Lorca or the pits of oblivion

Federico Garcia Lorca Lorca or the pits of oblivion

They discover the place of execution and what should have been the grave of Federico García Lorca, but his body does not appear

EDITORIAL GAYLES.TV.-  Federico García Lorca and Luís Cernuda with different luck, origin, trajectory, poetry, generation and sexual orientation shared. Both Andalusians, belonging to the generation of the 27, homosexuals and with destinies truncated by the Francoism. Lorca took his life, Cernuda condemned him to exile, to live and die far from his homeland.

And today Cernuda comes to mind because of the way he picked up the famous rhyme of Bécquer, that "Where oblivion lives, there will be my grave" that Luis would transmute in verses that seem to gloss the memory of Lorca:

"Where oblivion lives,
In the vast gardens without aurora;
Where I am only
Memory of a stone buried among nettles
On which the wind escapes his insomnia".

These days Lorca has been news for two different reasons but linked together. On the one hand, we have learned that a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists and researchers believe they have located the place where Federico was shot along with a republican school teacher, Dióscoro Galindo and two anarcho-syndicalist banderilleros, Francisco Galadí and Joaquín Arcoyas. The same place where they were supposedly buried in the early morning 17 18 August 1936. But bodies are not.

The archeologist Francisco Javier Navarro he believes that the remains of the 4 shot were exhumed "around the time of their death, when they were in a cadaverous, not skeletal phase." Despite not having found organic remains in the area, a well in the vicinity of Alfacar (Granada), yes it was a fragment of a Máuser projectile and a bullet casing of contemporary manufacture to the date of the deaths and of habitual use in the Civil War, which confirms the conjectures on the fact that they had been used in the execution.

But mystery surrounds the reasons why the 4 bodies were exhumed. The most widespread theory holds that it was intended to erase all traces of a case that had "great repercussion in the international press" and that in fact involved "significant pressure on the rebel side and the subsequent Franco government." Other theories point to the possible intervention of Lorca's own family, which even today refuses to search for and possible exhumation of his body. There are reports of a policeman, named José Mingorance, who affirm that the death of the poet was more the "fruit of family quarrels" than of political issues. It seems that they exhaustively detail the exhumation of the corpse. But today we can only say that we know the place of events but not the whereabouts of the poet's remains.

And it is this ignorance that leads us to the second theme for which Lorca has been news: the presentation in the Berlinale of the US documentary "Bones of Contention" in which Andrea Weiss shows us an excellent research work on Franco's repression of homosexuals and the actLorca and Dalíual struggle for the recovery of historical memory. And precisely one of the plot threads of the story is that of the statement that García Lorca was murdered because of his condition as "homosexual and socialist" according to a 1965 police report that didn't come to light until a couple of years ago. This text confirms the fact that Lorca was a victim of Francoism and that his homosexuality had an important weight in the decision to end his life. But Weiss's work is not limited to the figure of the poet, but delves into two issues that run in parallel: on the one hand, the existence, still today, of 120.000 buried corpses, which are not forgotten, in wells, gutters and mass graves. and the fight to honor their memory and prevent them from falling into oblivion. And on the other, an exhaustive review of the repression of homosexuality in the Franco regime, the history of the struggles for the dignity of gays, lesbians and transsexuals and also their references: figures such as that of the actress Margarita Xirgu, friend of García Lorca or the journalist Irene Polo, brilliant and brave women that the Franco regime tried to bury in the memorial to the point of being known as the generation of "The disappeared".

And is that the story of the poet does not differ from the tens of thousands of lives buried among the roots of pines planted to erase their tracks. And therefore this text can not but end with the premonitory verses of Lorca himself:

"When the pure forms sank
under the cri cri of the daisies,
I understood that I had been killed.
They went through cafes and cemeteries and churches,
opened the barrels and the cabinets,
They smashed three skeletons to tear their teeth out of gold.
They did not find me anymore.
They did not find me?
No. They did not find me. "

Sources: efe.com, ideal.es, andlpaís.com

GAYLES.TV
Online TV 

Follow us on: Facebook Twitter Instagram

↑ ↓ Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *