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  • Writing (in) Prison:The Discourse of Confinement in Lidia Falcón's En el infierno
  • M. Edurne Portela (bio)

"One written word in the political cell is a more serious matter than having a pistol."

(Nawal El Sa'adawi)

Lidia Falcón, born in 1935, belongs to the generation that grew up during the post-war period and spent the first half of its life under Francisco Franco's dictatorship. She was one of Los hijos de los vencidos, as she narrates in her homonymous book, and, as such, she grew up in an environment of poverty and constant fear of reprisals. Falcón engaged in social activism when she was still a teenager and studied law, journalism, and drama in order to apply her revolutionary impulses to her professional life. She took part in various oppositional movements since the 1950s, such as the Partido Comunista de España (PCE), through which she tried to implement a feminist agenda.1 Spain's political climate of the 50s, 60s, and 70s did not encourage opposition of any kind, and even less a feminist reform of the patriarchal structures generated by Franco's regime. Although the numbers of political prisoners were reduced during the 50s and 60s, as late as in 1975, 160,000 prisoners of conscience were asking for amnesty (Suárez 287). Indeed, the repression during the last five years of the dictatorship became stronger due to, among other causes, the open opposition to the regime by nationalists and leftist radical groups. In 1972, when Franco was eighty years old, he named Admiral Carrero Blanco—his loyal right hand—President of the Executive Power; however, as is well known, on December 20, 1973, a bomb was placed under Carrero Blanco's car by ETA, killing the Admiral. On [End Page 121] September 13, 1973, this same terrorist group bombed a cafeteria frequented by policemen, killing eleven people and injuring sixty-two. After these two events, the regime intensified the repression, and on September 15, 1975, Franco, who in two months would be dead, ordered the execution of five people related to ETA.

Lidia Falcón's En el infierno: Ser mujer en las cárceles de España corresponds to these final years of Franco's dictatorship, and in fact the carceral experiences narrated in this book are related to these violent events. Even though Falcón did not have any association with ETA, she was detained in the Yeserías prison on charges of having ties to the events of September 13. Falcón was incriminated in the process by Eva Forest, the main accomplice in the terrorist act, who also implicated twenty-two other intellectuals and activists from the opposition to Franco.2 After nine months of incarceration, Falcón was released free of charges.3 Falcón's En el infierno was published in 1977, although she wrote this text while confined in the Yeserías prison in Madrid from September 1974 to July 1975. The book was written clandestinely during her nine month stint and she smuggled it out with the intention of exposing the conditions of imprisoned women under Franco's regime. In it, she analyzes the life of both non-political and political women prisoners and denounces the horrible conditions of the Spanish penitentiary system. Falcón's feminist agenda informs her interpretation of the carceral space where the unequal relations of power and gender oppression are maximized. Her reconstruction of that space as an active entity of repression and her appropriation and subversion of it in her writing are the focus of this essay.

In En el infierno, Falcón walks the reader through her personal impressions of and reflections on the institutions that formed the Francoist penitentiary system. The author opens the doors of En el infierno with a "Nota de la autora a la Primera edición" written in 1977, two and a half years after her ordeal was over. In this note, Falcón describes her book as a "recopilación de apuntes sobre mi experiencia en las prisiones y mis conversaciones con otras presas" and reveals some of the details about the production of her book that will be...

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