2023-12-29 23:44:43
During the postwar period, the girls and boys of that time ate bread with snot. That in the best case; when the money arrived for the bread churrusco. Equality at that time was measured by the ration card and there was no blacker night than that of the reprisals of the civil war. That lack of freedoms was conditioned by national Catholicism, that rancid identity represented by the church, the true owner of the Francoist State.
The creaking of the kneelers and the hissing of the confessionals were the dominant music. The eroticism of joy was castrated in rooms with a wool mattress, a crucifix on the wall and Optalidon on the bedside table. The rosary, more than to keep the prayer beads, served to cool the burning in the lower abdomen, and the feisty wine left an aftertaste of defeat in the throat that only calmed the thought that nothing is eternal, that everything has an end except poverty. , a divine grace to test the goodness of heart of our people who overflow with mercy and give alms out of Christian charity. This is how things were in the mid-1950s, when good old Richard Wright appeared in our country ready to make a journalistic report.
He arrived from Paris, where he lived in exile. The FBI was persecuting him in his own land, not because he was “black,” but because of his legitimate political position. Always on the side of those below, never of privilege, Wright arrived in Spain ready to mix with prostitutes, artists and beggars. About his visit she wrote a testimonial book titled pagan Spain (Big Sur), a work where we are presented with the Spain that the trains crossed at that time; briefcase and black saliva on the tip of the tongue; espadrille with the smell of feet and wounds open to gangrene; those things.
The dirty milk color of those times covers the reading of its pages. Coming to the part that takes place in Granada, the North American writer presents us with the Sacromonte caves, where the gypsies sing and dance to the rhythm of the jurdeles. It is here where Richard Wright is acidic and hurtful with flamenco as a tourist attraction. His criticism contrasts with the sensual beauty with which he expresses the movements of the dancers.
The chapter dedicated to flamenco and caves granaines makes you think The caletre starts up after reading it and one comes to confirm what one already knew, that is, that flamenco, like the bulls or the red flag, were attributes of a Franco regime that the same system converted into categories, instrumentalizing them to your favor.
When this happens, you know, there is no turning back. It is difficult or impossible for the bulls, or the red flag, to represent something beyond the rancid and carpetovetonic of that miserable Spain. Because Francoism is present in both the flag and the cape.
But the same does not happen with flamenco and we owe that to the Holy Trinity of Flamenco Art, that is, to Camarón, Paco de Lucía, and Antonio Gades. The three achieved the most difficult thing; They managed to strip flamenco of stale ties, free it from Francoism and turn it into what it is now; a music too beautiful to be prostituted by Franco’s heritage.
#black #hungry #night