Basque Violence

Metaphor And Sacrament

Joseba Zulaika

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780874175325
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book captures the complexity and humanity of one of the most agonizing of contemporary problems—that of terrorist violence. Basque Violence is in fact a pioneering attempt to give a fully contextualized, cultural account of the endemic conflict engaging Basque villagers both as protagonists and as spectators. The author focuses on his native village of Itziar in the province of Guipúzcoa, and many of the Basque activists he discusses are friends from his youth. They are now lionized by the villagers despite the fact that their actions have become increasingly problematic for the villagers themselves. Far from being the work of a "terrorism expert" seeking counter-insurgency solutions or concentrating on the usual search for the causes and consequences of violence, this study attempts instead to understand the conscious and unconscious presuppositions of the violence. The author becomes the narrator of a drama of Homeric proportions in which ordinary men are forced into acts of heroism and errors of tragic consequence.

Part 1

Historical Representations

Introduction

Myth, war, heroism, and tragedy may seem pretentious themes for small-scale settings such as Itziar, yet it is the purpose of the narratives that follow to show the full force of such collective representations in the village. The major events in the history of the living generations of Itziar are recorded in the chapters in part 1. These chapters are indispensable in that, while providing an explanatory framework on their own terms, they also serve as an introduction to the central issues to be dealt with in the subsequent ethnographic descriptions.

The individual subject of this narrative condenses these various dimensions of historical mythification—from the imagination of the prehistoric past to the anticipation of the unconquered future, from the memory of recent wars to the participation in the present fight, and from heroic consciousness to its tragic results. This is a history made by and for the ongoing violence; as such, it affords an essential form of intelligibility to that violence. Yet, from the perspective of an integrated cultural understanding, the quest for intelligibility does not conclude in history per se. These concrete historical representations are themselves something to be explained; toward this end the remaining four parts of the book are directed.

CHAPTER ONE

History as Myth, Legend, and Devotion

Itziar is the home of important prehistoric sites. Seven miles from the village center is the cave of Ekain.¹ Here prehistoric man painted his awesomely beautiful horses millennia ago. In the cave of Urtiaga, a mile from Itziar’s center, skulls dating to as far back as the Azilian and the Upper Paleolithic were found.² In their prehistoric imagination, Basques intimately associate their non-Indo-European language with such archaeological evidences; Itziar villagers speak only Euskera. The first historical account of Itziar is based on the legendary apparition of the Amabirjina (Mother Virgin) in the early Middle Ages. A sanctuary built for the image has made Itziar a center of pilgrimage and Marian devotion for the past seven centuries.

Such mythical and legendary narratives are relevant in that they form part of the thought and social life directly observable in Itziar. As Evans-Pritchard observed, “Myth and history are in important respects different in character” (1961:8). We are not concerned with the historicity of the stories but with their mythical quality, for “a story may be true yet mythical in character” (ibid.). This chapter describes those events of the ancient past that are remembered in present thought and the historical implications to which they are related. This kind of prehistoric and legendary coding of history is a significant aspect of Basque identity and it becomes part of political attitudes.

Ekain, Urtiaga, and Maria

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. . . . One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. W. Benjamin, Illuminations

Maria, from the house Errementeri, was the children’s favorite storyteller in the Itziar of the fifties when I grew up. Her incredible stories about the flying lady Mari, witchcraft metamorphoses, and legendary figures had a strong impact on our imaginations and became frequent topics of wonder in our conversations. As fantastic as they were, her stories were most credible to us, for she would narrate them as concrete events that happened to her or to actual people that she would name. She was a delightful woman, much loved and respected in the neighborhood, and there was nothing in her that would raise a doubt as to the veracity of her fantastic yet factual stories. On one occasion, she used to say, she became so seriously ill after one such frightening witchcraft encounter that she was forced to stay in bed for three months.

The fascination exerted by Maria upon us children was not accidental, for she was skillfully articulating for us in the form of kontuak (stories) the mythical imagination of former generations. She was lovable in recreating for us a bizarre and dreadful world without losing any of her ordinary composure and kindness. Her candid confession as to her unwanted participation in such a reality added credibility to her stories; they were not mere fancy but events that she was confiding to us as a secret knowledge authenticated by her having witnessed them. Maria’s stories about the flying Mari and witchcraft metamorphoses had a decisive impact on my imagination as a child. Even before I began to study anthropology, my first fieldwork experience was taping her stories. A significant factor pushing me to anthropology was the strong presence of this magical mentality in the world of my parents. Maria was also the first to speak to us about an exceptional ethnographer, José Miguel de Barandiaran, who decades earlier had repeatedly visited Itziar, conducting archaeological digs in Urtiaga and gathering folkloric material.³

