Alternative Genealogies? History and the Dilemma of "Origin" in Two Recent Novels By Galician Women

The paucity of women novelists and short story writers in Galicia has long been a concern for scholars and readers anxious that women's experiences be part of the national narrative (see, for example, Carre Aldao, Queizan, Gonzalez Fernandez, Hooper "Girl"). Happily, however, the last two decades have seen a gradual increase in the publication of narrative works by Galician women writing in one or both of the Galician and Castilian languages. In the last three or four years, the situation has advanced even more rapidly: although until 2001 no woman had won Galicia's most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Xerais, three out of the last five winners have been female. Female novelists are clearly beginning to make an impression on Galician readers and publishers, and their emergence provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore the important question of women's role in shaping Galicia's past, present, and future. For if the details of women's lives are frequently absent from the historical sources on which the national narrative is built, and their role in the national myths of origin consequently marginal or passive, then perhaps it is in literature, with all its imaginative potential, where those myths of origin can be most comprehensively rewritten. That is, because it is less closely tied to sources than academic history writing, literature can be a key tool in reimagining a national history from which the voices of women (not to mention other minority groups) have for so long been excluded. In consequence, the challenge for women writers in Galicia, as for any other marginalized group seeking to resolve the dilemma of origin, is to find ways to work with and beyond the traditional historical and narrative models that have for so long shaped our stories about who we are and where we come from.