After leafing through the latest issue of the New Yorker, I have developed some thoughts of Spanish poet Fredric Garcia Lorca. The article writes form the political angle and debate around his death and grave excavation.
After returning to Spain in the early 1930’s to a country that was deeply trenched in civil war between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Lorca, a “visible figure with known Republican sympathies” had reached a level of celebrity that kept him on Nationalist radar. Lorca was known to socialize with other popular figures such as Salvador Dali and a personal favorite of mine, director Luis Bunel. He was also openly gay, which is suggested to be further cause for his death.
A military rebellion in the summer of 1936, lead by general/ dictator Francisco Franco resulted in Lorca’s execution, death by firing squad. It was later learned that his body and several others were dumped in an unmarked grave in Andalusia.
The article addresses the interesting political discordance around his exhumation, namely on the unresolved issues of the civil war. Still today Spain has either historical amnesia, or is unwilling to come to terms. For me it raises some interesting questions of the relationship between art, and history.
How can law and the judicial process help the historiography of a celebrated poet? And on the questions of ownership, at what point does the image of the poet become processed by the public, does that give them access to the physical remains? How is the excavation of Lorca metonymic for the unresolved conflict of the Spanish civil war?
His excavation is an attempt to confront a Spanish past and rewrite history. In my opinion it emphasizes most importantly, how a poet can be symbolic of what political philosopher David Crocker calls “an emblem of a contested past.”
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