El Festival de las Ideas y de la Cultura (FIC) is a major cultural event organised by ElDiario.es bringing the best in journalism, entertainment and culture around different cities in Spain. In its 2023 edition the Rosalía de Castro theater in A Coruña, Galicia, hosted the Monologues for Change (MIC) where Elena Bueriberi showed her photography work around identity in front of 670 spectators.

The Valencian journalist and photographer Elena Bueriberi brought the event to a close. In her monologue, she took us by the hand on her journey to discover her own identity, which she likened to “a vast blank page”. Inevitably, her identity is shaped by these defining factors: a Black woman born in Spain. Her father is from Equatorial Guinea and her mother is from El Salvador. With a narrative that kept the audience spellbound and with bated breath, Bueriberi took us from her childhood in 1990s Spain, when she was unaware of “being different from the Barbies” she played with or that the “flesh-coloured crayon” in her pencil case was not the same colour as her own skin. She didn’t understand why, when she played at being the Spice Girls with her friends, they told her she was Mel B, when she wasn’t necessarily her favourite Spice Girl.

The day she became aware of that difference was when a boy at school spat at her and called her a “fucking nigger”. She didn’t understand it, but she realised it was an insult and began to ask herself questions. “From then on, I realised that racism would be with me my whole life, that I’d have to put up with people touching my hair as if it were a soft toy and asking my mum if I was adopted,” she revealed. Her defence mechanism was to reject anything that might identify her as a foreigner. She was embarrassed to wear braids or African fabrics.

The turning point on this journey came when he moved to Madrid to study journalism and came into contact with the Afro-descendant community there. He began to research his roots in Equatorial Guinea, a country to which Spain owes a colonial debt – something “very little known” to current generations, Bueriberi emphasises. He found the key when he realised that the path to understanding identity lies through “vulnerability”, and it was completed when he concluded that it was “a treasure” he had to “cherish”.

(Text by ElDiario.es journalist Elena Cabrera, read the original in Spanish)