“My Obaba Zestoa huan. Twenty years later, we barely moved away from the banks of the Urola River. Going out to San Sebastian and Bilbao to the other world. In 1987 I received a letter and I had to go to Ceuta for military service. The first whip he gave me was the first to uproot him. Every time I feel uprooted, I turn to poetry,” says Mikel Ibarguren.
He fled the village in 1991. He was taken prisoner. He met the prisons of Fresnes and Soto del Real. He was extradited. He went free. After a while – although he thought there were no charges against him – he met Martutene, as well as Valdemoro and Carabanchel. Meanwhile, Konchi returned to his girlfriend in Ziburu. When Mikel was extradited, his girlfriend was confined to Dieppe in Normandy. Conchi still has a signed expulsion order. Enaitz and Arhan live with their children. They live instead of taking root, but as if they lived in connection with the escape.

Mikel needs references to the place where he is – the mountain and the sea – to find the paradise he left in the Urola Basin: “I had to live somewhere else. For this I had to take root, but I wear the sorrows of my homeland. I’ve learned to live with that pain or I’m still learning it.”

I remember the mind of the prisoner in the book Poems of the Prison of Sarrionandia. The prisoner always crosses the jujee.

In 2001, he dared me to go to Radio Egin – to dedicate myself to poetry – and he arrested me and took me to Baltasar Garzón Jueza with a “search and arrest” order from the police. I spent the old Christmas night at Martuten. Garzon had a sign poster in his office, and you were holding yourself on the poster and showing yourself as a target. He's very handsome, like a trophy on the wall: “‘You’ve had a lot of burning sensations?’ “Yes, of course.” The lawyers are: “But it is absurd. He was caught by looking for and capturing.” About Garzon: “Oh, I’ve been activated!?” Manipulate the computer and: “You can mark it, it’s free,” he said.

The Cesto poet of Mikel Ibargu. Soko of Hendaye working in the factory. I remember now Xabier Let’s “I am the lonely man who walks the streets in the winter sun to work”.

The employee, yes. In the upholstery, in the chair assembly... When I was young, I felt like a worker. My friends are talking about football and... My colleagues asked me, “Do you write poetry?” Poetry and literature are very personal. I'm a weird little bitch, a clandestine writer.

Worker and poet...

The work is the work: the need. Writing gave me the breath to live. Poetry is a way of introspection to know oneself. We are like the sea, we have the surface and the bottom, the other need is to enter and explore inside, if I work on it I take my head out in some way.

You were a bad student, poet.

I studied at school, but I started working young. I'm from the third Loyola School promotion. The boys and girls of our time didn’t want to learn, or at least those of my gang, we were very good at piping. The best thing the school has given me is friends. Teaching and learning took place on the street. I knew, besides the street, the utopian world of my aunt and uncle’s farm, a desirable world. It has been twenty years and for me that is still the world of happiness.

Later, he studied Basque Philology at Fresnes. The profession of letters has not become a profession. You were a teacher, but...

I live poetry naturally, I have never thought of jumping into the world of letters and becoming a profession. I wouldn't feel natural. I follow literature, but the literary world or the system is another universe to me. Me, satisfied with the creation.

So the night here has four edges (Susa) you created in Fresnes.

When I left the village, I experienced a deep uproar. The fact that I had to leave my surroundings brought me closer to literature, to poetry. I went into Fresnes and I couldn't take him away from my girlfriend. You need your own presence in prison, that's what you're looking for. It was through letters that I began to work on words and then slowly create poems. Being inside helps you to read the texts and work more deeply. I found the connection to the outside and the escape route. I gave shape to what I wrote and passed it on to José Luis Otamendi.

In the meantime, I was extradited to the Royal Basement. The book is very simple, but you took a big step for me: the poems of a beginner, a vital experience. The poems seem to mark the prison camp, going all the way to the edges of the prison, to the closed world inside. I had to find something for the world I had left behind, an umbilical cord, contact with the outside, with my girlfriend... It was a way to find temporary freedom.

A few years later, you revealed the Desert Streets (Susa). Already on the street, in the Basque Country, but apparently in the desert.

As the first book was marked by internal references, in this business in the Basque Country, but outside the country of origin. I found another language, French. I carry the desert and all the des inside, I am in the desert outside my country of origin. I tell you how I settled in the world here in the Karrikak of the Desert: in the streets, in the lodges, in the villages and in the mountains. It's an attempt to take root where I am.

In the workplace: instead of living. Instead of getting rid of them to live in local places.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Everything falls apart for me: to displace, to expropriate, to dislike, to live in the desert. It is a logical consequence of the uprooting. From that little settlement of mine, I feel like I'm out of that Obaba. I feel rooted and strange at the same time.

What has become of poetry?

Poetry is the way to swim, as well as the way to root. I feel like I'm local, I'm made to the environment here, I've made friends. However, despite living this more and more, I am a witness that I am not, I live where I am not at all times. Sometimes I don’t know myself and I’m surprised.

“If full flight were permissible, if there was peace somewhere, I would not be a lover of flowers at the edge of the house,” the song says. You left the edge of the house. Have you found peace?

No, I don't. With the uprooting, I carry a vivid sense of escape. As if I were wearing a compass, I live at that point of escape, sometimes escaping from people, sometimes from situations. The compass is a magnet and so am I, I want to go where I am not. On the one hand there is my Obaba, but I also have the need to leave reality, to seek that peace, I live instead of fleeing.

Your poems are wounds that have not been closed.

Of course I have enough wounds, and poetry is like a plaything, words are threads to close bitter sensations. I use the words to unlink the facts and to link the dissolved. I started trying to close a life cycle with poetry, but I haven't closed it yet. I live with the hope that one day I will close the circle.

The third book is from Ahap. What's in that circle?

The spaces marked the first two books, the two spaces being deserts. From Ahap I wanted to make an attempt to write in the book without references, contours and locations, in order to take another step in poetry. Whether I made it up or not, I don't know. During this period, I began to read French poets, receiving other influences, such as those of the poets Paul Éluard and René Char. Ahapetiken is sure to show their influence. On the other hand, when I wrote about my girlfriend while I was inside, the world between us – me and you in dialectic – was the whole world. Then you opened up the space and now it’s bigger, more space and more people are coming in. I’m still looking at the internal dialogue.

Looks like you're looking for something that's been stolen from you.

They took my time away. The courtyards of Fresnes are very small, I did not walk through the space and I am looking for the time that has been stolen, I go out to the street, to the mountain to recover the lost time and space... Sometimes I find and write words.

You won the 2007 Irun City Award with the book Ahapetik. You'll have to pick up the trophy soon. The Soko factory is a short walk to the town hall of Irun.

The truth is that being rewarded had me off-center, off-center, I didn’t expect it. I have to go for the trophy, the event is this month. I live with this dilemma: to go or not to go. Maybe I'll put myself in danger again.