By the fifties Maria’s esoteric world was already obsolete. Each household harbored in secrecy any disgraceful complicity with such an outmoded world view. Yet, although by then discredited and repressed, Maria was only voicing events that were indisputably part of the behavioral reality of her generation. As I grew older and inquired into my own family’s history, it was easy to discover significant contacts with such beliefs and practices. My own grandfather rather frequently used to hear Mateo Txistu whistling and his dogs barking at night. Mateo Txistu was the priest-hunter of legend whose excessive inclination toward hunting earned him the punishment of having to wander with his dogs around the world for all eternity. It is obviously not incidental that my grandfather was an inveterate hunter. My grandmother and other members of her family had seen Mari fly in the air in the form of a ball of fire. This was an event repeatedly commented on at my mother’s farm during her childhood and youth. At the baserria (farmstead) where my father served in his youth, the master of the household frequently used to watch Mari flying. One night she would go in a given direction, the next in the opposite one, but always traveling the same route between the two highest mountains of the area. My father was himself in his early twenties the subject of frightening witchcraft tricks.⁴

In the course of my fieldwork I found these events confirmed in similar family stories in other houses. Maria’s kontuak were for us the equivalent of fairy tales. Yet they were “true” in that she told them as autobiographical events and our parents would not deny the actual reality of such happenings. It can be said of these stories that they transcend the distinction between the real and the imaginary. As I recall from my own experience, for a child there was nothing more puzzling than being told that witchcraft was genuinely “real” only a few decades earlier but that it did not exist anymore. The saying became popular that all witches disappeared with the shotguns of Eibar, the nearby town that manufactured the guns. Although no longer “real” for adult generations, Maria’s storytelling offered us a significant access to their mental configuration.

Although Itziar is a separate parish, it pertains municipally to Deba, and there are over fifty caves in this municipality. In some of these caves—Urtiaga, Ermitia, Ekain, Arbil, Aitz-Beltz—important prehistoric materials have been found in the form of remains and fossils of humans, mammals, birds, shellfish, and fish as well as ceramics, drawings, and rupestrian paintings. In 1969 the paintings of Ekain were discovered. The estimated dating of the paintings is in 14,000 B.C. There are depicted thirty-three horses, ten bison, two bears, two deer, four goats, two fish, and many other nonfigurative marks. A rock at the center of the cave shaped in obvious resemblance to a horse’s head made archaeologists hypothesize that Paleolithic man used the cave as a chapel to the horse. There is an intimate relationship between these cave paintings and the images of Maria’s stories, as Barandiaran has pointed out.⁵

Ekain is presently closed to the public. During my fieldwork I proposed arranging a visit to show the cave to the youth. They were enthusiastic and grew impatient when the visit had to be postponed several times. Finally one Sunday morning, we entered Ekain in the company of an archaeologist. We were entranced by the arresting beauty of the prehistoric horses painted millennia ago right in our neighborhood. They were images of the past filled with a magical presence that affected us powerfully. Nor was this interest in archaeology a momentary affair, for in 1980 a group of Itziar adolescents formed an amateur team that found no greater weekend entertainment than archaeological outings and digs.

Maria’s stories were of course told in Euskera, the only language she knew. The formation of their language is also a prehistoric matter for Basques, who imagine their cave ancestors speaking the same Euskera they still preserve. Their language is the outstanding feature that, more than anything else, makes Basques the subject of curiosity. Being the only non-Indo-European language in Western Europe, it has attracted the attention of eminent linguists and men and women of letters.⁶ Basques are intensely conscious of the linguistic heritage they preserve. The reconstruction of proto-Euskera has been the main goal of Basque linguists (Michelena 1976). Language is again a fundamental factor through which Basques look at their prehistoric past in search of their identity. The linguistic link with the timeless past, with no elements of connection with other languages that might relativize its singularity, functions as a mythical operator that turns all other prehistoric remains into similarly exclusive facts of Basque origin. If in all historical reconstruction an element of myth can be postulated, there is an added dimension when there is no initial limit to the time frame. Various farfetched scholarly theories about Euskera contribute to this mythmaking process (Tovar 1980). However, no theory about the language, regardless of its scientific merit, can touch the core of the matter, which is the complete identification most Basques make between Euskera and their own cultural identity. Many Basques equate its potential loss with the total demise of Basque identity. This unconditional attitude toward the preservation of their endangered language forces Basque patriots to experience “the Euskera as agony and sacrament” (Oteiza 1983:317).

Not only in Itziar do Basques have a close relationship with their mythical past. In connection with their linguistic insularity, Basque identity is founded on an acute awareness of their enigmatic past. Their being a “mystery people” is also what seems to be of most interest about Basques to outsiders. No founding myth or political revolution substitutes for such an archaic definition of their group origin. Identity runs in an unbroken line from the ancestors who came from nowhere else but Urtiaga and Ekain, who achieved their human condition right there in those nearby underground dwellings. These caves provide for Basques the tangible context in which their imagination of the past finds its home. From a perspective of mythical timeless past anything historic belongs to a radically different classification of time; in conversations with Basques it is not unusual to hear expressions such as “that happened only 5,000 B.C.” When a situation obtains that experiences the past in prehistoric coding, history is simply valueless, spurious time.

In the early 1970s a nuclear power plant was proposed for a site about two miles away from Urtiaga and ten from Ekain. The new myth of boundless nuclear energy might perhaps dismiss once and for all the old mythology. An antinuclear protest was soon ignited at the provincial level, which prevented the plant’s construction and thus “the loss of Itziar.”

