"You are always reactionary for someone and red for someone",
Claudio Sánchez Albornoz
In 1988 I came to Spain for the first time and then I met Felipe Hernández Cava.
He was at that time one of the editors of the Revolved
Media
magazine
, and from that meeting two important facts remained: Felipe published in the magazine a report that I had written shortly before (it was the first time I had published something in Spain) and, the most endearing, a certain complicity was established between us and we began to become friends.
Since those years I have followed the development of the work of Hernández Cava as a scriptwriter of comics, work that he has carried out accompanied by various visual artists who have been able to graph the reflections that, with his texts, this writer has been making of reality and history Spanish (and not only Spanish), always with a sharpness that I find admirable. Because Felipe Hernández Cava only writes his texts when he has something to say and, as he is, he always says something useful, interesting, disturbing, revealing. And he also does it when he speaks. Because Hernández Cava is one of those who does not rest, because he is a person, above all, of whom, despite all the regrets, never tires. And now he proves it again.
On my most recent return to Spain, Hernández Cava was waiting for me with one of his last published works: the album
Estampas 1936
, with illustrations by Miguel Navia and published by the Norma publishing house a few months ago. There are 36 specific episodes, which occurred during 1936, the year the Spanish Civil War began, and in which Hernández Cava, with the support of Navia's illustrations, introduces us to the public and even private atmosphere of one of the historical moments most critical of the twentieth century.
When I began reading these vignettes or episodes I had the feeling (or certainty) that this book was waiting for me to reveal to me, from its historical time, the current drama and relevance that the events narrated convey to us. Because my arrival in Madrid took place just while a few pre-electoral days were passing in which the disputed sides attacked each other with almost all weapons, and the political proposals of each one were armed raising as slogans the horrors of which the others were or would be capable . It was a city in contention, divided, tense, in which grudges sprang up everywhere. And bullets were even sent, luckily only by mail.
The Spain that, with the illumination of actions and decisions coming from both sides of the conflict, through personal or collective dramas offers us
Estampas 1936,
delivers the evidence of a divided country, dominated by hatred of the other, and by the violence unleashed against the other, who at times was not even so "other", but that is how it was assumed from the orthodoxies and fundamentalisms of the moment: that hatred, which dragged fear, resentment, interests, denials that led to to a bloody fratricidal war that, in the opinion of Gregorio Marañón, has not ended, since "civil wars last a hundred years," he said.
Although the memory is usually much shorter.
Inside the comic 'Estampas 1939'. MIGUEL NAVIA.
EDITORIAL STANDARD
The justifications that led to that process are known to all of us (or we should know them) because they defined the history of the Spanish twentieth century, and they cost the lives of tens of thousands of citizens, at the hands of other citizens, uniformed and not. The engine powered by the flammable and efficient fuel of hate ran at full steam, causing a wound that apparently has not yet healed, perhaps because, not even with the balm of time (is it really accurate a hundred years?), its cure is feasible. And that possibility (or reality) terrifies me.
To the various episodes of horror, fear, repression and death that the volume contains, Hernández Cava provides an additional dimension with historical quotes such as those already included, and that he intersperses throughout the notebook (“He could have been shot by some and for others ”, assured Manuel Chaves Nogales). Each of these mentions, usually endorsed by an authoritative firm, not only serves to explain or amplify what is being told and seen in each event collected by the comic, but also offers a significant and temporal dimension that elevates it. above the specific circumstances of the year 1936, and reveal its permanence, its painful actuality ... and not only in the context of a political campaign, not even only in its Spanish reading,but in its ability to reveal to us a universal drama (and hence my greatest fears): that of the use of hatred, that of division, that of confrontation and disqualification, scales that rise towards the objective of eliminating the political adversary.
Because it is thanks to that universalizing capacity of good art that reading
Estampas 1936
has stirred me not only because of what it says about a country, an era or a conflict, but also because of what it projects towards other times, other contexts, such as It may be the one that we have seen exacerbated in the United States in recent times, or the one that Cuba has been going through for decades and that today I see with pain how it has been festering with offenses on both sides, with accusations, disqualifications and denials, with more ears deaf than willing to listen.
The abundance of aggression, which at one time tends to be mostly verbal, has become a state of national existence in many parts of the world. Faces that confront, offend, accuse, disqualify (often animalizing the adversary, which is a classic way of dehumanizing him and, therefore, of claiming the right to crush him), exude a hatred that suggests how difficult or impossible they will be. the dialogue, the meeting, the conciliation that any society that is divided for more or less respectable or more or less spurious political reasons needs more and more. Reasons that, supposedly, everyone has the right to have, to defend, although not to impose by force, fear and, much less, violence.
The tragic history of a civil war like the one that Spain experienced and which is reflected in the very dramatic 36
Estampas
by Hernández Cava and Miguel Navia, in the quotes from politicians and thinkers included in the notebook, is then raised as a warning, as an invitation to review of a lesson that we all must learn, everywhere, for all time.
Perhaps sometime we will be able not only to read history, but to learn something from it.
'Stamps 1936 ′.
Felipe Hernández Cava and Miguel Navia.
Rule.
88 pages.
22 euros.
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