Death and Resurrection in Andalucia

Of course I can’t pinpoint the exact moment the land, the tierra, of Andalucia claimed me as one of its own. Perhaps it was when we rounded the monumental gate and entered the grounds of Granada’s miraculous Alhambra for the first time. Or later that day when we sat on the Mirador de San Nicolas and watched the sun set over the Al Qal’a al-Hamra and the Sierra Nevada mountains? Or was it in Cordoba, where I wandered aimlessly, happily around the Mezquita and first experienced flamenco and its dualistic longing and exuberance? Or the time we spent four lazy days in Ronda, criss-crossing the stupendous gorge and feeling our faith in humanity restored by the “Paz” banners hanging from every window in the town square?

No, I suspect it goes much further back, before I ever traveled there, when I first heard the Clash’s song “Spanish Bombs,” in 1982:

Spanish songs in Andalucia
The shooting sites in the days of '39
Oh, please, leave the ventana open
Federico Lorca is dead and gone

The Clash were the coolest, and Joe Strummer shouted out those lyrics from his corazón in a way that made me know that this Federico García Lorca must be cool as well. Over the years, I read some about Lorca, the leftist poet and dramatist who was murdered in August 1936 in Víznar, a village outside Granada, at the outset of the Spanish Civil on the order of one of Franco’s generals. His bullet-riddled body was dumped unceremoniously into a unmarked grave, but, in death, Lorca triumphed as an enduring symbol of all Spanish victims of political oppression.

Although Lorca was born in the nearby farming village of Fuente Vaqueros, it was Granada that exerted its pull on him. The city and the poet had a troubled relationship, with each repudiating, yet unable to deny, the other. The city was late in granting Lorca his due, finally converting one of his family’s properties in Granada into a museum and memorial park. The poet also had a complex attitude toward the city and its history. He credited it with making him a poet and wrote some beautifully evocative descriptions of it. Yet, in an interview in the Madrid newspaper El Sol, published a scant two months before his death, Lorca lamented Granada’s expulsion of its Muslim (and Jewish) population in the last years of the 15th century and lambasted its current citizenry: "It was a disastrous event, even though they say the opposite in the schools. An admirable civilization, and a poetry, architecture and delicacy unique in the world----all were lost, to give way to an impoverished, cowed town, a wasteland populated by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain."

Granada’s Moorish past is most strongly felt in the Albaicín, the old Muslim quarter that is a steep maze of whitewashed, mostly modest homes. Some guidebooks warn visitors about theft by drug addicts and other dire circumstances that may befall them in the quarter, but it’s never frightened me. On our most recent visit, in May 2003, the Albaicín hummed with teahouses, restaurants, new boutique hotels crafted from old buildings, and a luxury complex of Arab baths, or hammams. Most significantly, Granada’s new mosque was nearing completion; the mosque has adopted an “open door” policy that allows school groups, tourists, and others to visit it, helping to dispel opposition to it on the part of some city residents. Finally, we were cheered to see T-shirts sold on the street that extolled the virtues of Christians, Jews, and Muslims living side by side in Andalucía. There seems to be a renaissance of tolerance and cooperation in Granada and elsewhere in the region; perhaps the ghosts of the expelled Moors have been put to rest, at least for the time being.

For an analysis of the historical precedent of this phenomenon, I highly recommend María Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. And for an elegant depiction of Al-Andalus from an Arab perspective, I offer Andalucia's Journey, an article by the late Edward Said that appeared in Travel + Leisure in December 2002.