Over the past couple of days, I’ve read Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain. Published in 1957, it’s an account of a total of three months Wright spent in the country, after having lived for a decade in Paris. I happened upon it while checking out the Gutenburg Canada site – even though Trump isn’t president anymore, they still find a way to be mad at Americans on that site, but no matter. They make good books available, which you can easily find amidst the Outraged! Red! Font!
What a fascinating book. If you are at all interested in: a) Richard Wright b) 20th century Black experience c) Spain d) Catholicism – check it out. It’s not very long and is quite thought-provoking for a number of reasons.
If you’d like some background and analysis of the book try this article or this one. They both look into how Wright’s experiences as a Black American seem to shape his engagement with Spanish people and culture, and how the book was received.
For those of you who don’t know, or might have forgotten, a Wright refresher: the author of Native Son, which you might have read in school, was the grandson of slaves, grew up in Mississippi and Memphis, was part of the Great Migration north – in his case, to Chicago, didn’t go to formal school until he was twelve years old, didn’t go to college, was involved in the American Communist movement in one form or another, left the United States for what he hoped would be the less racist Europe, and was a marvelous stylist and keen observer. He died in 1960.
There’s a lot to say about Pagan Spain¸ but I don’t want to make this a mega-post, so I’ll try to be succinct.
First point – it’s quite interesting to read Pagan Spain in the context of our present culture of heightened emphasis on racial identity.
For Wright doesn’t center his identity as a Black man in this narrative. It certainly comes into play. He mentions occasional reactions to his skin color – mostly startled and interested, never bigoted (to his face). He sees a relationship between his own experience of repression in the South with the suffering of so many of the Spanish in the Franco regime.
But a contemporary reader might come away from Pagan Spain disappointed or even determined that Wright must be deluded or in denial, for he resolutely refuses to position himself as a “Black man experiencing colonizing Spanish culture. “
He does, however, have a focus in terms of his identity in this context, but it’s not race – it’s as an embodiment of enlightened, secular Western culture. He very comfortably bears that descriptor, and it’s the primary filter for his experiences – which might be clear from the book’s title.
This might surprise the ignorant today, but if you have any knowledge of Black intellectual life and activism in American history, with all of its variety, conflict and different views on identity, accommodation and separatism – it won’t.
You won’t be tempted, as some might be, to cancel Wright and declare his experiences meaningless to the present for that reason. You’d just be interested and have one more thing to think about.
And so, Wright drives around Spain, from the Pyrenees, to Barcelona, Madrid and then south to Seville with other stops along the way. He is hampered by the fact that he doesn’t speak Spanish, so if he wants to effectively communicate he must find either French or English-speakers – which he does. He’s not on a sightseeing tour as much as a listening tour. He tries to find people from all walks of life who can tell him what life is like for them, right then and there.
And what he finds and hears, for the most part, depresses him. He finds Spain largely impoverished, particularly in comparison to the economic recovery of much of the rest of Europe. The people are dispirited and repressed and the social and cultural life he finds is full of contradictions and what he would say was hypocrisy.
(Readers at the time and since have, by the way, taken issue with some of Wright’s observations, both in terms of accuracy and meaning, faulting his relatively limited encounters and his language limitations. Of course, he also comes at Spain with a particular point of view – as all of us would – which frames his impressions.)
Of course, what I will focus on for the rest of this will be the Catholic aspect. Wright was raised Seventh-Day Adventist, and his religious upbringing was harsh and restrictive. He clearly brings a reaction against that, as well as the Southern Protestant’s gut reaction against folk Catholicism, to his observations. But despite that, his descriptions of what he sees in churches and on the streets are fair, full and expressive of an attempt to understand.
What he grapples with the most are a number of realities that seem to him to stand in clear tension. The Church in Spain is intertwined with Franco’s realm, and as such is an agent of control of every level of life, a control which lead to unhappiness and poverty, at the level of both the individual and communities (here Wright focuses on the role Church institutions play in land control and economic decisions that mostly benefit large landowners). He sees richly decorated churches in impoverished communities. But then he sees the poor gathered in those beautiful churches to pray, and to pray, in fact, side-by-side with the wealthy.
