Thursday, March 25, 2021

Replacing Harrison Ford in My Memory Bank

I'd written to a friend about how as I read the Murderbot Diaries, I was always imaging the characters as white guys like Harrison Ford.
It's my brain's automatic default.

Nothing wrong with Harrison Ford, but I've got a million images of him in my head, and I'm having a hard time coming up with ONE image of a Basque woman hero.
In fact, I can't come up with one.

"I want to wipe Harrison Ford from my brain," I wrote, "and replace him with a million individual faces."

I found this photograph of a Basque woman--unnamed, a model for a stock photo.
I hereby
replace all images in my brain of Harrison Ford with HER. Right? Don't you think she'd make a great Han Solo?


She could play the character of Don Abene in Murderbot Diaries. Abene is a woman, the leader of a planetary survey team, though in our time period "Don" is a masc. honorific (Don Corleone in the Godfather).

It's not said in the books what ethnic group any character comes from--it appears to be irrelevant (?) in this imaginary future––but I looked their names up.

Abéné is a village in Senegal, but the honorific is Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese... So I looked further and found the name Abene is derived from Basque abe meaning "pillar", a Basque equivalent of the woman's name Pilar.

I decided to go with that, since we walked through the Basque region of Spain on El Camino de Santiago.

Oh--wow! Looking further--just now-- I see the name Pilar
is directly connected with Camino:
It comes from the title of the Virgin Mary, María del Pilar, meaning "Mary of the Pillar". According to legend, when Saint James the Greater was in Saragossa/
Zaragoza in Spain, the Virgin Mary appeared on a pillar.

Saint James (Sant'Iago) is supposedly buried in Santiago, Spain, which is the whole point of Camino--getting there.

2 comments:

Bink said...

Like your substitution and the Camino connection, I remember Pilar as a Spanish name, but didn’t remember it was Basque.

Fresca said...

Hi, bink! RIght, it's Spanish, not Basque---"Abene" is the Basque version--remember, she's the owner & friend of the bot Miki.