Nation Heal Thyself: Illness and Recovery in Mauricio o las elecciones primarias and Mala gente que camina

NATION HEAL THYSELF: ILLNESS AND RECOVERY IN MAURICIO O LAS ELECCIONES PRIMARIAS AND MALA GENTE QUE CAMINA by Jerelyn Johnson Fairfield University PALOMA Aguilar in her book Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy examines the significance of the memory of the Civil War in the political decisions of the transition. She maintains that: “memories, that are normally latent, are activated by a process of association... [And during the transition to democracy] when society perceived , consciously or unconsciously, and more or less correctly, certain similarities between the situation that existed in the 1970s and that of the 1930s, the historical memory of the war emerged” (268). It was this historical memory that informed the collective blame that was adopted by both sides and the desire to “never again” have the civil war repeat itself. The fear of instability and another civil war led to several concessions and most importantly, to the perceived necessity of the “pacto del olvido” in order to “never again.” Today Spain is again experiencing a series of associations activating latent memories that are now causing a second “never again” scenario. Yet, inversely, instead of pushing aside, burying or ignoring the atrocities committed during and after the Civil War so as to conserve stability, certain societal players are centralizing , uncovering and discerning the memory of these events in order to consolidate the government into an even stronger, healthier democracy that has confronted and reconciled with its past. In addition, creative practices have been working in concert with social activists to inform the Spanish public and foster debates about today’s legacies of the transition to democracy. Cultural commu1 nication has been saturated with the idea that if Spain does not settle its past sins, or account for them, it can never develop as a healthy democracy. In general, this cultural production itself is serving as a manner of healing, because as the artists unearth history or call attention to it, they are part of the cure. For there to be healing as a nation, many believe that an institutional, political level of awareness and direct action need to happen, and they are, slowly. The most salient example is the recent passage of the Law of Historical Memory by the Spanish parliament in October 2007. In the meantime, and this is where the charge in the title comes into play, Spaniards continue to self-medicate through their cultural production: documentaries, television series, visual art and literature that involve remembrance. Historian Jay Winter when discussing historical remembrance states that it “entails not only first-person narratives but scripts which later generations form and disseminate about significant events in the past. That is why any consideration of the contemporary memory boom [must] recognize the role” of cultural producers in “this varied set of cultural practices we term historical remembrance” (278). Part of this cultural production aimed at historical remembrance takes the healing metaphor a step further by incorporating illness within their narratives as an allegory for the political situation and level of healing in Spain today. “Healing” can include many facets. Catherine Garrett gives one explanation that I have found helpful as she examines the anthropologic concept of healing: “[w]hen anthropologists explore the rituals and beliefs through which people across cultures try to find ‘healing,’ they define it as ‘the redress of sickness’: through cure, rehabilitation and palliation. Cure is the restoration of a prior healthy state, rehabilitation is a compensation for loss of health and palliation is the mitigation of suffering in the sick” (105). As I extend this idea to Spain, it is difficult to say that a cure is possible, that is, a restoration to a prior healthy state, but what is possible lies somewhere between rehabilitation and palliation. In his book The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, Arthur Frank outlines a typology of illness narratives, in which the sick person is the storyteller when he or she relates their own experience with illness and how their healing, or not, comes into play. Two of the narrative categories he discusses are the restitution narrative and the chaos narrative. In restitution narratives , the protagonist becomes sick, receives treatment...