LIFE ON THE RECEIVING ENDBy: Matthew Tree
This 31 page essay was read at the Cañada Blanch Centre for Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics, on Wednesday, November the 5th, 2008
Back in the Sixties – Franco's time, when use of the Catalan language was still largely illegal outside the privacy of home - there was an incident on the Spanish Cadena SER radio station that's still remembered in Catalonia today. The best-known voice of the period, a presenter called Bobby Deglané – who usually came on to his guests, according to author Quim Monzó, like a 'knight in shining syrup' - invited a Catalan comedienne, Mary Santpere, also well-known throughout Spain, onto his weekend show. Straight out, he came out with: 'Mary, is it true that you Catalans, rather than talk, simply bark, just like dogs?'. To which Santpere, after a moment of being taken aback, replied, 'I wouldn't say that, but in
The stories come trickling in year after democratic year from over the Catalan border, stories of Catalans going out into monolingual Spain, being identified as such, and then being looked at askance, or short-changed, or insulted on the street, and so on and so forth. For example, one television cameraman I knew told me how in 2004 he and his crew had sat down in a restaurant in Burgos only to be told by the manager, and I quote: ''Si quereis hablar en catalán, mejor que lo haceis en otro sitio'. My favourite story of this type, however, is the one told on public radio a couple of years ago, by the Catalan-language writer Empar Moliner. No sooner was she speeding out of
Personally, I find it incomprehensible that the Catalans who've had such experiences never seem to be especially affected by them. If someone were to tell me to stop speaking English to another English speaker, in any context whatsoever, I would get very cross. It's true that all these anecdotes, plentiful though they may be, are just that: anecdotes, mere episodes, isolated cases of regional sparring of a kind in many places around the world. Perhaps, it did on occasion occur to me, the Catalans were right, even, to treat such incidents as teacup-sized storms.
Then, in the year 2006 – when the Catalan parliament was putting together the third Statute of Catalan Autonomy - I came across two incidents which seemed to me to be indicative of a great deal more than mere interregional bitching. On both occasions I was on the breakfast show of the private Catalan-language radio station RAC 1; musician Miqui Puig and I had what must have been one of the easiest paid jobs in the western hemisphere: for half an hour all we had to do was talk about things we'd liked and disliked over the past week.
Occasionally, if the pressure of this got too much for us, the presenter would open the lines and let the hoi-polloi mention a few likes and dislikes of their own. One Friday, we got a call from a Barcelona taxi driver; the previous weekend he had upgraded his taxi to a Mercedes, and decided to celebrate by going for a long spin to the capital of Aragon, Saragossa, where he could show off this brand new tool of his trade – freshly painted, of course, in the instantly recognisable black and yellow of all Barcelonan cabs - to some Aragonese friends of his. No sooner had he stopped at the first set of
Saragossan traffic lights than the drivers to right and left of him began to wind down their windows and treat him to a mixture of forthright verbal abuse and earnest recommendations to leave town which were clearly provoked by the Catalan nature of his car. He made it to his friends' place, only for them to ask him please not to leave his taxi parked in the street, where they could not guarantee it remaining in one piece for long. So he drove it to a car park, on entering which he was accosted by a group of angry young men who threatened to do his windows in, no matter where he parked. At this point he gave up, and, abandoning
The following Friday, in the same radio studio, we got another similar call, this time from a town near Barcelona – Mataró, if I remember rightly - from the mother of a sixteen year old girl who had just been on a school trip to Madrid to see the Prado gallery. When this girl had been chatting to her school friends in Catalan on the
Now, it might look as if, once again, we're simply piling isolated anecdote upon isolated anecdote and trying to draw some overall conclusion from them. But in these cases, I think it's the small print that counts, so to speak, in the sense that what makes these two stories significant is that both the Aragonese friends of the Barcelona taxi driver and the mothers of the teenagers off to their school trip took for granted that there was – in Saragossa and Madrid respectively – a general (not an anecdotal or residual) antipathy towards Catalan people that might turn ugly, possibly with violent consequences.
That struck me as being indicative of a more widespread phenomenon that was both unpleasant and – given certain circumstances – potentially explosive.
