Entre rejas y entre textos: El proceso de creación de las Romanzas de las rejas o la conquista del espacio narrativo

Abstract

This essay explores some of the strategies used by Carlota O’Neill in Romanzas de las rejas to create a narrative space of her own inside prison. These prose poems were written during her fourth year of captivity in the Victoria Grande Prison of Melilla, where she was taken when the Spanish Civil War broke out. O’Neill manages to elaborate a complex intertextual tapestry using texts from multiple sources that enter the Romanzas through quotations, allusions, and ekphrasis. This dense intertextual network masks the counter-discourse that lies underneath the poems, thus evading the demands of censorship and surveillance, and facilitates both the escape of the poetic voice and the incursion of the world that lies beyond the prison walls in the cell.