Images from exhile

DIANA B. WECHSLER

Wrek Journal

University of British Columbia

Lugar: Vancouver; Año: 2004 p. 20 - 35

Barcelona fell in January 1939, Madrid and Valencia in March. Under the title "The Spanish Exodus" a cultural magazine of Buenos Aires, published this heart-rending description of the tragedy of a nation devastated by the war on their way to exile. Until then, had promoted debates against authoritarianism and Fascism, publishing essays by European intellectuals and had pondered the new place of intellectuals in contemporary society. They had also striven to incorporate the Spaniards who arrived in their dispersion. But reality set its hard rules. The defeat of the Spanish Republic and the exile of the people coloured the pages of the magazine with a dim hue, and they published this bitter document that reported on the situation of the voices silenced by defeat. Artists, writers and journalists were all involved in this painful episode of uprooting. Exile crept on to them as a subtle transition between the exploratory and promotional journeys seeking support for the Republic and the impossibility to go back to Spain when the rebels of the "Falange" advanced and prevailed. Those alternative lands were more or less alien. Paris, Moscow, Mexico, Cuba, Buenos Aires were the preferred destinations of Spanish intellectuals turned into expatriates overnight. Among them there were numerous artists who chose Latin American countries. There they might find a common language to avoid the utter alienation of exile. Argentina, in particular, offered family, friends, remote relatives who had emigrated with the sweeping waves of the turn of the century. Some left early, others fleeing from imminent defeat, but they all had to face alienation, the breaking up of their own history, their own time and space. This led María Zambrano to define her condition of expatriate as being "at the edge of history, just alive, without a place of our own. Spaniards without Spain as souls in purgatory". In her essay on Seneca, however, - considered a model Spaniard and published in "Hora de España" in 1938 - she asked: Can a Spaniard give up without betraying himself?? and after long ponderings, she concluded:"All things Spanish often bloom better far from their roots. People cannot give up because it cannot stop, it cannot anihilate itself. A suicidal people would be an immediate precursor of the end of mankind. (...) A Spaniard today cannot choose resignation, for in doing so he deserts the stage where the tragedy of human fate is played out. In 1938 there was still a strain between those who, like Zambrano, chose to go on to the bitter end and those who had already gone to exile. There was still the possibility of keeping on the stage work, of struggling on in their own land. A few months later that alternative would vanish leaving only resistance from abroad. The expatriated Spanish artists and intellectuals will work on against this restless backdrop of ceaseless activity halfway between a degree of integration and the carrying on of their struggle. This paper focuses on the case of the Spanish painters and artists exiled in Buenos Aires in order to penetrate some of the experiences of exile from their gestures, practices, texts and artworks.