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| Andalusian landscape |
I read a book over the Hari Raya (End of
Ramadan Festival) break, which affected me deeply, stirring up old concerns
about the hazardous business of being a certain kind of writer in a certain
kind of society. The kind of writer I have in mind is not, as you might think,
one who is ideologically committed or fired by topical issues that prick his
social conscience and because of that gets into conflict with a repressive
State. The writer I am thinking of is one whose very stance as a writer and as
an individual and the values that inform his non-topical writings and his
unconventional lifestyle constitute a challenge, not so much to the State but
to society at large. I am thinking of the writer who cherishes an open mind
(and heart), and that mere openness –openness to life basically – is an offence
to his society. The society in question may on the surface look modern and open
but in reality is still ruled by group taboos, ancient prejudices and
life-denying pieties.
The subject of the book that sets me
thinking again about this old problem may seem remote, both in terms of
geography and time. It is a biography of a Spanish poet and playwright who died
more than half a century ago. But if you believe as I do that history can
repeat itself, in different situations, different cultures, but with a familiar
pattern of conflict underlying them, you might consider the tragic story of
this poet not so irrelevant to us. The poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, was
brutally murdered near his hometown of Granada at the beginning of the Spanish
Civil War between the Nationalist (read Fascist) rebels and the Republican
government in 1936.
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| Federico Garcia Lorca in 1914 |
He was then only 38 and at he height of his
powers as a poet and playwright. His murderers were Fascist thugs who took
advantage of the chaos of the early days of the civil war to settle old scores
with the poet they hated so much. During the civil war, which ended with the
victory of the Nationalists under General Franco in 1939, the name of the murdered
poet became a powerful political symbol of the Left. And it was used by cynical
Communist propagandists to exploit the idealism of progressive writers the
world over. The myth of Lorca as a martyr of communism has long been exploded.
But the idea that was nevertheless an example of the politically committed
writer who had to pay with his life for his commitment seems to persist,
especially among people who have neither read his writing nor know much about
his life.
That the case of Lorca is more complicated,
and more disturbing, is shown by the new biography by Ian Gibson (Faber
paperback, 1990). The picture of the poet that emerges from this superb book is
that of a man who was inspired by an exuberant lust for life yet haunted by an
obsession with death. The two sides of his self were rooted in the ambivalence
of his heritage and his equally ambivalent attitude to it. Ambivalence and
paradox, in fact, seem to run right through the life and work of this Andalusian
prodigy. He was one of the most regional of Spanish writers rooted to the soil
of Andalusia, its blood and mire, songs of joy and laments of despair, and yet
universal in his appeal. In form, he was both traditional and modern, rooted to
the ballads and folk music of the peasants and the Gypsies, but also open to
the avant-garde influence of the day (he was a close friend and early
collaborator of Salvador Dali). Lorca’s universalism is not the sort much cared
for by ideologues. His universalism has to do with the primitive yearnings of
humanity, the desires of the spirit and the flesh, and the tragic consequences
of the denial or betrayal of those desires.
The oppression that he was deeply concerned
with, was not so much political or economic oppression (though he was not
unmindful of these), but the oppression of healthy human instincts by a society
ruled by a life-denying religious orthodoxy and grimly patriarchal values and
codes of conduct. Just as Lorca was a true son of Spain who hated the narrow
and sterile patriotism of the bourgeoisie and the Nationalists, he was a true
if unorthodox Catholic who hated the corrupt and repressive Church. In their
turn, the Church and the Nationalists, cheerless guardians of the national
soul, and the national honour, considered minds like Lorca a corrupting
“cosmopolitan” or “alien” influence that must be exterminated at all costs.
After the myth of Lorca as a martyr of Communism had been exploded, the actual
circumstances of and the real reasons for his murder became a subject for
speculation.
For a long time, because of the taboo on
the poet’s name imposed by the Franco regime, it was difficult to establish
what actually happened in Granada during those chaotic early days of the civil
war. Ian Gibson, author of an earlier study of the murder (banned by the Franco
regime), has now in this full length biography placed the tragic event in the
context of the poet’s whole life and of the Spanish society of his time. We are
as a result in a better position to understand the deep-seated as well as the
immediate reasons why Lorca was murdered. Lorca may not have been a political
writer in the commonly understood sense of the term. But he was even more
“subversive” than the most radical of political writers.
Lorca was “subversive” because he was the
voice of primal energies which questioned the repressive orthodoxies of his
society and religion, both in the realms of the body and the spirit. “As for
me,” he was recorded to have said, “I’ll never be political. I’m a
revolutionary, because all true poets are revolutionaries.” What he meant by
“revolutionary” could be inferred from another remark: “The day we stop
resisting our instinct, we’ll have learnt how to live.” His openness to life
and all its possibilities meant among other things being a human being first, a
Spaniard and a Catholic second. “I am totally Spanish,” he said, “and it would
be impossible for me to live outside my geographical boundaries. But at the
same time, I hate anyone who is Spanish just because he was born a Spaniard. I
am a brother to all men, and I detest the person who sacrifices himself for an
abstract nationalist and religious ideal… “
He was outspoken, at times to the point of
recklessness. He made many enemies among the religious and nationalist
philistines of Granada, and he became a marked man. About two months before
they killed him, he made a remark in a newspaper review that dramatized his
ability to rise above the barriers of narrow sentimental patriotism, but which
infuriated many Catholic patriots. Asked for his opinion on the fall of Moorish
Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, he said provocatively: “it was a
disastrous event, even though they may say the opposite in the schools. An
admirable civilization, and a poetry, architecture and sensitivity unique in
the world – all were lost, to give way to an impoverished, cowed city, a
“miser’s paradise” where the worst middle class in Spain today is busy stirring
things up.” They myth of “the great Christian victory over paganism,” so sacred
to the chauvinistic Catholic, was dismissed just like that! If there was one
remark that sealed Lorca’s fate, it must have been this one.
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| Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) |
Oh yes, I almost forgot one other reason
why the poet was murdered. He was a homosexual, and we know what being a
homosexual was like in a macho, rigidly patriarchal society like Lorca’s Spain.
One of the thugs who shot him actually boasted that he fired “two bullets into
his arse for being a queer.” As Gibson grimly comments “Such was the mentality
of the Granada bourgeoisie criticized by the poet (in the newspaper interview
quoted above).” And it was tragically fitting that they butchered him at a spot
outside Granada not far from a famous fountain once called, by the Arabs, Ainadamar (The Fountain of Tears).
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