Next Stop: The Validation Station

One of the many great things that happened to me during my first several months in Tetouan was meeting Carolina Ceca, a young Spanish artist working in the city under the auspices of a Spanish government grant. (You can see a bit of her work here. It’s worth checking out.) Before her Morocco time came to a close a couple days ago, we were meeting up once a week, ostensibly to converse in (and practice her) English but really just for girl talk. We had also tinkered with various English texts that she’d written up for grant applications and her website.

The last day we spent together, though, I figured I’d turn the tables and request some feedback on a project abstract I’d translated to Spanish. It’s something I hand out to research-related people when I meet them, since I find they often focus better on what I’m saying when I’m not actually saying it, but rather when it’s written down in front of them. As expected, Carolina had some helpful suggestions to make; however, she also surprised me with some passionate – and personally validating – insights into the Spanish side of my work.

In a nutshell: her opinion was that Spain very much still requires a prying open of its recent history, and that foreigners are well suited to the task. Most Spanish, she said, don’t want to talk about the Civil War at all, and those that do typically fall into polarizing categories of liberal and conservative. Foreign historians can act as a more neutral push toward confrontation with the past and hopefully toward reconciliation with it.

Now, I have to imagine that at least some of you out there are thinking, that’s all well and good, Caitlyn; congratulations on not being Spanish, but what exactly is this recent history you’re referencing? Why might it need grappling with? Excellent questions, to which I offer: The Spanish Civil War and Its Aftereffects, in 9 Short Paragraphs.

We are in the early 1930s. Tensions in Spain, between urban cosmopolitanism and rural tradition, between secular and religious, between central and periphery, between authoritarian and liberal political beliefs. 1931, elections ring in the Second Republic (the first having been in 1873-4). The government is center-left, a hodge-podge of mainly communists, socialists and anarchists. It struggles to get reform off the ground.

The conservative sectors of society and especially the military grow antsy. This latter stages a coup in July of 1936. Franco had been wavering on involvement until the eleventh hour but then rises to the fore, particularly once it becomes clear that the rebellion was not going as quickly as planned and that the Army of Africa (Spanish colonial officers and troops + tens of thousands of Moroccans) under his command would be vital in a prolonged struggle.

The rebels – or nationalists, as they fashioned themselves – also relied heavily on support from fascist Germany and Italy. On the other hand, the Republicans were more or less going it on their own, as Britain and France enacted a policy of Non-Intervention.

Civil War: July 17, 1936 – April 1, 1939. My Arabic teacher tells me that “civil war” in Arabic is “harb ahlee” – a family war – and I think we do well to keep in mind this personal, intimate aspect to the conflict. This was not merely a clashing of armies on distant battlefields; the war was civilian, too, and even familial. It penetrated and tore apart homes.

Such invasiveness continued under the repressive policies of the Franco dictatorship, especially in its early years. Franco and his government constructed a monolithic, single-sided version of the Civil War (the triumph of messianic Nationalists over barbaric Republicans), enacted the retroactive Law of Political Responsibilities to punish anyone not in accordance with this narrative and encouraged widespread denunciation to hunt down these traitors to Spanish patriotism.

“In other words, the work of legitimating Francoism and building its brutal community was occurring deep inside Spanish society.” Furthermore, “The silent knowledge of unquiet graves necessarily produced a devastating schism between public and private memory in Spain” (Graham 135, 137).

Franco passed away in 1975, but issues of history and memory carried over into the proceeding constitutional monarchy. Most significantly, in exchange for the cooperation of the Francoist elite, the new democratic government agreed to a “pact of silence,” in which perpetrators of dictatorship crimes received total amnesty. The pact remains very much in effect today. Perhaps you saw in the news this spring reports about a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, who the national judicial body decided to suspend from his post for overstepping legal bounds in his 2008 order for an inquiry into crimes committed under Francoist rule.

How can we make sense of this fierce adherence to silence? As Helen Graham explains in her fantastic "The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction", “There was a widespread fear of the consequences of reopening old wounds that the Franco regime had, decade on decade, expressly and explicitly prevented from healing” (140).

On a personal as well as a political level, confrontation with this history is a scary thing for people. Carolina told me that it was taboo to speak of the Civil War in her home, that her father became a stone wall any time mention of it arose. Younger generations likewise feel the power of the past. I remember going to a movie called “Las Trece Rosas” (“The Thirteen Roses”) with some Spanish friends while I was living in Cordoba two years ago and watching this eighteen year-old girl completely break down after we left the theater. The film, based on the true story of thirteen young women executed by the Franco regime just after the end of the war, had been an intense visual of her own grandfather’s death at the hands of a Francoist firing squad. (Another great movie to see is "La Lengua de las Mariposas", or "Butterfly" by its English title.)

As painful as engagement with the past may be, many people have realized that its suppression is untenable. Not only does political and social amnesia hinder healing on both personal and communal levels, it also impedes our ability to learn from bygone wrongs and to truly know our world and ourselves in the present. It is this latter point that is most relevant to my research.

Carolina briefed me that stereotypes about the Moroccan soldiers in Franco’s army are still rampant in Spain. The Republicans demonized them during the war – they even show up as boogey men in a lullaby or two – and it sounds like many Spanish today will readily tell you how they raped and pillaged their way through the country. Even Carolina became heated talking about the subject.

I’m not here to apologize for the Moroccan soldiers. Certainly some of them engaged in horrific acts. But we have to view them in a larger context – of that particular war, of the prior colonizing wars in Morocco, of colonization, of Moroccan poverty, of forced recruitment, of propaganda. So many issues become forgotten when we don’t examine history. The sheer intertwinement of these two countries – of, if I may be so blunt, “Islam” and the “West” – falls out of consciousness.

Memory matters: that we remember, but also, importantly, what we remember and how we remember it.

Many thanks to my friend Carolina for reminding me of this idea and for the invigoration with which it’s provided me.

Carolina's "Tres Monos" ("Three Monkeys")