Carmen, a Gypsy Geography

Theoretical Introduction

[2] Carmen, a Gypsy Geography finest of them all, Spanish history is revealed through conquest and political will. Their histories are translations of events past, derived from detailed and interesting documents.5 It is ironic that Gypsy artists, who not only transported eastern musical and dance forms into Spain but fused them with Mozarabic and Sephardic influences, should be so marginalized in Spanish history. If the Gypsy, illiterate and itinerant, is barely noted by historians studying Spain, how is his/her contribution to time and Andalusian identity recorded? I would argue that flamenco—the cultural currency of the Gypsy and the most important element in Andalusian, Carmenian, Gypsy identity—provides the key. Gypsy history lives in the baile (the dance) and the cante (the song). In these explosive, self-positioning acts of communication and expressivity is to be found the history of Carmen and of the Gypsy, the nomadic outsider on European soil. The cante jondo, the guttural deep song and wailing prayer of the beat poet narrator of every Gypsy dance, is a historiographic act of retrieval, the uninscribed past pulled by the cantaor into the present. Their narrative , individual interpretations of collective memory unfold before the audience. “We need history,”Walter Benjamin tells us, quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, “but our need for it differs from that of the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge.”6 While historians remind us that the Iberians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Jews, and Christians left something behind for us to know them by, I wonder how the presence of history—its immanence—might not be the artifact for which they search to unearth a meaning of things in sequential rather than poetic order. Can historians’ interpretations of the past change through studying the dancing body, the Gypsy flamenca? Could the notion of artifact be expanded? I believe the figure of Carmen, in essence a figure of the presence of the past on stage at any given moment in time, is the “document” for which we search. Her fingers, hands, arms, and feet inscribe a map of the world—an intensely personal geography—that traces her conscious memory of the present moving back into the past and returning to center again at the end of a long Soleá. Momentary whims begin, given a certain accumulation, to sketch an itinerary, to map the imaginary land that stretches out inside of us.7 The second reason I question the value of histories that attempt to reach into the past to interpret the present and see into the future is that the Gypsy, to his/ her mind, has no history. Yet she, like Carmen, lives. Politically, religiously, and Theoretical Introduction [3] economically peripheral to the natural order of things Spanish, the Gypsy has lost her place in conscious memory or in what Walter Benjamin reminds us is a group of people, the redeemed of humankind who are “granted fullness of [their] past.”8 Arriving at a Gypsy history, at their contribution to the spirit of Spain, is very difficult, in part because they recycle a mystique about themselves and their long journey from India and Egypt to Spain. After centuries of abuse by local authorities, they tend to fabricate and obfuscate both identity and history in order to protect themselves. Gypsy history, as any fine cantaor will tell you, happens in the present. As Henri Bergson argues, history is in the durée, the time between the singer’s wail and the dancer’s quicksilver call back to him. The Gypsy’s history is a lived one. It can only be read from the stage where, in the most precious space of liberty, the dancer and singer bear witness to the moment as past and present fuse inextricably as one. Like a Tibetan sand painting, Gypsy history cannot be held or owned or archived; it must be experienced in the moment of its execution. This aesthetic anarchism—mocking traditional forms of rendering meaning and memorializing them—is uncannily present in the figure and movement of Carmen. I turn to Walter Benjamin and Henri Bergson for entrance into the notion of immanence as historical time. In his seminal 1940 essay, “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin writes: The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t...