Jonathan Mayhew asked:
What’s the origin of your fascination with the Spanish Civil War?
I have been thinking about this for days because it is, indeed, weird that I should have such an intense emotional response to a war that happened many years ago in a different country.
When I took my very first course at the Department of Hispanic Studies at McGill University (Intermediate Intensive II), I had never spoken a word of Spanish to anybody and had the vaguest kind of knowledge about the Hispanic culture. In the second week of the course, we had to create a dialogue with a famous person from the Spanish-speaking world. There was a list of suggestions and, for some mysterious reason, I was drawn to Dolores Ibárruri, or La Pasionaria. The very first essay I wrote in that department (still in English) was also on the Spanish Civil War. Something was drawing me to the subject almost against my will.
There is something in this conflict that touches me very deeply, and I’m still not sure what it is. Maybe I’m displacing onto it the emotions I have regarding the civil conflicts in my own country because they are too painful to approach. It is also very possible that my great-grandmother (whose life I’m replaying in endless ways) worked for the Soviet effort in the Spanish Civil War. Her activities were classified, so we will never know.
I’ll keep thinking about this because it puzzles me, too.
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