There is historical evidence concerning the existence of Itziar from the early Middle Ages. Documents of the Episcopal See of Pamplona (Kingdom of Navarre) show that Itziar existed at least as far back as the beginning of the tenth century.⁷ Sancho IV, king of Castile, on June 24, 1294, granted to Itziar the rights and privileges of a villa.⁸

A Sanctuary for the Amabirjina

If Itziar’s antiquity can be kept guarded in underground shelters and prehistoric fossils, the history of Itziar can be captured with the naked eye in its sanctuary, which architecturally towers over the surrounding houses. When approaching the village from any direction, the medieval church stands out as an imposing fortress. Since the early Middle Ages this sanctuary has been a prominent center of pilgrimage as the shrine of the Amabirjina, the popular name for the icon of the Virgin Mary. The emplacement of Itziar on the northern route of Saint James of Compostela caused it to flourish. The icon is one of the oldest Basque icons (considered to be earlier than the thirteenth century) and, in the words of the Franciscan monk Lizarralde (1926:39), “the most beautiful” of them all.

The legend of how the Amabirjina appeared is common knowledge to the people of Itziar. A young girl from the baserria of Erreten Zar, close to the sanctuary, had the privilege of one day seeing “among the brushwoods, and blackthorns of that uncultivated place a most beautiful Lady full of light with a lovely Child at her breast” (Esnaola 1927:29). The girl asked her who she was and what she wanted, to which she replied: “I am the Queen of Angels, Mary, and it is my will, that you build me a church in this place, in which I wish to stay, and be worshiped with my Son” (ibid.). The spot where the Amabirjina appeared is called Lizarbe.⁹ This is a place known in the area for the quality of water in its copious spring. Housewives from Itziar did their washing in Lizarbe’s waters until the recent arrival of washing machines.

Esnaola believes that two earlier churches preceded the one now standing. Itziar possessed a pre-Romanesque or Romanesque temple when its founding charter was granted. The temple seems to have been replaced by a new one at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Sometime in the sixteenth century the present church was built over the second Romanesque church and as an extension of it.¹⁰

In the history of the sanctuary we find that there is a special relationship between fishermen and the cult of the Virgin.¹¹ As far back as the thirteenth century a Cofradia de Navegantes (Brotherhood of Seamen) existed in Itziar. A royal document dated 1448 gives approval for new chapters to be added to the statutes of such brotherhoods. Esnaola notes: “Although this Brotherhood was eminently religious, nevertheless its articles included themes related to the good government and administration of the society in its purely civil aspects” (1927:113). These statutes were concerned mainly with the organization of the brotherhood for the collection and distribution of alms among its membership, which was restricted to men only.¹²

A further historical note concerns the Amabirjina’s church serving as the center of geographical and social space in Itziar. The centrality of the village church in the social space of traditional Basque society has been investigated by Arpal.¹³ The ecclesiastical autonomy of the church was not challenged by the town council until the second decade of the nineteenth century.

The outstanding manifestation of the tie between the village church and each household in Basque society is each baserria’s sepulturia, or symbolic grave site, on the church’s floor, which is owned by that house.¹⁴ The church’s religious space is therefore a synthesis of the village’s social space. The massive sanctuary of the shrine, built and rebuilt in a communal effort by Itziar and surrounding villages over the centuries, is a majestic statement of the village church’s domination over its parishioners’ households. The geography of Itziar is spotted with points from which one can see the Virgin’s sanctuary. These are called Amabirjina bistak (the view of the Amabirjina). Traditionally, prayers were said when passing by them. These spots mark a Marian orientation for the entire area and show that the Amabirjina in her shrine has provided the undisputed geographical, social, and religious center of Itziar.¹⁵

“What Are We Going to See?”

Itziar’s Amabirjina is only one among the many Basque icons of the Virgin. Lizarralde (1926) recorded over seventy such sculptures in Guipúzcoa alone. In the early 1930s, during the lifetime of Itziar’s older generations, the apparitions of the Virgin in the Guipuzcoan town of Ezkioga made the town a center of regional and international attraction (Christian 1984). Multitudes went to Ezkioga to see the Virgin. People from Itziar were no exception. The apparitions were finally dismissed as being false by the Catholic church.

Among the devout visitors was Tene Mujika, a well-known playwright born in Deba and baptized in Itziar. When in the course of my work I visited her in 1980, she was ninety-two years old and her sight was much deteriorated. Yet talking about those trips to Ezkioga she would stare at me squarely and remark with intensity, as if summing up everything, “We wanted to see. We wanted to believe.” Despite repeated visits, Tene never saw the Amabirjina. On one of the days that I visited her, Tene was seeing strange things. As I sat in the kitchen in front of her, she began to hallucinate and see a lady by my side. Since the previous year when I had visited her, Tene’s sight had deteriorated to the point that she could scarcely recognize my features. In the meantime she had started having frequent hallucinations that she knew were “nothing” but deeply bothered her. I took the opportunity of her hallucination of a figure at my side to ask about apparitions and the role of vision in religious experience.

Because she was almost blind, I first asked her about her sight. Tene explained in detail that she did have problems with her sight when she was five, but she had...