They longed to go to Cuba where they used to say the sun made blossom grow from your ear
Posted in General on 14. Oct, 2010
They longed to go to Cuba, where they used to say the sun made blossom grow from your ear. The homesickness that Gallegos call saudade, or morri?is nostalgia for the future, a desire and hunger for what we don’t yet have, not grief for what’s lost.”He pauses on the hilltop that juts into the sea like the prow of a granite ship. A monument erected three years ago, a mini-Stonehenge, commemorates the slaughter that followed Franco’s uprising against the republic in 1936. “Coru?s were loyal to the Republic, but they were unarmed and were hunted down, taken out at night for what was called ‘a stroll’ and shot.” Embedded in the granite is a grainy photograph of a crowd on the hill.
“It’s the only picture, taken from afar by a soldier, of those clandestine executions.” All this is not to dwell on the past “It informs our present. All the currents cross at this moment.”He gazes down at the fretwork of little coves where, he says, fishermen have named all the rocks after animals. “In Galicia our feet are the roots of oak trees, but our arms are the wings of an ?gr?ird. We inhabit a great Tex-Mex frontier between home and abroad, medieval and hi-tech, and this produces a cultural vanguard But the sea is fundamental, it’s our cradle and coffin I’m amphibian. You can’t see them, but I have fins behind my ears,” he laughs.Down there, he points, the tanker Aegean Sea ran aground in 1992 and caught fire, and before that the Urquiola. And then, last November, the tanker Prestige sank off Galicia’s coast with 77,000 tons of fuel on board, unleashing upon this wild and beautiful shore the worst environmental catastrophe it has ever known.Rivas contributes to El Pa?reports of his homeland that are suffused with tenderness and lyricism, steeled with a whiplash of polemic. Suddenly he has become a national political figure, spokesman for the campaign Nunca Mais (Never Again) that rose up against the Spanish government’s bungling of the Prestige disaster.
In December, he read out a manifesto to more than 150,000 protesters in the regional capital, Santiago de Compostela, in an unprecedented display of revulsion at incompetence that left his spectacular coastline poisoned with black filth.Rivas’s political commitment, like his literary stardom, did not emerge overnight. He has long campaigned against the environmental abuse of his beloved Galicia. “The Prestige is the eighth marine catastrophe I’ve experienced. The first was when I was a child and my mother warned me not to touch the poisoned shellfish, and every five years since, some tanker has spewed petroleum or chemicals on to our coast.”Does he feel torn between politics and writing? “There’s no contradiction. The most important moment for a writer is when you lift your head from the paper to see what’s happening around you If you work with words you use them in the struggle. You can’t sing of the blue sea when in reality it is choked with fuel The fuel is your ink and you must write with it. You don’t have political ideas that make you write, but the reverse: art invites us to commit ourselves.”The duty of the writer is to write Nunca Mais is a mass movement in defence of the sea It’s part of my craft of writing, a commitment to the sea This is the moment to listen to the sea It’s in shock.
We were convulsed by impotence, then a sense of tremendous desolation.”We drive north-east from Coru?hrough the port of Ferrol and into the mountains, following the tortuous contours of the “death coast”. Rivas quietly makes sure I don’t miss what he is showing me: the working-class quarter where his three aunts worked as travelling seamstresses, bearing their Singers on their head, the Nunca Mais flags – Galicia’s blue and white, slashed with black – fluttering from fishing boats and portside bars, Ferrol’s once-mighty shipyards where his uncle makes oil platforms, a flock of starlings “painting a banner in the sky”, clouds racing “like a speeded-up movie”, wild horses protecting their liberty in oak forests, shaggy cows chomping spongy pasture.His observations spring from the passing landscape, as we head for San Andr?de Teixido, a place of pilgrimage where legend insists Saint Andrew landed in a stone boat from Palestine. Galicians say you must visit the shrine during your life, or your restless soul will assume the form of an animal and head there after your death.Rivas’s latest novel to appear in English, In the Wilderness (Harvill, £9.99), is narrated by a crow, one of 300 warrior-poets of the last king of Galicia who died in fetters. The intricate plot is driven by animals embodying unquiet spirits.