Survival Songs. Conchita Piquer’s Coplas and Franco’s Regime of Terror by Stephanie Sieburth (review)

In 2006, Concha Buika, a Spanish singer whose parents were from Equatorial Guinea, the last Spanish colony, offered her own interpretation of one of Concha Piquer’s most famous songs, “Ojos verdes”: “Ojos verdes, verdes / como la arbahaca, / verdes como el trigo verde / y el verde, verde limón” (96). This is one of the examples that Stephanie Sieburth gives to close her argument in her fascinating and challenging new book Survival Songs. Conchita Piquer’s Coplas and Franco’s Regime of Terror. In the conclusion, she explains how both left-wing intellectuals of the 1970s and contemporary young performers like Concha Buika, of different political orientations, are embracing Concha Piquer’s coplas. Piquer, a right-wing singer accepted and promoted by the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco, was nevertheless an artist whose performances surpassed the dictatorship’s political orientation and became a reference for the left-wing citizen. Instead of authoritarian support, the coplas became an auxiliary of reassurance for the opposition. Sieburth hypothesizes that “through her voice and performance, [Piquer] played a role somewhere between therapist and ritual high priestess, a role that did much to enable the defeated to work through some of the intense traumatic feelings they carried within as they sang along with her” (7). The book takes the reader through a path that proves that Concha Piquer’s coplas were useful as survival tools.

Survival Songs begins with two introductory chapters. The first one, “Camouflage: The Psychology of Survival in Franco’s Spain,” offers an overview of Franco’s Spain, focusing on the regime of terror imposed upon the civilian population. The author gives a thorough panorama of what people had to endure, and how authorities closely controlled and repressed any kind of expression and movement. She explains that the arts, and especially films and songs, were the only escape an individual had. Through these mediums, one could negotiate and cope with his or her traumas of the past and oppression of the present. The second chapter, titled “An Introduction to the Copla and Its Star Performer,” offers necessary information on Concha Piquer’s life as well as on the genre of the coplas. Chapter three, “Coping with Terror through Popular Music: “La Parrala” (“The Wine Lady”),” is a close reading of the song “La Parrala.” It emphasizes how both performance and text worked together as “mechanism(s) of desensitization to fear,” enabling citizens to deal with chronic terror. Sieburth argues that the song “showed the defeated how to conceal information about themselves through role play” (94).

Chapters four, five, and six closely analyze three mourning coplas that “offered them [Spaniards] ways to express and to work through some of their grief in the code of a fictional role” (94). These songs are “Ojos verdes,” “Tatuaje,” and “Romance de la otra.” In each chapter, the author illustrates two different types of performance: that of Concha Piquer and that of the public, whose engagement occurred mostly in the private spheres. Both performances were anchors for those who lost the war. These anchors facilitated dealing with grief, marginality, and the impossible incorporation of the defeated into the dominant Francoist structure that denied them legal rights and protection. According to Sieburth, the citizen did so by engaging with the songs as fiction, much like a speech act: “singing ‘Tatuaje’ was an act that brought into being, or achieved, what it declared . . . it was a covert yet audible ritual of mourning. It was a coded way to express what was otherwise kept silent” (139). The close reading of the songs in these three chapters is excellent, especially in chapter five, the chapter the author dedicates to “Tatuaje.” In it, she conducts an analysis that is both poetic and musical to prove that the song established “an emotional protection” and created a “vivid alternative world” for the public (119). She examines the vocabulary employed in the song to prove how its author, Rafael de León...