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Ignacio Martínez De Pisón's Una Guerra Africana and Morocco As "Open Wound" in the Spanish National Imaginary

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Ignacio Martínez De Pisón's Una Guerra Africana and Morocco As Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Volume 30 Issue 1 Rethinking Spain From Across the Seas Article 11 1-1-2006 Telling Tales of War to Teens: Ignacio Martínez de Pisón's Una guerra africana and Morocco as "Open Wound" in the Spanish National Imaginary Silvia Bermúdez University of California, Santa Barbara Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, Modern Literature Commons, and the Spanish Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Bermúdez, Silvia (2006) "Telling Tales of War to Teens: Ignacio Martínez de Pisón's Una guerra africana and Morocco as "Open Wound" in the Spanish National Imaginary ," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 30: Iss. 1, Article 11. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1621 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Telling Tales of War to Teens: Ignacio Martínez de Pisón's Una guerra africana and Morocco as "Open Wound" in the Spanish National Imaginary Abstract Exactly ten years after its traumatic defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, Spain appeared to find some compensation for the loss of its last colonies by undertaking the invasion of Morocco in 1908. The enterprise proved difficult when the forces of Abd-el-Krim defeated the Spanish army in the summer of 1921. This terrible loss was metaphorized as an "open wound" and entered the collective imagination by becoming a theme in novels such as José Díaz Fernández's El blocao (1928), Ramón Sender's Imán (1930), and Arturo Barea's series La forja de un rebelde (1941-1944). Known as the "Disaster of Annual," the defeat appeared to be almost forgotten until a series of narratives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries obsessively returned to this particular moment of Spanish history. I focus on how one such narrative, Martínez de Pisón's Una guerra africana (2000), revisits this war as adolescent literature ("novelas juveniles") and within the literary genre of the "novels of the War in Africa," and by so doing, contributes to the articulation of a Spanish collective identity with the historical memory of the feared Moroccan Other. Keywords Martínz de Pisón, Spanish-American War, Morocco, José Díaz Fernández, El blocao, Ramón Sender, Imán, Arturo Barea, La forja de un rebelde, una guerra africana, adolescent literature, novelas juveniles, novels of the War in Africa, Spanish identity, Moroccan Other This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol30/iss1/11 Bermúdez: Telling Tales of War to Teens: Ignacio Martínez de Pisón's Una gu Telling Tales of War to Teens: Ignacio Martinez de Pis On's Una guerra africana and Morocco as "Open Wound" in the Spanish National Imaginary Silvia Bermudez University of California, Santa Barbara In the presentation note to the first edition of El blocao (1928; The Blockhouse 1930), Jose Diaz Fernandez stated that "Despite claims to the contrary, Morocco continues to be an open wound in the Span- ish consciousness" (5; my translation). He further emphasized this point in 1929 in the "Preface to the English Edition" of his novel by specifying that, "The Blockhouse is a war book. Not of the Great War which set half the world ablaze and destroyed ideals and postulates that were accepted as inviolable, but of the colonial war that gnawed like a cancer at the heart of Spain" (14). Diaz Fernandez summarized his personal experience of the Spanish colonial enterprise in Mo- rocco, known as the Moroccan Wars (1912-1926), with the graphic metaphor of the "open wound" and the violent simile "gnawed like cancer." By resorting to this imagery, he conveyed the devastating effects of the failed colonial venture and voiced the trauma inflict- ed on the Spanish national psyche by the "Disaster of Annual," the Moroccan location where the forces of Abd-el-Krim defeated the Spanish army in the deadly summer of 1921. The prescience of Diaz Fernandez's statements cannot be overlooked when considering the series of eleven Spanish novels published between 1990 and 2004 that return to the Moroccan Wars of the early twentieth century, and especially to the Disaster of Annual.' These include three works authored by Severiano Gil Ruiz, a resident of Melilla since the 1960s: Prisioneros en el Rif (1990 Prisoners in the Rif), El canon del Gurugii (1992 The Cannon of Gurugu), and La tierra entregada (1994 The Published by New Prairie Press 1 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 30, Iss. 1 [2006], Art. 11 BermUdez 191 Given Land); David Lopez Garcia's Raisuni (1991), which targets young male readers; two novels by women authors-Josefina Alde- coa's Historia de una maestra (1990) and Maria Charles's Etxezarra (1993); Eduardo Valero's Dias de Luz (1994); Antonio Abad's Queb- dani: El cerco de la estirpe (1997); and Lorenzo Silva's El nombre de los nuestros (2001) and Carta blanca (April 2004; winner of the Pre- mio Primavera de novela).2 In this essay I focus on Ignacio Martinez de Pison's Una guerra africana (2000 An African War), a narrative that functions as a history lesson and a cautionary tale aimed at adolescent male readers. I examine Martinez de Pison's Una guerra africana in order to assess why Spaniards, so ready to forget about traumatic historical events, such as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), during the late 1970s and the 1980s, the years of the democratic transition and the "movida" (see Labanyi), are now inclined to remember the more distant past of the Spanish Moroccan War. What are the lingering issues brought back by the resuscitation of this particular historical phantom? If globalization brings forth the need to apply critical sensibility to the spatiality of social life and the reconfiguration of geographical landscapes, how are we to read this dramatic return to a historical epistemology ob- sessively present in so much of Spanish cultural production at the turn of this century? And why is the retelling of this particular epi- sode of Spanish history aimed at young male readers? In order to respond to these questions, I interpret Martinez de Pison's Annual novel as a narrative of social identity that sustains the "open wound" to which Diaz Fernandez alluded. Importantly, literature is at the core of theories of trauma; at the crossroads where literature and the psychoanalytic theory of trauma intersect, Diaz Fernandez's vivid "open wound" metaphor foreshadows the "open wound" metaphor of Cathy Caruth's Un- claimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Caruth evalu- ates the Freudian theory of trauma by returning to the literary ex- ample Freud used to explain the drama of repetition compulsion: the story of the wound endlessly inflicted on his beloved by the pro- tagonist of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. For her, we must move beyond Freud's fascination with the metaphorical reverbera- tions of the story of Tancred-the hero of the epic tale-because https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol30/iss1/11 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1621 2 Bermúdez: Telling Tales of War to Teens: Ignacio Martínez de Pisón's Una gu 192 ST&TCL, Volume 30, No. 1 (Winter, 2006) what is relevant is not how vividly Tasso's story illustrates repetition compulsion. Rather, the symbolic power of this story rests on its exposing "traumatic experience not only as the enigma of a human agent's repeated and unknowing acts but also as the enigma of the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound, a voice that witnesses a truth that Tancred himself cannot fully know" (3). More specifically, in the story of Tancred we not only witness the ex- perience of an individual traumatized by the repetition of his past- Tancred wounds and kills Clorinda twice-but we hear Clorinda's voice through the wound. In Caruth's articulation this ultimately means recognizing that history is not only told in straightforward narratives of experience and reference but also emerges where im- mediate understanding is not possible. Literature has been representing the trauma of Spain's wars with the Moors since the Middle Ages, but in modern times the genre of "novels of the War in Africa," in which Martinez de Pison inscribes Una guerra africana, arose in the nineteenth century dur- ing the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859-603 and continued after the twentieth-century Moroccan campaigns (1912-26) with Jose Diaz Fernandez's above-mentioned El blocao, Ram On Sender's Imcin (1930 Magnet), Arturo Barea's series La forja de un rebelde (1941- 1944 The Shaping of a Rebel).4 Each wave of novels on African wars reveals an obsession with the Moroccan other and an anxiety over Spanish identity vis-a-vis Northern Africa, as Susan Martin- Marquez indicates in her analysis of Benito Perez Galdos's histori- cal novels set in the 1859-60 war and a number of paintings by the Catalan artist Maria Fortuny sent by the Diputaci6 de Barcelona in early 1860 to document the Spanish Moroccan War of 1859-60 (7- 8). Aldo Blanco makes a similar point in regard to Spanish identity when evaluating the obsessive patriotism displayed in three plays dedicated to justifying Spain's involvement in the Moroccan War of 1859-60: patriotism is directly linked to a fragile sense of the na- tional self (405).
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