As it happened, when reading about anti-Catalan prejudice in Spain later on, I came across this observation by the Spanish historian José Antonio Maravall: 'to speak of something Catalan or to speak in Catalan, in a café in Madrid or any other major Spanish city, exposes one automatically to a hostile reaction'. He was writing not about
As mentioned, they were negotiating their third Statute of Autonomy. So, I thought, is this the key to it all? Is it just the Catalan Statues of Autonomy that foment anti-Catalan prejudice in
Firstly,
Secondly, the Catalans. 'The Catalans' refers here to all registered residents of Catalonia, irrespective of where they come from, where they parents come from, what colour their skin is and what language they prefer to speak.
Finally, monolingual
Ok, now we've got all that cleared up, we can go on.
Anyone living in
For them, the famous reconquest of the peninsula from the Moors starting around the 10th century, was achieved not only by the Galaico-Portuguese fighting their way down the western edge and the Castilians doing the same down the centre swathe; but also by the Catalan counts and later the Catalan count-kings who gradually removed the north-eastern strip of the peninsula from Arab and Berber control until by 1245 they had claimed not only Tarragona and Lleida but also Valencia and the Balearic Islands for Christendom and themselves.
Successive Catalan count-kings used this mainly coastal territory as a springboard to create a fourteenth century commercial empire, with direct military control over Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, a chunk of Anatolia, much of Greece, including Athens: the Catalan Count-King Peter III, thrilled to have the Parthenon in his power, ordered a dozen crossbowmen to protect it from thieves in 1380. All this swashbuckling went hand in hand with the emergence of some of the most precocious protodemocratic legislation in
If our imaginary Catalan is a little better-informed than usual, he would at this point delight in quoting us the French historian Pierre Vilar's famous analysis of Catalonia at this point in her history: 'perhaps, between 1250 and 1350, the Catalan Principality is the one country in Europe about which it would less inaccurate, less risky, to describe in apparently anachronistic terms as a nationstate.'.
If, to drive the point home, the Catalans wanted to be a bit bolshie, they would casually point out now that at the time referred to by Pierre Vilar, the flag that represented Catalonia is the very same one that represents it still. Whereas the Spanish flag, they would enjoy adding, was invented by decree on May the 28th of 1785. After this, even our cocky Catalans would have to admit, it's downhill all the way. To begin with, a dynastic alliance in 1469 between Isabel, Queen of Castile, and Ferdinand II of Aragon, Valencia and Barcelona did not unite Spain – as the old Spanish nationalistic myth has it – given that the Catalan-Aragonese Kingdom retained its legal system, tax system, parliamentary structure, currency, customs tariffs on the Castilian border, and so on. But there is no doubt that from this moment on, power begins slowly to shift from
This is as nothing, however, to what happened in 1714, the key date in modern Catalan history, when the country lost its war against the Bourbon dynasty and was incorporated by force of arms into a still fledgling Spanish state (remember, which didn't yet have its own flag). What it did have was one irritated absolutist monarch, Phillip V, who used his Right of Conquest to justify his subsequent elimination of Catalan financial independence, of most Catalan law – but NOT Catalan civil law, something worth bearing in mind for later - of Catalan currency, all Catalan institutions, its eight universities included, the long-cherished right of the Catalan parliament to approve its King, and the use of the Catalan language in certain contexts.
Not only this, but an entire neighbourhood of
Ciutadella, partly to house some of the 30,000 Castilian troops billeted in
Later, in the 19th century there was a resurgence of Catalan culture which in its turn, together with other circumstances, led to the appearance of political Catalanism which eventually led to the recovery – after its suppression 218 years earlier, of the main Catalan institution of government, the Generalitat – together with a Statute of Autonomy (1932) which restored a small amount of the home rule lost in 1714. Both Generalitat and Statute were suppressed yet again seven years later by the well-known fascist dictator, Francisco Franco Bahamonde, who ruled from 1939 to 1975.
Four years after Franco's demise, in
There, in an outsize nutshell, we have the Catalan version of history. Whether people find it to their taste or not, is not really here nor there. The fact is, as we said, that is how most reasonably well-informed Catalans see their collective past.
From the Castilian point of view, the military seizure of the Principality of Catalonia in 1714, and the dozens of measures that were later taken to bring
What the Catalans of the time, 1714, regretted most was the loss of their legal system and institutions, now abolished at one stroke. From their point of view, this constituted a complete loss of political independence ,was not legitimate and never would be legitimate. Graffiti that appeared on the streets of
For many Catalans today, what they regard as their forced membership of the Castilian-Spanish national project is still not legitimate.
