Nivaria Tejera

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Squares, streets & markets · Year: 1929-2016

A cross street located in the heart of the Cabo-Llanos neighbourhood bears the name of the writer of Tenerife origin Nivaria Tejera (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1929 – Paris, 2016).

Daughter of a Cuban mother and a Canarian father who emigrated to Cuba in 1923, Nivaria, together with her family, moved while still a child to Tenerife, where shortly after their arrival the Spanish Civil War broke out. Her father was immediately arrested for being a socialist and a mason, remaining imprisoned in the Fyffes concentration camp in Santa Cruz until 1944, when he managed to escape as a stowaway on a cargo ship bound for Cuba, following his family who had left shortly before. 

In Cuba, Nivaria began to write and publish poetry in the most prestigious magazines of the Caribbean island in the 1940s and 1950s, including Ciclón and Orígenes . In 1949 she published her first book of poems Luces y piedras and, ten years later, her best-known novel was published: El barranco , in which she recounts her childhood experience during the Civil War with a father in prison. Some specialists cite this work as the first novel written in Spanish about the Civil War and Francoist prisons. It would take thirty years for the work to be published in Spain.

In addition to her work as a writer, Nivaria Tejera worked for the Cuban revolutionary government as Cultural Attaché in Paris and Rome. Disillusioned with the new Cuba, she settled in the French capital in the mid-sixties, finally ceasing to "... obey slogans and do propaganda surrounded by watchful monsters." 

In 1971 her novel Sonámbulo del sol was awarded the Seix Barral Biblioteca Breve Prize, the first woman to receive it. Twenty years later she was a finalist for the Plaza & Janés prize. 

Absent for a long time from critical attention, Nivaria Tejera's work began to be rescued from oblivion from the early years of the 21st century. Her strong poetic charge and her curious narrator's gaze, as well as essayist, make Nivaria Tejera a first-rate literate. Her story is entirely situated at the crossroads between three magnificent places: Tenerife, Cuba and Paris.

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