Happy birthday, Lorca. Let’s talk about your murder.
It was ten o’clock on a Monday night, and I was in Fuente Vaqueros, a town 30 minutes from Granada, with a friend I’d made the week before. Fuente Vaqueros is the town where Federico García Lorca was born, and if you didn’t catch that fact on the faded, tattered signs abutting the town’s plaza, you’d soon see the mural, painted brightly on the side of the house where Lorca grew up.
The reason we had made the trek to Fuente Vaqueros (which involved a missed bus and an hour wait for the next one) was that last Monday, June 5, was Lorca’s 125th birthday. Hooray! Happy Birthday, Lorca.
In honor of his birthday, every year the government of Fuente Vaqueros puts on a week-long festival that involves concerts, puppet shows, exhibitions, and presentations on Lorca’s life and poetry. The main event, though, is his birthday itself. The government gives out an award in his honor. Various dignitaries give speeches. And, at the end, a well-known artist performs for the crowd. In this case, it was Juan Valderrama, who just released an album in which he set the Diván del Tamarit, one of Lorca’s last collections of poetry, to music in a flamenco-pop style with American rock-and-roll and Argentine tango influences too. Check it out—it speaks, whether or not you know Spanish.
A Spanish teacher who had attended Lorca’s birthday celebration a number of times in years past portrayed the whole thing as a sort of oasis, something that pushed against the headwinds of our current, anti-art (or at least art-blah) moment. “All ages, all genders, people from near and far,” said Ramón. “Everyone comes to see Lorca’s poetry performed on stage in Fuente Vaqueros.”
This turned out not to be the case, as my friend and I were the youngest there by far (except babies, who are everywhere in Spain), and the next youngest attendees, a couple in their mid-30s, left halfway through. (Ramón also painted the picture of an event that would push against the headwinds of car dependency, in which several buses would be waiting at the end of the concert to take attendees back to Granada, since the public buses would no longer be running. This was not the case, and 10 minutes after the concert ended, at around 11:30, everyone had left on their own and Fuente Vaqueros was a ghost town, leaving us semi-stranded, free lemonade in hand, in the middle of the now-ghost town. An Uber driver who smelled like bread and had three cell phones saved the day.)
Although this was not the ageless, bus-driven paradise I had expected, still, the proceedings struck me. I was particularly struck by the speeches. José Entrena Ávila, the President of the Diputación de Granada (possibly the equivalent of the county executive), gave a smooth, rousing speech after the puppeteer graciously accepted his award. You could tell he was a politician because of the way his suit looked and the sorts of things he said. His speech had the sort of rhythm we’re accustomed to in political speeches: a series of thank yous, a round-up of accomplishments, and a reminder of the work still to be done.
Despite the nature of the event, a celebration of Lorca’s birth and life, Entrena kept his focus firmly planted on Lorca’s murder. “I sincerely believe that 47 years after the first ‘5th at 5’ [the name of the yearly event on Lorca’s birthday, June 5], we can be satisfied with the Granada we have been able to build around the Poet,” Entrena said. “A land proud of its past and proud of all the people who were killed for defending freedom.”*
That last line references the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, in which Francisco Franco’s fascist troops, called the Nationalists, marched through Spain and took over the country, massacring the left-wing opposition, called the Republicans. Lorca, shot dead by Nationalist troops in 1936, was one of the casualties. I will paste the rest of the passage below:
And of course, we have recovered the real tribute to García Lorca on the night of August 18 in Alfacar, in which we had to remember that Federico, unfortunately, does not live. That he was murdered for being the way he was and for thinking the way he thought.
It is important to insist on this, because probably from now on someone will do everything possible to avoid saying that Federico was killed. And then it will become clear that we still need to work on knowledge of historical truth in this province and in this country, where all the progress that has been made in terms of democratic memory is in danger. I hope that politics and ideology will not again contaminate everything that Lorca means, and I hope that the truth is not twisted to accommodate an insane revisionism. ‘May the heart learn to be calm,’ Federico said. And so we will, knowing at this ‘5th at 5’ that his memory is safe.
I found Entrena’s words particularly interesting given our current moment in the US, in Spain, and, frankly, around the world. As right-wing reactionaries try to rewrite historical narratives to support their present ideologies, prevent children from learning difficult truths in the classroom, and spout conspiracy theories that encourage us to ignore that which our eyes can see and our ears can hear, it’s no surprise to hear that the death of someone like Lorca may be questioned by some of these same forces.
Was Lorca killed because of his sexuality, or was it because of his left-wing politics? Was Lorca a committed left-winger, or was his commitment to politics more a byproduct of his membership in the avant-garde? Most interestingly, can we separate Lorca’s art from the manner in which he died? Should we try to? Those fall well within the range of acceptable, important questions to ask about the poet. But denial of his murder (or denial of the political nature of his murder, which amounts to denial of the murder itself) is a different matter entirely.
And the next week I saw evidence myself that this insidious strain exists, by way of graffiti on a sign on the road where Lorca and his fellow prisoners were shot, and where their bones still lie.
If I may, I will draw a contrast to another bit of graffiti that I found on a wall in the beautiful Parque Federico García Lorca, on the western edge of Granada.
I will have more to say later about my walk along the road between Viznár and Alfacar, but I see a connection between the graffiti on this sign, Entrena’s speech, and one of the issues I’m most interested in when it comes to my study of Lorca.
Everything from the beautiful mural in Fuente Vaqueros, to the local politicians’ words, to the graffiti on the park wall shows me that Fuente Vaqueros and Granada have, in one sense of the word, “claimed” Lorca as theirs. Lorca’s excellence has become their excellence. Lorca’s legacy has become their legacy. And, crucially, Lorca’s murder has become a symbol of their struggle for democratic values, against fascism.
When you claim a historical figure as your own, when you welcome their cultural production into your own cultural pantheon, you don’t get to pick and choose what goes where. It comes with everything. When you celebrate the dead poet’s birthday, you lament his murder, too.
*Spanish-English translations done collaboratively by me and translation software.