It is during this post-1714 period, and especially over the 19th century that modern anti-Catalan prejudice as we live it today begins to emerge.
Take the language, for example. Although a preliminary report by a Castilian functionary called Patiño affirmed soon after 1714 that the Catalans, and I quote: 'spoke and wrote only in Catalan, without making much use of Spanish', the new laws imposed by the Castilian regime insisted that Spanish or Latin were to be used in the courts, instead of Catalan, as had been the custom up until then. At the same tie guidelines were laid out for the prohibition of Catalan in school teaching, book-publishing and preaching, the latter being an extremely widespread activity back then, when most people believed in God. It should be said that these decrees proved extremely difficult to implement at first.
Which is probably why in the 1800s, measures designed to limit the use of Catalan multiplied, reaching a fever pitch towards the end of that century. In 1881, any legal or commercial document written in Catalan – from a testament to a tram ticket - was decreed null and void.
The ban on Catalan in the courts was made stricter, often with disastrous consequences for monolingual plaintiffs: in the Spanish parliament in 1905, the MP for Tarragona Julià Nougués brought up the case of a Catalan who had been wrongfully jailed for 14 years for answering 'yes' instead of 'no' to a Castilian judge's question that he hadn't understood correctly. In 1896, it was forbidden to speak in Catalan at any forms of public meeting, indoors or outdoors. In the same year, the use of Catalan was banned on the telephone and in telegrams. In 1900, it was banned in theatres. Later, under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, which lasted seven years starting in 1923, inspectors were sent into
Today, curiously enough, although now all Catalans can speak Spanish, from time to time, grouplets of Spanish politicians and intellectuals still insist on insisting that the Spanish language is being persecuted in
So, here we have one root cause of anti-Catalan prejudice: not the language in itself, but the insistence of large numbers of Catalans on using it as the default language in
In the London School of Economics the last thing I wanted to talk about was economics – a subject I understand even less than, say, bosonic string theory – but in order to understand the crucial second source of antipathy towards Catalonia in Spain, the delicate subject of money has to be broached. After all, the stereotypical Catalan – as seen by prejudiced monolingual Spaniards, not all, of course - not only barks like a dog, but is mean, tight-fisted, selfish, miserly, money-grabbing and even - and this accusation dates from a 1907 article in El Mundo newspaper by the novelist Pío Baroja – a Jew. ('Everything in
The supposed stinginess of the Catalans has been reflected in a host of popular jokes, the more elaborate of which – as is also the case with Jewish humour – are told by the butts of the jokes themselves. The ones of monolingual Spanish origin tend to be both shorter and blunter. The shortest one I know, overheard personally, goes: [joke about the dead Catalan, shown with thumb and finger].
As mentioned, Catalan civil law was allowed to remain in force for several decades after the military defeat of 1714. Catalan civil law both favoured and fomented the existing tendency in
This economic conflict – between the propertyowning classes of
Despite all this, the suspicion that the Catalans are not only rolling in it, but also withholding financial support from other regions started to become more and more widespread. In 1915, when the Catalans asked for money for local infrastructures, the then much-read Madrid newspaper, El Imparcial, described the Catalan authorities as 'financial parasites who feed themselves a the expenses of the state'. 86 years later, in 2001, when the Catalan government was pushing for a transfer of 15% of income tax to Catalan public funds, the then president of Extremadura, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, made headlines with his comment: 'Just because the Catalans speak two tongues, doesn't mean they need to eat twice as much as everyone else'. To this day, the myth persists that
So: sooner or later, this combination of legalised attacks against the Catalan language together with such heavy taxation, was going to get the Catalans' goat. Their first political reactions, however, were nothing if not moderate.
Anyone today who ploughs his way through the foundational texts of Catalanism, most of which date from the late 19th century, might be surprised to find that none of them show any interest in independence. The republican theorist Valentí Almirall, for example, writing in 1886, opted for a federal status within a liberal
And yet right from the word go, Spanish media and politicians treated all Catalanists as separatists. In 1901, the liberal deputy Luis de Armiñan bought up the question in parliament: 'Could
Nowhere in monolingual Spain did this perceived separatism ring alarm bells more violently than in the Spanish military whose paranoia about Catalonia meant that, as historian Jaume Vicens i Vives pointed out, 'martial law was imposed in Catalonia for 60 of the 86 years running from 1814 to 1900'. Far worse was yet to come. In
Talk of the military brings us to
Detainees who insisted on speaking in Catalan before the judges, such as the philologist Jordi Carbonell, were placed in psychiatric institutions. Women belonging to the clandestine Catalan Republican Left party, whose members denied they were Spanish, were frequently raped in custody, as two of the victims once explained to a mutual friend.
