The Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was garroted March 2, 1974. We went down from Jutland at Easter, to spend a week in the sun.
I signed up to study in Barcelona, and learned many Lluís Llach songs.
This is one of the most beautiful. It is about the 1974 rebellion in Portugal, but I always associated it with Puig Antich.
Companys, si sabeu on dorm la lluna blanca,
digueu-li que la vull
però no puc anar a estimar-la,
que encara hi ha combat.Companys, si coneixeu el cau de la sirena,
allà enmig de la mar,
jo l’aniria a veure,
però encara hi ha combat.I si un trist atzar m’atura i caic a terra,
porteu tots els meus cants
i un ram de flors vermelles
a qui tant he estimat,
quan guanyem el combat.Companys, si enyoreu les primaveres lliures,
amb vosaltres vull anar,
que per poder-les viure
jo me n’he fet soldat.I si un trist atzar m’atura i caic a terra,
porteu tots els meus cants
i un ram de flors vermelles
a qui tant he estimat,
quan guanyem el combat.
Companions, if you know where the white moon sleeps.
This song went classic:
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Thanks for these. Never heard of Llach or Puig Antich — I’m ignorant of Catalan culture — but I do know something about Italy, and its left, and its ’70s, and this puts me strongly in mind of those (e.g. Sergio Endrigo).
It’s a surprise to me how musical the radical movement in Catalonia seems to be. A relative of mine is in this band. They’re all still at school. I saw them play in a town square on the coast last week, they kick arse, but is that as much use as kicking heads? I hope they don’t try to find out or get into the hands of those who believe it. I find nationalism very difficult, especially underdog nationalism: I am torn between humanist solidarity against oppression and contempt for all nations as altars of useless sacrifice. So I just danced to the music.
O good, a cool band I don’t know!
Well, Catalan anarcho-syndicalism appeals to me more than some linguistic nationalisms — although of course I am a language nerd so I believe all languages should be promoted.
But here in Louisiana there’s a conservative way to be pro French, and some of the Catalan nationalist talk I hear snippets of now strikes me as somehow retro, although I don’t know enough about the current situation to really judge. I have a Faroese connection in the family and there’s reactionary Faroese linguistic nationalism, too (again, from what I can figure out).
And then, there are those secessionists in N. Italy.
I don’t know much about the Catalan nationalist movement, really, or independence movement as it thinks of itself, but it is definitely split between ages, the elder one being intellectual, remembering its heroes, the Civil War (appropriated for each agenda of course), Prat de la Riba etc., and this is the sentiment that gets these people’s names onto street signs and also the one that lies behind the linguistic definition of citizenship promoted by the Generalitat. It is inward-looking, is my sense. But the youth movement is, from my one-sided experience, mostly based in music, and picking up not the intellectual side but trying to find a way to blend the new global youth culture and Catalan traditional music, hence the folk rhythms you can hear in Raska’s stuff, in a way that distinguishes them clearly from Espanya. In this process a lot of children of foreign extraction are involved, both cause and effect, and this is the common thread between the two groups other than contempt for Madrid’s ordinances, that race or origin are not really part of their agenda compared to language and loyalty to the païs. And the two must go together: if you love Catalonia you must speak its language, if you don’t you can’t join in. Coming from somewhere where nationalism is (a) intellectually deprecated and (b) mostly ranged against skin colour and immigration, this all looks very strange, and chauvinistic, but that’s better than racist, right? I am reluctant to get into value judgements, though, not least because of the family connection.
That actually sheds a some light, though, on the global Francophone musical youth culture element here in Louisiana (also evident in Canada and I suppose elsewhere). Here, though, you don’t actually have to speak French. They try but it doesn’t seem to be the main thing, music and cultural identity are. I don’t understand it (here) well enough to opine, although I am fascinated with LA French and will probably be among the last people to hear it. But as far as the French “movement” I think it’s thin. They are convinced they are the only people worldwide who were ever shamed for speaking a minority language, ever beaten in school for it, and so on, so there’s all this exceptionalism and also nostalgia for the French Empire. If it had a more forward looking politics, I’d be more interested, but it seems to be about promoting the state as a tourist destination and a plan to get foreign investment based on this … nostalgia. I’m not sure.
(An aside: you must realise that this thread is more personally identifying than many, but I’m pretty sure I’ve now got your faculty web-page open in another tab. (If it is you, are the mailbox and office numbers supposed to be different? Rhetorical question.) It’s not so much that the blog entries allow one conclusively to Google you up first time, but there are only so many people teaching plausible things in possible places and one of them mentions on their web-page a number of places that one can establish from the blog that you have also been in. This is about flexing my detective skills for me, with no real purpose beyond wondering if I could find the information, but if I can, so may others, so you may want to redact things and indeed maybe delete this comment.)
