is the real reward. “
Although—or perhaps because—her work has received all the recognition, Rueda often has to deal with the arrogance of those who long to know why the poet works in the laundry.
“It really reminded me of it,” she said. “But you just laugh at the ignorance of some people. We really need to understand that doing a certain job does not make you a better or worse poet. We also need to understand that being a poet does not make you a better poet. Good or worse workers. We are all equal. We are all born; we all die.”
Excerpt: March 23, 2020, This Shield Yes pile superior Carton
Shrouds stacked in cardboard boxes
At the bathroom door
They are the only hospital bed sheets
Do not wash after use
Like everything these days
They are plastic,
Prepare to meet death like the food baked in the factory,
Wrap and go straight to the void
You want to know who made the shroud
What cold machine to sew and pack them
Be prepared to cover any corpses in the morgue
For my shroud, I want my mother’s hand to die in front of her
And lay in her womb again,
Be a little girl again, don’t know
In the hospital laundry room
Death piled up in cardboard boxes
Next to the toilet.
(Laundry service from Begoña M Rueda, published by Hiperión)
