La Voz de Galicia – February 23, 2024 →
If only I could have today my mother’s Galician broth. The broth she made when she had her own vegetable garden, when to cook it she didn’t even have to think. That «broth of glory» that tasted of rancid fat, and that lead me to imagine the scenes my mother always repeats about her mother’s broth for breakfast. Yes, for breakfast.
Today, for Rosalía’s Day, the Rosalía de Castro Foundation invites us to celebrate the anniversary of the writer with a «Caldo de Gloria,« «an initiative inspired by the poem Miña casiña, meu lar (…) in which the daily epic of survival is recounted». It invites us to cook a humble broth, like the one in the poem, to remember Rosalía and all the emotion contained in her words. That emotion that today, upon reading Miña casiña again, moves me more than ever. Because the reality it conveys is not so far from the reality of many people who live around us. And the reality conveyed by the neighbors of the protagonist of this poem is not so far from our own. This complex tribute to survival is as contemporary as it is universal, as local as it is global. And that «epic of survival,» reflected in a woman who has nothing and to whom nothing is given, and who is capable of cooking something from that nothing, is more present than ever.
The poverty of Rosalía’s time, the poverty of my mother’s time, and the poverty of today have many things in common, including the resilience of the human condition, and the cruelty of the systems we inhabit. Poverty can be visible but also invisible; you can be born into it, live in it, or acquire it unexpectedly. And that is why it is important to remember the meaning of that «broth of glory,» whatever role we may have in this complex poem that is life.
