The last six years of Federico García Lorca's life were marked
in equal part by passion and politics. The former of these had
always been an important part of his life. The latter was somewhat
newer to it, and would ultimately contribute to its end.
Returning to Spain from the United States and Cuba in 1930, the
former of which inspired Poeta en Nueva York, his feverish cycle of
poems about the metropolis on the verge of a nervous breakdown,
García Lorca was a changed man. As Pablo Medina and Mark Statman
note in the introduction to their 2008 translation of that cycle,
although the poet and playwright had never been "in any strict
sense a political man, a poet of the political," he was
nevertheless a man of deep emotion and conviction. He had great
deal of sympathy for those on the periphery of society, and this
sympathy had been sharpened to a fine point by the endemic racism
found on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
"Being from Granada," García Lorca once said, "gives me a
sympathetic understanding of all those who are persecuted-of the
gypsy, the black, the Jew, of the Moor, which all Granadinos carry
inside them."
In his book on García Lorca's output as a visual artist, Mario
Hernández writes that the poet's experience in New York thus
radicalised him: he returned to Spain a strident advocate of
theatre as a form of social action, as a space where, as he himself
put it, "men can question norms that are outmoded or mistaken and
explain with living example the eternal norms of the human
heart."
It was fortuitous, then, that his return should have coincided with
the fall of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and the reestablishment
of the Spanish Republic, the government of which supplied him with
the funding, in 1931, to establish La Barraca. This student theatre
company was charged with touring radical reinterpretations of the
Spanish classics to remote and rural areas, where locals could
attend them for free. Australian groups such as Urban Theatre
Projects and Version 1.0 are, while less concerned with the
classics, perhaps, clearly in the same activist mould.
It was while touring with La Barraca that García Lorca wrote, not
only Blood Wedding, but also the other plays of his "rural
trilogy", Yermaand The House of Bernarda Alba,
all of which explored the relationship between the individual and
society, the role of women, and the eternal dance between life and
death. They were marked by what in Spanish is called duende, a
hard-to-translate characteristic that, in his famous 1933 lecture
on the subject, García Lorca described as "a force, not a labour; a
struggle, not a thought."
"It's not a question of skill," he said, "but of a style that's
truly alive. Meaning, it's in the veins. Meaning, it's of the most
ancient culture of immediate creation."
The trilogy was also a further demonstration of the playwright's
abiding feeling for those who constituted what Medina and Statman
describe as the overlooked "backbone of [Spain's] population, the
agrarian poor, who lived away from the centres of culture."
Whether we like to admit it or not, it is worth remembering that we
theatre-going types do often come across as an urban elite that,
consciously or not, belittles, patronises or downright ignores
those who live away from the centres of our own culture, who are
marginalised as often by economic circumstance as they are by
ethnic and racial divisions. García Lorca would have been one of
the first to defend, or at least try and understand, Australian
"bogans", British "chavs" and American "rednecks", just as he would
have the Muslim and Indigenous populations of, say, Western Sydney
and Redfern. Ian Sinclair's interpretation of Blood
Weddingshows a real sensitivity to this point. For García
Lorca, the theatre's importance and vitality was largely dependent
on its ability to reach, and speak to, these groups.
It was his desire to take it to them, and the fact that his
attempts to do so had been financed by the Republican government,
that eventually brought him afoul of Spain's increasingly
belligerent Nationalists. His homosexuality might well have had
something to do with it as well. On the morning of August 19, 1936,
the poet was taken, along with a teacher and two anarchist
bullfighters, to a place called Fuente Grande, on the road between
Víznar and Alfacar, and executed. His body, despite numerous
excavations in search of it, has never been found.
Duende may, as Alison Croggon has written, "stand on the rim of the
wound, inviting death to be its playmate," but it is still a
living, human force. Fascism is precisely the opposite: not a dance
with death, but a dance of it.
García Lorca was one of that movement's first victims. He
undoubtedly remains one if its greatest.
Matthew Clayfield
Blood Wedding, Wharf 1 Theatre, 1 August - 11
September, 2011.
Feature: Lorca and his times
Date posted: 18 Jul 2011Author: STC