Carmen, a Gypsy Geography

CHAPTER SEVEN Space and Place in Islamic Spain: The Archeology of Flamenco

Space and Place in Islamic Spain [179] “Islamic Spain”also refers to two Arabic phrases: Mudejar—art influenced by Muslim-ruled Spain—and Mozarabic—the Christian, Sephardic and Muslim cultures influenced by Arab rule. Mozarabic influence is reflected throughout the poetry, songs, architecture, dance, and languages of Andalusia. Arabic was the lingua franca of Andalusia and could be heard on the streets of Granada well into the early sixteenth century.3 In the years preceding the Expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the conquest of Granada, Andalusia became the geographic focus for the cultural development of Gypsy Flamenco.4 Gypsy toque, cante, and baile evoke an earlier time; these arts express a Middle Eastern quality of singing and dancing whose ethos lies in sacred chant and tribal ritual. Flamenco music and dance are, in large part, creations of the Middle Eastern Islamic and Arab cultures through which the Gypsies passed in Persia, Egypt, and North Africa on their way to southern Spain. Flamenco choreography, in particular, represents a mapping of space and needs to be re-read in a larger context than previous flamenco scholarship has established . This reading requires in particular a reflection of the Islamic architectural tradition whose alcazars—public buildings—were frequented by all peoples living in medieval Andalusia. Flamenco’s ornamental, gestural vocabulary known as floreo y braceo—a flowering of the hands, wrists, and arms—reflects the Islamic architectural archive of southern Spain. It also reverberates the musical and poetic languages whose inscriptions are to be found on the walls of its public, secular buildings, libraries, nature walks, and fountains, as well as its sacred spaces, such as mosques and their minarets. The physical geography or architecture of the body in flamenco—in the Gypsy Siguiríya, for example—recalls the spatial design of mesquitas in Cordoba and Granada; that is to say, a bailaora’s use of torso, hands, and feet expresses a physical historiography that resonates with the Mozarabic architectural legacy of medieval Spain. In order to elucidate and clarify the way in which we understand or view “Gypsyism ” and our larger concept of Gypsy geography, it is necessary to recall the multiple paths of Islam as it penetrated and spread across the Middle East and North Africa. Let us first define medieval Muslim Spain. Mozarabic connotes “People of the Book”—Christians and Jews who lived with religious tolerance in a Muslim-ruled society. Mozarabic geography extended in space and time from the first Spanish Muslim city, Madinat ‘al-Zahra in the eighth century near modern Cordoba, to the city of Granada, surrendered by the last Muslim Caliph living in Spain, Boabdil—Mohammed Abu Abdullah, “el chico,”—on 2 January 1492.5 Gypsy Girl Dancing in the Sand [at the annual Gypsy pilgrimage to the Feast of Saintes-Maries de la Mer, France], photographer and date unknown. Roger-Viollet Archives, Paris, France Space and Place in Islamic Spain [181] The Creation of a Hispano-Arab Geography Let us understand the conquest of southern Spain and France by Arab and Berber forces. The eighth-century army described by Arab geographers as an extraordinarily well-organized military force rose in the year 710 in the Atlas Mountains and landed at the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula, pushing north in successive military campaigns through the Christian Visigothic kingdom and Provençe, conquering Nîmes and Narbonnes and eventually reaching Poitiers and Tours. Historian Henri Pirenne describes in Mohammed and Charlemagne the first famous battles between Muslims and Christians on European soil.6 These early eighth-century campaigns, organized from the seat of Muslim power in Damascus, entailed thousands of Arab and Berber soldiers enlisted by their military leaders to fight Christian armies.7 The idea was not necessarily to remain in Spain but to convert all of Christendom to the belief in the “one, true God: Allah.” Muslim Middle Eastern culture had a profound impact on Visigothic Spain. The culturally rich civilization of Iberia was a coalescence of many other cultures past and contemporary: Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Gothic, and Iberian. Muslim Spain conquered and assimilated civic and rural cultures whose economies depended upon the fertility of a land that produced wine and olives and still used the aqueducts, roads, buildings, art, languages, and religions of the older society. This complex economic and cultural synthesis created a heterogeneous and wealthy Andalusian society. One of the most compelling arguments for a continuous historiography between...