'Martinete of the Shadow King' is the title of the novel, published by (Jekyll & Jill, 2023), with which the narrator, poet and historian Raúl Quinto (Cartagena, 1978), has been awarded the 2024 Critics' Prize in the Narrative category. Ben Clark, with 'Demonios', has won in Poetry. The Critics' Awards, dependent on the Spanish Association of Literary Critics, were announced this Saturday in El Ferrol, where the members of the jury have been deliberating, among whom was Jóse Belmonte, an expert in literary criticism from LA VERDAD .
'Martinete of the Shadow King' is “a reflection on how history and oblivion are constructed” where Quinto, author of poetry collections such as 'Ruido blanco' (2012), 'La lengua rota' (2019) and the notebook 'Sola' (2020), all of them published in La Bella Varsovia, and hybrid genre books such as 'Idioteca' (El Gaviero, 2010), 'Yosotros' (Caballo de Troya, 2015), 'Hijo' (La Bella Varsovia, 2017) , “again breaks the limits of literary genres to tell what is never told.”
In the award-winning novel, the author focuses on the failed project to exterminate the Gypsy people in Spain in the mid-18th century, an episode known as the 'Great Roundup'.
On July 30, 1749, a mass arrest of the gypsy population took place. When did you discover those events that occurred under the reign of Fernando VI and by order of the Marquis of La Ensenada? “The curious thing,” Quinto told journalist Manuel Madrid in this newspaper, “is that I am a History teacher and for years I have had to explain the history of Spain to my 2nd year high school students. [en un instituto del centro de Almería, donde reside]». «I have used different materials, many manuals. “This event is not mentioned in any of those textbooks,” he added. In his opinion, “it is an event that deserves a prominent place in the collective memory and in the historiography of our country, but there are very few books that are dedicated to truly and in-depth analysis of the events.”
Quinto learned about the events from a magazine that arrived at work where the history of the gypsy people in Spain was told in a dossier. “It caught my attention a lot,” he admits, “that it was an extermination project.”
At a certain point, he specifies, “the authorities of the Spanish state wanted to exterminate the gypsy population, which is what the 'Great Roundup' is intended to do. That July 30, 1749, they tried to arrest all the gypsies registered in the country, they separated the men from the women with the intention of preventing them from reproducing. This punishment will last 18 years, it was carried out without trials, without legal provisions, except for the own will of the Marquis of La Ensenada and King Fernando VI and the Catholic Church.
“During all that time they are doing slave labor, for example, in the Cartagena Arsenal,” he reports. One of the chapters of the book, in fact, is set in the construction of said Arsenal in the 18th century, “which was made with slave labor, and not only of gypsies, but with Berber and Turkish slaves captured at sea, and there they had them forced to work. «We talk – Quinto details – about concentration camps and forced labor, and extermination, and it takes us to what could be the Jewish holocaust in World War II, and in Nazi Germany, which everyone knows. “Everyone knows how to locate the Auschwitz camp and, however, this, which is something so close, which happens not only in Cartagena but in all Spanish cities, is absolutely unknown, and also in academic circles.” And, of course, not treated by the artistic field, by fiction, “which sometimes ends up building collective memory much more than history studies.”
Raúl Quinto himself has a hard time defining what 'Martinete del reyshadow' is in terms of literary genre. «I don't take those types of distinctions into account. I give the theme or idea what it needs, sometimes pre-established molds are broken. But perhaps it is the most narrative book I have written, although it is not a novel. First because there is a quite poetic tone, then there are branches and fragments that are clearly essayistic and historical chronicle. It is a kind of literary monster, which is in the end the genre in which I move most comfortably.
Good news
This volume is, without a doubt, “an opportunity” to confront these historical events so ignored and forgotten by the official Academy, and, furthermore, to do so from literature.
Another good news for writers in the Region of Murcia. If only a few months ago I knew that 'The White Desert', by Luis López Carrasco (Murcia, 1981), had won the Herralde Novel Prize with a text that, from the first page, plunges the reader into a strange universe, Now it is Raúl Quinto from Cartagena who has earned critical recognition. In 2023, the veteran writer Dionisia García, who has lived in Murcia for decades, received the Critics' Prize, in the Poetry category, for 'Clamor en la memoria', a dazzling tribute to her life in the company of her husband, to who pays tribute after his death.
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