Giving Voice to Silenced Others The Year in Spain

A notable trend this year in Spanish life writing has been to give voice to those silenced. Following in the footsteps of a long-standing tradition of testimonial life writing worldwide, multiple lifewriting works in Spain have been turning to issues of "voice" and "silence." It is little surprise that some of these stories feature women after the global impact of the #MeToo movement. However, the trends I identified in my contribution to this feature last year (Martínez García) have persisted. Conflict continues to permeate life narratives in Spain, and as will be seen in what follows, both politics and journalism are among the most prevalent fields of study from which life writing comes.

Voicing the Stories of Silenced Crimes

One of the key pieces of Spanish life writing this year has been the documentary El silencio de otros, directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar. El silencio de otros, produced by acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, sheds light on the recent past in Spain, the stories of crimes committed under Francisco Franco's dictatorship that remain unsolved to date. The documentary retraces those traumatic memories by interviewing some of the survivors and witnesses seeking justice, some of whom have since died. It gives voice to their suffering and to that of others who preferred to stay unidentified. With a brilliant use of close-ups for empathic engagement (Plantinga 239) and an emotive score, the storytelling process takes viewers through a grueling six-year process of reconstruction, a journey through the concept of "historical memory."¹ This term is commonly heard in the Spanish news, as it is contrasted with the Law of Amnesty, which was passed in Parliament in the late 1970s² and is called "historical amnesia" in the film. It is no wonder that this documentary has won several prizes: the Grand Jury Award at the 2018 Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Audience Award and Peace Film Prize at the 68^th Berlin International Film Festival, and the Best Documentary Feature at the 33^rd Goya (the Spanish Film Academy) Awards. It was also shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2019.

El silencio de otros must be viewed in conjunction with the latest work published by Baltasar Garzón. If 2018 saw the publication of Garzón's La indignación activa,³ 2019 sees his No a la impunidad: Jurisdicción Universal, la última esperanza de las víctimas, where he explores various dictatorships across the world he has helped to fight by raising legal claims. As the subtitle reads, Garzón is addressing the need for "universal jurisdiction" as "the last hope for victims." In chapter ten of this volume, Garzón explores the notion of "historical memory" in Spain and the "shadow" cast by "Francoism." Like El silencio de otros, Garzón delves into the so-called "querella argentina" [Argentinian lawsuit], whereby victims and witnesses to atrocities during Franco's regime presented a legal case in Argentina seeking reparation for crimes against humanity under the protection of international jurisdiction.

The Law of Amnesty of 1977, also known as "pacto del olvido" [pact of forgetting] (Davis), is at the center of the debate in both the film and Garzón's book. At the time, it was deemed a necessary step toward democracy, tacitly acknowledging wrongs on all sides of the Spanish Civil War and the necessity not to speak of those evils any further if peace was going to prosper. Now that decades have elapsed, should those crimes remain forgotten—unspoken—in favor of national reconciliation, or should the law be revised—or overturned—so that the criminals who committed them may be tried and their victims receive reparation? A recent biography revolves around this idea. In 2019, the 31^st Comillas Prize for History, Biography and Memoirs went to Javier Padilla's A finales de enero: La historia de amor más trágica de la Transición. Though the title of this massive volume might suggest a love story, that is far from the truth. This biography offers a vivid account of the late 1960s student movement in Spain, following three law students involved in organizing, one of whom one is killed in 1969 and another, already a lawyer, is killed in 1977. The main point this biography highlights is the silence surrounding crimes such as police brutality, torture, executions without resort to trials, and random killings passed off as suicides. Another voice against the Law of Amnesty, though perhaps a bit more subtle, Padilla seems to claim the right to reparation—or at least to their version of the truth—that victims deserve and the debt Spanish society as a whole owes for having remained silent—and inert—so many years after these crimes were committed.

