The Suffering Body in Pepe Sales's Poetry

The poems of Pepe Sales (Barcelona, 1954-1994) are marked by his experience as a homosexual, drug addict and AIDS sufferer. He was a key member of the Barcelona counterculture, along with Pau Riba, Pau Malvido and Genís Cano, and has gone down in history as one of the poètes maudits of contemporary Catalan literature. The aim of this article is to analyse the representation of pain and distress in his poems and songs, with some additional references to his paintings. To this end, I draw on the critical work of Susan Sontag, Sara Ahmed, David Le Breton and Joanna Bourke, who conceive pain in general, not as a private and personal experience, but as a cultural and historical event that creates identity and community bonds. The main strategies used by Sales to convey his pain are the scream, animalisation, weapons and wounds and, especially, religious martyrdom. The basic finding is that the poet’s pain is not simply a testimony to the suffering of a lost generation of junkies and misfits that the official account of the transition from Francoism to democracy has stigmatised. On the contrary, it reminds us of an unfair medical, political and financial system that inflicted great suffering on them.