From that whole period, however, nothing drove home to me personally just how savage the anti-Catalan climate under Franco was until I heard a true story told me by a man I was buying a table from, some ten years ago, in the Sant Antoni neighbourhood of
With the advent of democracy, far from winning widespread sympathy from Spanish public opinion for having nearly had their culture surgically removed, a survey commissioned by the then Spanish president Adolfo Suárez in 1977, showed that Catalonia was the least liked region of Spain in Madrid, the two Castiles, Andalusia, Galicia, Extremadura, Asturias, Murcia, Aragon and the Canary Islands. Only in
Since then, antipathy towards Catalonia has proven so deep-rooted in monolingual Spain that Catalan historian Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté was moved to say in a recent interview, and I quote his exact words: 'In the same way that in Austria, before the Second World War, you could not be fully Austrian without being a little bit anti-Semitic, so in Spain today, you cannot be one hundred Spanish unless you are at least a little bit anti-Catalan'. We have seen at the beginning how anti-Catalan prejudice, fomented openly in certain Spanish media and by certain Spanish politicians, has resulted in harassment, verbal abuse, and so forth. On occasion, it takes a far more serious for,, no better example of which can be given than extraordinary and mind-boggling case of Èric Bertran.
In 2004, Èric Bertran was a 14 year old schoolboy who lived in the Costa Brava resort town of Lloret de Mar. Èric, a Harry Potter fan, had a web page called 'L'Exèrcit del Fènix', - the 'Army of the Phoenix' - named after the J.K. Rowlings's Order of the Phoenix. On the 24th September, Èric sent an email to two supermarket chains and a dairy products manufacturer, requesting them to include Catalan on the labels of their products and suggesting that his
On September 30th, just before 11pm, twenty Civil Guards in full combat uniform, automatic weapons at the ready, broke into Èric's home, searched his room and removed his and his brother's computers. They identified themselves as members of the anti-terrorist unit who had been sent from
One year later, in March of 2005, the supermarket chain dropped its accusations against Èric Bertran, after having had its server blocked for months by furious Catalan e-protestors.
The point of all this is that such an episode would have been inconceivable in any other part of
So where do we stand now, we residents of
Put bluntly, the Catalans are tiring of a tiring situation that has gone on for far, far too long. Of the six million odd citizens who have the vote, over two million now want outright independence, with a further two million remaining undecided. Even us foreigners, voteless though we are, have been canvassed. A majority of Latin Americans, it turns out, would prefer to stay in
Before anyone can say, hey, what's it to you, with your British passport and your universal English language, why you should you care about this kerfuffle in a little coastal corner of the continent?, I would like to finish by saying that my own interest in the issue is more personal than political, given that one of the areas in which anti-Catalan prejudice is most virulent is in the world of writing. Take this book, for example. 'L'últim patriarca' by Najat El Hachmi. Najat El Hachmi came to live in
Twenty years later, with this novel, she won the most prestigious and also best-remunerated Catalan-language literary award, the Ramon Llull, in January of this year. Despite this unique achievement, when the Spanish translation was being prepared, Najat received tremendous pressure, even from her own agent, to eliminate the words 'traducido
It is, indeed, an open secret in the literary world, that monolingual Spanish readers tend to shun the products of Catalan language writers. One of the most commercially successful of these, Ferran Torrent, from
I never realised just how much this was the case, until something similar happened to me. Here we have the Catalan original of a novel published in 2001, 'Privilegiat'. The biographical blurb is standard: Taught himself Catalan in 1979, published this, that and the other (Catalan titles given), contributed stories to these anthologies, bla bla bla, contributes to this and that newspaper and this and that radio station (their names given, identifying them as Catalan language media). OK.
This is the Castilian version: born in
What I'm sure everybody wants – and I include the vast majority of the inhabitants of monolingual
Your turn.
.JPG)
Posts