Political (Not-So-Silent) Manifestos

If the three aforementioned works of life writing condemn the times of the Spanish Transition, the period during which the country "transitioned" from Franco's dictatorship to democracy, other voices seek to reclaim the validity of the justice of that period. One such work is former Vice President Alfonso Guerra's autobiographical essay in defense of the Constitution, La España en la que creo. Much as Guerra insists this is an essay, readers soon realize it is actually a politician's memoir. He confesses to having been tempted by communist leanings before joining the socialist party, and he defends the choices that were made by all parties during the drafting of the Constitution. Among other things, he discusses the 1977 Law of Amnesty and criticizes detractors by claiming that it was an initiative from the left, approved by near unanimity, and that those who voted against it belonged to the Francoist section of Alianza Popular. With that, he accuses those who are now questioning the foundations of the law of naivete and indecency. In his view, both that law and the Constitution proved to be examples of a wish for reconciliation, the wish of the Spanish people to transcend violent conflict and live in peace. He denounces those who want to reopen a debate on the Constitution for feeding regional nationalist agendas, thus destabilizing Spain.

Here we must return to the Catalan quest for independence that multiple life writing publications have been addressing of late. Perhaps aiming at becoming the voice of reason, former senior lawyer in the Catalan Parliament Antoni Bayona published No todo vale, in which he condemns the inability of politicians to reach a solution to a political problem because no dialogue is deemed possible: "Cuando algo empieza mal, los problemas se suelen suceder. Se evitan unos, pero se crean otros nuevos" [When something goes wrong, problems tend to arise. Some of those may be avoided, but new ones emerge] (30). Providing glimpses into recent Catalan and Spanish politics in light of his own experiences, Bayona's book is in line with Gaziel's ¿Seré yo español? from the year before (Martínez García 147), in that it ponders the question of Catalan identity without taking a particularly definite stance. Also Catalan, and adopting a disconcertingly middle-ground position, is Duran Lleida, whose long political memoir, El riesgo de la verdad, expands on the notion that the so-called "Catalan issue" is actually a "Spanish issue": "Siempre se habla del problema catalán, pero yo siempre he defendido que era y es un problema español" [People always talk of the "Catalan issue," but I have always defended that it was and is a Spanish issue] (420).

Two other politicians stand out in bookshops this year: current President of Spain—at the time of writing—Pedro Sánchez and VOX leader Santiago Abascal. While Sánchez has released a ghostwritten autobiography, Manual de Resistencia, Abascal is the focus of journalist Fernando Sánchez Dragó's political reflections. Genre and content may differ, but the purpose of these two works coincides. They have been written to inform prospective voters of the politicians' merits as candidates in a (then) forthcoming election and as potential shapers of Spanish politics and history.

Sánchez's memoir has received praise and criticism alike⁴ for his effort to portray himself as a resilient character, someone who is able to survive against the odds and keep fighting, whose psyche has been tested but who has overcome the difficulties he has encountered in his life. He devotes special care to recounting the trauma of his resignation as leader of the socialist party back in 2016, expressing how he felt betrayed by those close to him: "Todo fue terriblemente duro, traumático. Viví algunas deslealtades minuto a minuto. Fue terrible en lo personal y me permitió saber a quién podía considerar mi amigo y a quién no" [Everything was horribly tough, traumatic. I lived through some disloyalties from one minute to the next. It was terrible at a personal level and made me aware of who I could consider as my friend and who I could not] (181). That he decides to compare this fall to the one suffered by Spaniards at the height of the financial crisis of the 2010s, at key points throughout the text and even at the very beginning of the prologue, makes him sound not so much resilient as conceited: "Si algo me ha dado mi peripecia vital y política es una profunda empatía y la capacidad de identificarme con millones de españoles que durante la crisis cayeron y se volvieron a levantar. Exactamente como me ocurrió a mí" [If there is something I have gained through my personal and political vicissitudes, it is a profound empathy and the ability to identify with millions of Spaniards who fell during the crisis and rose again. Exactly like what happened to me] (11).

