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Manu Rodríguez
Manu Rodriguez was born in Sevilla, Andalucía, in 1967, to a modest and traditional family. My mother was a primary school teacher and my father a policeman. I am the eldest of four brothers and a ...view moreManu Rodriguez was born in Sevilla, Andalucía, in 1967, to a modest and traditional family. My mother was a primary school teacher and my father a policeman. I am the eldest of four brothers and a sister. This might sound like a regular story but the peculiarity is that my father´s father, and my mother´s father, were brothers. According to my maternal grandmother, who is still alive, they didn’t see anything wrong at all with the relationship or the later marriage of her daughter and the son of her brother in law. Then, my mum and dad got married very young and I was born about nine months later. Probably their first love… their first son.
When I was two years old I got really sick. The doctors said I was not going to last very long. I’m forty seven now and I guess those doctors are probably dead by now. Sometimes fate plays such unpredictable games...
I’ve had to learn how to live and accept my life with health problems, physical limitations and a label that society has for people like me: ‘disabled’. I can’t say it’s easy just because I’ve got used to it. In fact, some moments in late childhood and adolescence were the times I had the most difficulty relating to this label, other people and the world that surrounded me.
In spite of my sickness, and with the encouragement of my parents, I finished my high school days and went to university, I worked in broadcasting, I became a writer...
I wrote Crying Words at the end of the nineties. I can´t remember now when exactly I started or finished it. I wrote it in my mother tongue, Spanish, as a process of catharsis and healing, to spit out the pain and frustration I was suffering, in a city where I couldn’t find my own space or freedom.
Now I can see how Crying Words marked the end of that period of my life. Soon after I wrote it, I left Sevilla and relocated to Edinburgh, Scotland...view less