Mikel Laboa

As you may know by now, Basque songwriter Mike Laboa passed away last week. This is The Guardian's obituary dedicated to his memory:

Mikel Laboa

Basque singer central to his culture's revival

* Michael Eaude
* The Guardian, Tuesday 9 December 2008

The Basque singer Mikel Laboa, who has died aged 74, was a legend in the Basque country, the region spanning part of northern Spain and south-west France. Always singing in Euskara, the Basque language, he was central to the region's cultural revival.

His father was a Basque Nationalist party councillor on the San Sebastián (Donostia) city council, who left for exile on the arrival of General Franco's troops in 1937. His mother and her seven children took refuge in the fishing village of Lekeitio, but the family was reunited in San Sebastián in 1939. The old quarter of that beautiful seaside city remained Laboa's haunt until the end of his life.

The post civil war years were tough: not only did hunger and fear rule, but speaking Euskara was forbidden. His family were musical and Laboa learned the guitar. In 1955 a friend gave him a record by the Argentinean Atahualpa Yupanqui that suggested a way of singing about suffering and politics.

At the same time, Laboa was studying medicine in Pamplona. He took his finals in Zaragoza, where, in 1962, at a student concert, he first sang in public in Euskara. In 1964 he married Marisol Bastida and went on to study child psychiatry for three years in Barcelona, where he made contact with the Catalan protest song movement.

From 1967 till its closure 18 years later, Laboa worked at the San Miguel hospital in San Sebastián as a psychiatrist, caring for children with Down's syndrome and autism. With his well-worn clothes and beret, he looked more like a farm labourer than a consultant physician, but combined the two careers with great success.

Laboa had found a Basque popular songbook in the early 1960s and his particular contribution was beginning to fall into place: Basque traditional songs, 1960s protest music, but always with a personal interpretation, including an album of translations from Bertolt Brecht (1969), and Lekeitioak (1988), an album of experimental pieces involving screams and onomatopoeic sounds that were closer to John Cage than Joan Baez. His curiously pitched, clear, nasal voice, the minimalism of his poem-songs and his commitment to Basque culture struck chords with his audience.

His first records were EPs only published in the French Basque country, but, in 1974, a double album was issued in Spain, Bat-Hiru (One-Three), his best-known record. It includes his hymn to freedom Txoria Txori (The Bird Which Is a Bird), inspired by his work with autistic children: in all, he made 16 records.

In later years Laboa experimented with other styles such as jazz and rock. A younger generation, mainly Basque post-punk rockers, paid him homage in the album Txerokee (1990). In 2003, he wrote the music for Julio Medem's documentary La Pelota Vasca (The Basque Ball). Medem wanted to interview him for the film, but Laboa refused: "I have nothing to say apart from my songs."

The writer Bernardo Atxaga described Laboa as a tall Viking warrior with piercing blue eyes, trapped inside the nervous nature of the singer. For his last performance, on July 11 2006, Laboa overcame his stage fright to perform in front of tens of thousands of people on San Sebastián beach, when he opened for Bob Dylan in a concert for peace.

He is survived by Marisol and their two children.

• Mikel Laboa Mancisidor, singer-songwriter, born June 15 1934; died December 1 2008

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Eva

This bio about the great freedom fighter Eva Forest was published at ZNet:

Eva Forest: The Passing of a Spanish Icon

Supriyo Chatterjee

It was typical of Eva Forest, who died after an illness on May 19 at Hondarribia in Basque country, Spain, at the age of 79, to tell a friend days before her passing that she was living the best days of her life. A Left-wing icon whom the Spanish state could never silence nor smear, defiant till the very end of the harsh Spanish political system, and a great friend of Vietnam, Cuba and latterly of Venezuela and Bolivia, she is being remembered with great affection throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Eva was born into a politically active family in Barcelona in 1928. Her painter father, an anarchist who felt that schools were a repressive institution, kept her at home for as long as he lived. It was some time after his death in 1936 that she set foot in a formal educational institute. That also was the year in which the civil war started and in 1939 Eva was at the point of being flown out to Russia from a nursery created with Swiss help for Spanish children, when her mother pulled her out of the truck moments before it set off towards the evacuation point.

Eva Forest gained a degree in psychiatry at Madrid and at the final year of her studies in 1955 she met and married Alfonso Sastre, playwright, essayist and a relentless critic of censorship lf the Franco era. They stayed together till the end, a couple who collaborated so closely in their work that they progressively thought and wrote alike.

With Aflonso's persecution in Spain, the couple left for Paris in 1956, where their first son was born. At this time, she moved away from psychiatry towards a "sui generis sociology" and wrote her first novel, Febrero. They returned to Spain in 1962 and she was detained after joining other women demonstrating in support of Asturian miners. She was fined, refused to pay it and was sent to prison with her new-born daughter.

In 1968, Franco imposed a state of emergency. Eva's response was to edit, along with her friends, a clandestine journal, Information, and the more widely circulated samizdat publication, State of Emergency. A Catalan by birth, her identification with the Basque cause started with characteristic fearlessness in 1970, when she was among those who worked to set up a solidarity committee during the farcical Burgos trial of 1970 against Basque prisoners, which ended with death sentences being handed out and later commuted following an international outcry. She was arrested in 1974 for writing under the pseudonym of Julen Agirre Operation Ogre, a book that detailed the car bomb assassination in 1973 by the Basque group, ETA, of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Spanish premier and Franco's most intimate collaborator. Eva was tortured and kept in preventive custody for three years, accused of collaborating with ETA, a charge never proven.

Her account of imprisonment, translated as From a Spanish Prison, shone light on the arbitrariness of the Spanish justice system and her own humanity and capacity for love for her children, her family and others amid great adversity. Prison was also the impulse for her to set up TAT, a group dedicated to working against torture, and to write extensively on the subject. As a torture victim herself, she campaigned till the very end against torture, ruing that despite years of all the work, it still tended to be common place.

After her release, the family moved to Basque country where Eva lived till the end. She aligned herself with the Basque Left and was at one time elected as a regional Senator on a Left ticket. She was also an incorrigible internationalist who could feel as her own the pain of others. We are responsible for own actions and our own silences, she said and Eva did not do silence. She visited Iraq in 1998 and wrote a book about it, 'Iraq, a Challenge to the New World Order?' She was intrigued by the anthropology of the 'new man' emerging in Cuba, interviewing peasants who learn for the first time to speak out in public and live in solidarity with others.

Eva Forest was a prolific writer, of novels and polemical reports on issues that were not profitable to commercial publishers. Since 1990 she kept herself busy with Hitu, her own publishing company that functioned on cooperative lines. She would edit, translate, pack and even sell books. The most eloquent homage to her is something she had written as an eulogy for one of her companions: "Pick up the sleep of our deaths and turn them into a creative arm that perforates impossibles and drills through utopia in search of new ways of speeding up the process of humanisation." Alfonso, her own companion of a lifetime, survives her and so does his little prophecy: "And one day, companion, we will return in triumph to the inhabited space that never was ours".

(Eva Forest 1928-2007)

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