Teresa Pàmies' letters of exile: from individual to collective memory

Since the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the violence practiced against the vencidos by Franco’s troops imposed the displacement as a way of life on so many Republicans, among whom there was the young activist Teresa Pàmies. Teresa Pàmies was a Catalan speaking Spanish writer. She was a left-wing feminist militant. Her abundant work (she wrote about fifty books, a large number of articles for newspapers, magazines and radio programmes, essays and novels) is closely related to her experience as a political exile in Latin America, USSR, Czechoslovakia and France. During her long exile, Pàmies started writing to recover historical memory, intertwining it with the collective one, made up of ordinary people’s memories. She used to incorporate both real and fictional letters in her novels, to preserve memory, or to (re)construct it. This narrative device gives authenticity, intimacy and immediacy to her writings. Pàmies’ epistolary represents a biographical and literary itinerary, a journey to other countries and even to another continent for a new beginning, far from her native homeland, that she had to abandon when Franco’s troops entered Barcelona.