Letter to a Spanish Friend

A friend of mine sent me this text so I could share it at my blog.

Here it is:

Iñigo Aranbarri, writer

Dear friend,

I've been meaning to write you this letter for a long time and, to tell you the truth, I cannot quite explain why I have put it off for so long.

Finally, today I decided to write you, convinced as I am that it must be very hard for you to understand much of what you are seeing, hearing and reading about us [the Basques] these days.

Do you recall the Library of Sarajevo? It happened on August 26th, 1992. All the news broadcasts lead with the image of the building in flames. Do you remember how everyone agreed to highlight the magnitude of the barbarity and the tremendous cost that it represented for the Bosnian culture? The library, the old Institute of Eastern Studies, all of it reduced to ashes in a few hours. Try to remember those books flying like birds in flames. It was not a military target, but its bombing was perfectly and carefully planned. The Serbian ultranationalists knew its value. That's why it became a military target. "Memorycide" was the word chosen to define such a huge atrocity.

This week, judge Juan del Olmo, using a judicial order previously negotiated with the Spanish Home Office (yes, things like this do happen in this country), decided to destroy our own Sarajevo Library: he shut down Euskaldunon Egunkaria, the only newspaper we had in Basque, and had ten of its promoters arrested. I know, a newspaper is not a library, you will say. You will say that Andoain, Vitoria, Bilbao, Pamplona will never be Sarajevo, and that we are not at war here, despite some people's efforts to the contrary. I know.

I did not mean to hurt your sensibility, it was just poetic license -you know, things us poets do- but I think that it can help to put the matter in context. By saying that Euskaldunon Egunkaria was our Sarajevo Library I am trying to say that when a paper is the only one through which a language can breathe, it is not just a newspaper, but something else, quite a lot more, way much more. A newspaper then becomes a book, a record, a concert at the Gayarre Theater, a report on Iraq, an interview with John Berger, the pleasure of tasting the linguistic and plastic ingenuity of that Picasso of the Basque language, Olariaga...

Euskaldunon Egunkaria was our place in the world, our meeting place, the forum where, thanks to the efforts of a team excellent professionals, we the people who speak, read, and write in Basque used to meet to talk about the world and its beauties, including our ugliness. And we did it in a Basque language that was solid, communicative and modern. With normality. Without bitterness, not like in the Spanish news, where we are depicted as if we lived in the prehistoric caves. Each day, Egunkaria added a new tome to the large library of our collective memory.

I should tell you quite a bit more, I should depict for you Egunkaria's staff, the board of directors, the subscribers, the readers, all those who have made possible for us to live a dream come true, something that for you is as normal as informing yourself about your linguistic community by means of a newspaper. A newspaper!

Imagine it for a moment. Can you imagine what it would be like if all of a sudden the hundreds of newspapers written in your own language were wiped off the face of the earth? That is what "has happened" to us, and thanks to the perversion of a government that, besides, is so bold as to explain that the closing of Egunkaria's editorial offices was for the Basque culture's own good.

I know, I am surpassing the limits of correctness and you do not like certain words to be used. You are absolutely right. But, tell me, if this is not a perversion, which is the word I should use to define Minister Acebes' statement?

Again: "for the Basque culture's own good". Do you know how much the Popular Party uses the Basque language in the Basque Country? Not at all. Did you know that, unlike in Galicia and Catalonia, here the Popular Party never uses a language other than Spanish in its public meetings, in its public statements, anywhere at all? Despite facts like, for example, Basque being as official as Spanish in the Basque Autonomous Community, according to the Basque Autonomy Statute that the PP claims so ardently to defend.

Socialists act almost exactly. And you say that the Basque language is not used because it is "contaminated", politicized by nationalist people. "Compulsory nationalism" they call it. Can't you see that it is dynamics like the one described above -and I am just talking about linguistic situations- that are obliging Basque speakers to be nationalist?

It is a matter of survival. I have already told you something that the newspapers of your country do not say. Who politicizes languages: Those who do not use them, or those who sit and wait until such languages die of starvation, condemned to folklore?

Wait a minute, I am throwing to the dustbin some notes I had gathered for you. It is nothing. Some data about the glotocide politics the Popular Party is spearheading in Navarre, and some testimonies about the situation of the people who happen to live on the other side of the Bidasoa River, in that territory that is presented to you as the French Basque Country. For instance: do you know what the adjective "alegal" means? Really? It is the word applied to the Basque-medium primary schools there.

But let's change the subject. I would never show myself as a victim before you. I am just talking about languages, and it is better like that, for I know that you love languages, you are fond of them because they create worlds where people can live.

You know that I agree with you when you say that a language is a communication code, and that its updating, use and survival is up to its speakers. But it seems to be something more. People weep for their language. Out of rage, out of emotion. We have seen it these days. Can anybody weep for a bunch of papers? Perhaps, you need to belong to a language sheltered under one single newspaper to feel that. Imagine what it would become of you if you lived with this absence, an absence that can only be compared with the death of a dear one. Now I am not using a poetic silence. Living together everyday creates ties that are hard to forget. To have your breakfast while reading the culture supplement. To go to bed with a report on Palestine by Jose Mari Pastor, to immerse yourself in the interview that Imanol Murua Uria gave to Fernando Savater, to read in the last issue the historic and cruelly premonitory statement by the Basque singer Imanol, "I will not be back, there is not freedom here".

To be a normal person, to live in a little more normalized way, like you. And one day, everything disappears. The accusation: "it is a newspaper created by ETA". Have you taken a minute to think what that sentence means? If during these twelve years ETA has managed to unite what Euskaldunon Egunkaria has united, all of us should revise a lot of things in this country. Are you ready then to affirm that it is ETA who united Basque people of all ideologies, by crating the daily newspaper that has covered the broadest social spectrum we have ever known, from the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) to sectors of the PSE (Basque Socialist Party), from Mauleon (French department of the Atlantic Pyrenees) to the little hotel in Montana, USA, where the children of the Basque shepherds emigrated to America in the sixties usually meet? Was it not beautiful?

I am almost finished. I feel your restlessness and I would never willingly upset you. You see that I have not mentioned the arrests, or the financial situation the 150 Egunkaria workers face after the closing of the paper. I will not. I just wanted to tell you something you will not find in the papers of your country, something that may help you better understand what is happening here, in this small part of the world that is very far from looking like Bosnia and that you know by the name of Basque Country. We Basque speakers call it Euskal Herria, the Land of the Basque Language.

At this point, a piece of sincere, loyal advice occurs to me, in solidarity: take care of your language, it is under menace. In fact, it is already dangerously contaminated. Those who are not interested in it being a means for mutual understanding have seized it, and they are manipulating it so it does not mean what you and I had agreed it to mean.

Take care.

.... ... .