In Santiago Abascal: España vertebrada, Fernando Sánchez Dragó takes a different stance from Pedro Sánchez's ghostwriter. Instead of adopting a muted tone, letting the politician paint his own picture, Sánchez Dragó devises a set of interviews that he then arranges in the form of a quasi-Socratic dialogue. He praises Abascal, whom he calls "Santi" (13), but without adhering to his political party and ideology. Sánchez Dragó makes constant intertextual references to philosophers and other authors, mixes colloquial and elevated Spanish, and often relies on puns: "Comience ahora el lector, si lo hay, y si le place, la lectura de este libro, y escuche con atención y recta intención lo que Santi dice. Suya es la Vox y la palabra" [Now, reader, if there is one and they so wish, start reading this book. Pay attention and judge rightly what Santi says. His is the Vox and the word] (35). Playing with the Latin word "vox" [voice] and its original meaning while referring to the party over which Abascal presides, VOX, is a constant in the narrative. It harkens back to the vox populi of Ancient Rome, as if Abascal were the representative spokesperson of the Spanish people. Abascal's voice, usually silenced—or twisted—in the media, is given space in this creative book, halfway between the genres of interview and panegyric, however much Sánchez Dragó disavows this interpretation (16).

"Silenced Women" in History

Following a timeline, Mujeres en la Corte de los Austrias, edited by María Leticia Sánchez Hernández, presents readers with Sánchez Hernández's take on historiography, as she allows this collection of lifewriting texts to tell the story of those women via letters, autobiographies, and wills. It is notable that this innovative attempt was published at the height of new global feminist movements such as #MeToo and its afterlives. Jumping ahead and right into the twentieth century, No sabes nada de mí: Quiénes son las espías españolas is Pilar Cernuda's homage to the hidden women who have conducted spy work—for many, an occupation long associated with male stereotypes of sleuthing, courage, and ruthlessness. Debunking such stereotypes is the main purpose of Cernuda's testimonial narrative. Much the same might be said of Rosa Montero's Nosotras: Historias de mujeres y algo más and Laura Freixas's A mí no me iba a pasar: Una autobiografía con perspectiva de género. Montero's Nosotras fights against the archetype of the perfect woman, including not-so-nice women in this collection of biographical sketches. Freixas's "autobiography" looks back at her marriage and motherhood, doing so from the vantage point of one of the most prominent feminist theorists in Spain.

Freixas defends an understanding of "autobiography" as a text where the author revisits her past while holding a key to interpret it, as she asserted in El silencio de las madres y otras reflexiones sobre las mujeres en la cultura. In that sense, even if A mí no me iba a pasar focuses on the period since she met her then-husband until she divorced him, the narrative must not be read as a "memoir" because, for Freixas, memoirs are "focused on exterior events, on the famous people the author met, on their deeds and above all on something very characteristic of memoirs in Spanish (unfortunately, I would say): anecdotes" ("Intimacy" 15). To the relative shortage of women-authored autobiographies and related lifewriting modes in Spain until recently, Freixas responds by imbuing her intimate nonfiction with her own scholarly critique of patriarchal culture (Literatura). As translator, literary critic, and author of diaries (Adolescencia; Todos), Freixas writes an autobiography where the reading key is feminist theory, so the confessional is transformed into a collective testimony for all those oppressed, albeit unwittingly, by patriarchy.

Voicing the Plight of (Distant) Others

This final section is devoted to journalists committed to testimonial life writing. 2017 saw the publication of a number of these works, among them Mikel Ayestaran's Oriente Medio, Oriente roto. This past year further Spanish journalists in the MENA region have lent their voices to others. In Respirando fuego: En las entrañas de la lucha kurda por la supervivencia, David Meseguer and Karlos Zurutuza speak out for the Kurds and describe their long history of victimization. Other works focus on Africa and the myriad cases of injustice to be found there. While África: La vida desnuda by Alberto Rojas is a collection of chronicles from war zones and delves deep into the emotional state of the author, Xavier Aldekoa's Indestructibles compiles stories of African people who are depicted precisely as human beings, capable of laughing through disaster and overcoming the odds. These journalists' testimonies, taken together, exemplify the trend to narrate the plight of distant others so common elsewhere.

Issues of voice and silence have been prominent in the Spanish lifewriting scene this year. Whether or not the silenced have gained salience now due to increasing attention to questions of race, gender, social class, or geopolitical conflict, their testimonial narratives have come to the fore at a time of political turmoil and have added to—not eased—existing tensions in our midst. The lyricism of some of these works reinforces the drama at the heart of an unspoken recent past. Some of these publications might well shape how the public perceives politics and politicians. The general elections—held on November 10, 2019—tested the values of democracy explored by most of the authors contained here. Whose version of the truth finds the more grounded footing is likely to have an impact on Spain's political landscape in the coming years.