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.
Like your substitution and the Camino connection, I remember Pilar as a Spanish name, but didn’t remember it was Basque.
ReplyDeleteHi, bink! RIght, it's Spanish, not Basque---"Abene" is the Basque version--remember, she's the owner & friend of the bot Miki.
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