Yes – you have surely found my eccentric self. So this post in particular does it, you say? I had sort of given up on the idea of anonymity and gone for pseudonymity because there are so many people that know the blog and if anyone is malicious they could have revealed far and wide.
I don’t know – perhaps I should redact that comment on French, I’m talking about certain elements in the youth movement and don’t want to offend anyone who may be watching me here. I tend to think that I thought through so much nitty gritty personal stuff on here that it doesn’t matter at this point but I know what I’ll do — mark the post private, perhaps; the thread is kind of interesting.
<nods>
Not this post by itself but that it is the second time I noticed you refer to being in a particular state and this time it got through. A Google for that state + `university’ brings up three to choose from, elsewhere we have discussed what you teach and, well, yes, the rest unfolds. I presumably could have had the same thought at the previous mention. When I first started reading this blog I thought you were in an entirely different country though!
What country? That’s fascinating because when I was really trying for anonymity, people were convinced that I was a gay U.S. Latino man.
Anyway, this does mean I may need to reconsider everything I say on da blog, not just in this thread. Thanks for pointing it out.
I thought probably Chile or Argentina. Somewhere in South America, anyway, somewhere big enough to sustain a university culture but apparently a fairly new or small one (based on some things you had said about colleagues who weren’t coming over as very professional) and obviously not Brazil because wrong language. Bolivia or Venezuela also seemed like possibilities but I heard no politics and—though I have an ex who studied indigenous movements in Bolivia for her Ph. D. who very occasionally blogs so I may have an unusual view of the country—it seemed difficult to imagine a university life in either country that didn’t reverberate when Morales or Chavez spoke. And I know too little of Ecuador, Belize, Honduras etc. to guess whether they contain places that would hold you. But I can, as is often proven, be very wrong! And then you mentioned your language teaching and I had to revise my impression.
Though, come to think of it, Brazil would have fitted the Freire references—indeed those had me confused about your actual subject for a while since I think of him as a historian and read by historians—and it’s only now I notice the Zapatistas picture which might have led me to a totally different assumption about country (and is a broken link, by the way). The question is when impressions coalesce enough to be verifiable, and whether the mass of data here provides that coalescence for people determined to sieve it, I suppose.
Well, it’s the Louisiana + other specific geographical references that really do it, I think, in terms of outing; I used to really guard against both but then threw caution to the winds.
But it is interesting that I come across on the blog as South American; in real life people tend to think I am Chilean or Argentine, too. Recently I have figured out that that it’s not just a professional p.o.v., I really do sort of view the world from that kind of perspective and it is interesting to see that this shows here.
*
My subject(s), for school, are literature and cultural theory, but the blog is a personal one, not really an academic one, so that’s why it doesn’t have a clear subject area focus. This ex and I started blogs one day to amuse ourselves. He quit his because really, he just wanted to figure out how the software worked. I continued mine because I decided to use it as a space in which to recreate a voice, from the ground up, both personally and academically — personally, outside that relationship, and academically, outside the shadow of my father.
Then, said ex started cyberstalking the blog, and that was how it ended up getting outed to some administrators at this university. At that point I gave up on anonymity but still wanted the pseudonym because it was still and is still helping me recreate voice.
Oh gods, then all my careful warnings about the fragility of online anonymity have been preaching to the choir, I do apologise.
No, actually I appreciate it. I knew a lot of people knew about the blog and knew that people in field could easily guess me, and others could figure it out if they tried. I also knew a lot of posts were getting reposted to Facebook, who knows by whom and saying what.
I didn’t realize, though, how easy it would be to see me as non US, and how much the naming of places I’ve traveled was outing me. It means that if I construct things differently, I might go quite anonymous again. So, it was useful. I had been thinking of just coming out.
The blog is going to change, anyway, something has changed in the last month or so, my actual voice seems to be coming back and I seem to have finished discussing certain things the blog was here to discuss. This has to do with a few conversations I’ve had, including the ones with you. It is all sort of fortuitous.
Oh well, hurrah for progress then! Pondering this idly, I think that you are right that naming the state is a crucial part of the jigsaw, but as well as that, I would not have been certain of anything had not your faculty page contained information that could be substantiated within the blog. I guess that content there is less negotiable.
All of this would of course be different if I actually knew you or your field. Then there would be many more keywords.
But I can change the real life web page, make it much more vague. 🙂