Carmen Martín Gaite underlined that post-war adolescents had enjoyed, during their childhood, an imaginary as varied as it was profuse that fueled their thinking. Regarding the different models of femininity, they knew of the existence of the holy confessionals, but also “of the militia (and) also of the vampirepassing through the researcher who goes abroad with a scholarship, and the one who gives rallies.” On the level of political imagination: “they had heard about strikes, controversies in Parliament, emancipation…, divorce.” The references learned during the turbulent and incredibly enriching period that was the Second Republic populated the heads of a citizenry who became accustomed to exercising the right to vote and embraced different ideologies – Catholic, Phalangist, socialist, anarchist – in in the midst of democracy. That intellectual abundance, inherited from previous decades, ended up being reduced to its minimum expression by the dark period imposed by Franco’s dictatorship. Remembering the 50 years of his death implies, then, recognizing that knowledge that was never developed due to lack of opportunity;
What might we have conceived as possible if the long authoritarian night had not occurred? Would we have been a leading country in science, technology, care for nature and respect for social justice? It’s hard not to remember that, for every person buried in a grave, torn apart by a rifle or cowardly expelled, the same crime was committed with the stories it carried with it. Because Francoism deprived us of the books that Lorca did not write; It has thrown universities into a clientelistic lethargy that still brings with it pernicious dynamics; It has cut off thousands of brilliant minds who, with freedom of expression, would have been put at the service of well-being. Let us contemplate for a second, in the retrospective realm of utopia, writers like Max Aub, María Zambrano, Eugenio Granell or Rosa Chacel who place their fictions in a territory not limited by fear and hunger. Let us reflect on the potential rights that an anarchist tradition as deep-rooted as the Spanish one would have obtained: if already in the 1930s they called for an educational system based on a secular, mixed education forged on ecology – heir to the theories of Ferrer i Guàrdia -; a feminism that was concerned with women’s professional development and their reproductive freedom; a collectivization of resources, what would not have been achieved if we had enjoyed democratic continuity?
The Franco regime was a machine emasculating knowledge, much of which has not yet been recovered. We will never know the ramifications, the effects on the subjectivities forged by repression, even if we are partially aware of the depth of that lack through the testimony of its victims. After the war, the most powerful publishing industry moved to Latin America, particularly Mexico. In Argentina, the Ulysses by James Joyce in our language in 1945, but it was not until 1976 that the Extremaduran poet José María Valverde launched a more refined version to the Spanish public, already during the Transition. In the 1960s, while Remedios Varo in exile painted his last canvases before dying, the young Agustín Gómez Arcos established himself as a playwright in Spain to see how, after having twice won the Lope de Vega National Prize, the dictatorship systematically prohibited him from performing his works. He went to France, licking the frustration of seeing talent censored, and there he achieved a well-deserved prestige as a novelist, but we will never see the shows he didn’t create, not even when, once the Constitution was promulgated, the national cultural scene turned its back on him.
Forgetfulness of a similar nature, repressions and mutilations of reason have occurred in all disciplines. It is enough to mention the Nobel Prize for Medicine that the Asturian Severo Ochoa won for the United States in 1959, three years after the same literature prize had been awarded to Juan Ramón Jiménez, resident in Puerto Rico. If anything has not been sufficiently remembered so far, it is the passion of our national history to impose mediocrity at all costs, like a sewer into which, from time to time, the best minds of a generation are thrown. Their ostracism or extermination continues to take an inestimable toll on us and creates painful paradoxes: when we talk about staying ahead on the geopolitical map, competing and advancing to lead Europe and finally shake off the dust of legendary backwardness, one might wonder whether we will be able to put ourselves on the same level as the abundant indigenous intelligence we have let go, if we do not voluntarily fight for its destruction. The debt to them lies under the mounds scattered around the world, from Collioure to the ditches. The obligation of such a primordial anniversary as the one commemorated in these days should consist in granting them the posthumous passport of a renewed coexistence not only in memory, but also in knowledge.
