Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation, and Cultural Activism

Chapter Two: Euskara and Basque Nationhood: From Heritage to Practice

49 c h a p t e r t w o Euskara and Basque Nationhood f r o m h e r i ta g e t o p r a c t i c e One winter afternoon in 1983, a few months into my first year of fieldwork in Usurbil , María, the grandmother of the family with whom I lived, knocked on the door to my room. The restaurant kitchen below had closed and it was quiet, as everyone was still resting after serving the midday meal. Maneuvering her way into my room cluttered with newspaper clippings and notebooks, “You are interested in Basque things,” she said. “Here, you might want to see this.” With a heavy thump, she set down a large book: El libro de oro de la patria [The Golden Book of the Nation]. It was a gorgeously illustrated and impressive leather-bound book published just before the Spanish Civil War, with chapters on Basque rural customs, history, folk traditions, and of course, Euskara. As I carefully turned the large pages, I could see it was something of an encyclopedia of Basque culture. Published in 1934 during the Spanish Republic, it exuded optimism about a new future for Basques and was inscribed with warm dedications expressing solidarity from fellow Irish and Catalan nationalists. María was proud of the book, and she proceeded to tell me how her family hid it in fear when the Spanish Civil War broke out. They kept it for years, she said, under the floor in the cow stalls of the farmhouse where she grew up. Later that evening, when I was having dinner with her son and daughter-inlaw , I told them about it. Her son was surprised. Neither he nor his wife had heard of this book, much less that a copy had been in their house for so many years. El libro de oro de la patria had been a dangerous book. Written mainly in Spanish , its description of Basques as a nation with a rich history and cultural heritage would have been read as treasonous in Franco’s Spain. Years later, I curiously came across reference to the book again. This time reading the memoir of novelist , linguist engagé, and one-time founding member of eta José Luis Álvarez Enparantza, better known by his pen name “Txillardegi” (1997: 10). Txillardegi recounts finding the very same book hidden in a drawer in his parents’ house. For him, the discovery of this book was a kind of apocryphal moment in his own development, emblematic of the way in which he and a generation of Basques in the fifties would begin to question their identities as they uncovered the signs of 50  r e cl a i m i ng b a s q u e a Basque culture and language that had been forced, quite literally in some cases, underground. To continue my exploration of the discourse of language loyalism, this chapter will examine the place that Basque-language revival had in this process of recovery and reawakening of a Basque nationalist movement toward the end of the Franco regime. As we have seen, the first wave of Basque nationalism took language to be evidence of the Basques’ separate origin and their difference from Spain. Nationalist treatises tended to talk about language as a heritage that indexed the nation—or what at the time was often also called the Basque “race,” but this was not the whole story. The impassioned rhetoric about language as symbol of the nation should not blind us to the way in which intellectuals were simultaneously constructing the Figure 2.1. Painted in the 1990s, this mural in Usurbil was the joint effort of a local group protesting mandatory military service and the language-advocacy association, Euskal Herrian Euskaraz [Basque in the Basqueland]. The Basque speaker in the mural is shown being strangled by the Spanish and French flags and crushed by the army boot above his head. Political dissent often linked the Basque-language struggle with other forms of antistate resistance. Photograph by the author. Euskara and Basque Nationhood   51 language as a distinctly social object to be documented, regularized, and governed. A third element of early nationalist discourse that was especially relevant for language politics was the Basque Nationalist Party’s conceptualization of the Basque nation, commonly referred to as Euskadi at that time, as a political or moral...