Where is the home? Autobiography and exile

Abstract

The experience of exile causes the permanent sensation of wandering and vagrancy. A natural question about the location of the home emerges in the exiles. In two women of republican ideas, Teresa Pàmies y Anna Murià, the answer is related respectively to the father and the husband. So the writings of Crònica de la vida d'Agustí Bartra (1967) and Testament a Prague (1971) form two unusual books in which the authors manage to express their truth. On one side, Pàmies alternates in the odd chapters the memoirs of the father and in theevens she tells about his father's burial in the Czech capital; she unites both facts as simultaneous. For her part, Murià fuses three genres into one with extraordinary literary wisdom: biography, autobiography and testimony or chronicle. Both titles present the deep relationships of women with men: as daughter or as a wife. The literary expression of these two authors forms an unexplored field of Spanish and Catalan memorialism.