And all with an overwhelming emphasis on sin, suffering and death.
Wright’s takeaway is that all of this works to engender a defeatist mentality – not surprising considering his Marxist background – that the graphically suffering bloody Christs and weeping Virgins work to keep the people in their place, accepting suffering as a connection with the divine that is cut at one’s peril.
I braked my car on slippery clay, got out in front of the Santo Domingo Church, whose soaring yellow walls were scaly with peeling paint. I entered and found mass in progress. Beyond the heads of kneeling penitents was a gilded altar framed with glittering candles. There was silence save for a softly chanting voice. High along both walls were paintings of floating angels below which were rows of shrines, each with its cluster of crouching communicants, their eyes glazed, their lips moving in silent supplication, their rough fingers telling their beads, and, again, I was moved by what was beyond doubt the deep and abject piety of the Spaniards.
These people were not serving God, they were adoring Him, surrendering themselves before what they felt to be the Supreme Consciousness of the universe. To Catholics the hierarchy of Christianity was external, unspeakably beautiful, powerful, and yet miraculously accessible through the intercession of others, and it was inconceivable for them to think of refusing the aid of intermediaries to enable them to receive balm or blessings from that source.
To Protestants this whole process had been psychologically internalized, made a part of their mental functioning. Protestants had to conjure up out of their imagination, their longings, and fears, and with but few or no visual representations, what they felt to be the Supreme Consciousness of the universe for the balm and blessings they needed. Protestants had to make severe demands upon themselves; Catholics submitted to what had already been arranged.
The Protestant, therefore, could be dynamic, could project into his environment his sense of his dignity, could create his sense of God out of the worldliness of the world. Hence, the social systems of America, England, Switzerland, and large parts of Protestant Scandinavia had been transformed by Protestant pressure molding the environment; they had higher standards of living, more health, more literacy, more industry–all stemming from the Protestant’s ability to handle the materials of reality.
But the Spanish Catholic remained static, the victim of a spell cast by the external configuration of fetish objects that coerced his imagination and emotions to unchangeableness. He was doomed to apprehend his environment through the fogged and sacred glass of the Church’s hierarchy. And the physical area of the Spaniard’s life reflected this: low standards of living, illiteracy, no control over material forces, and a charged, confused consciousness that compelled him to seek release from his frustrations in the projected shadows of his own personality. A glance sufficed to reveal how little Spain had altered during the long centuries….
Emerging from the church, I saw at once that that altar and those shrines were the only beautiful images in that town. In Protestant environments the churches were almost always plain and simple, while living conditions carried the adornments; here, living conditions were sodden, dilapidated, and the only beauty resided in the churches.
A bearded, wrinkled beggar wearing filthy rags blocked my path, mumbling. I dropped a few centavos into his clawlike hand and his dull eyes gleamed with a flicker of life and he breathed:
“Gracias.“
Of course, an alternative view is that the emphasis on suffering is simply an acknowledgment of reality: life does involve suffering, death is real, and the divine dwells among us, in sympathy, weeping with us – and that yes, there is hope at the end of the Way of the Cross.
The Church, then, to the optimistic post-enlightenment Western cheerleader Wright, plays a large role in the economic and social stagnation of Spain.
It’s a view. You don’t have to agree with it, but nor do you have to refuse to encounter it, for if you do, then you miss out on Wright’s descriptions of what he sees, which I’ll feature in the next post, but starting here – it’s a wonderful chapter, chapter 27 if you want to read the whole thing.
(the “protect her virginity” comment is related to a previous discussion in which Wright reflects on the emphasis on virginity in Spanish culture and its juxtaposition with widely practiced and available prostitution.)
My traveling companions were a diversified lot: sitting next to the window was a mustached, fastidious, elderly man who turned out later to be a country doctor and who kept aloof from everybody; a husky young man, evidently a manual worker, sat next to me. Among the women was a pretty girl who rode with her coat draped over her knees, obviously to protect her virginity. Another young woman, plain and slightly stupid, was traveling with her mother. Then there was the young mother who held her baby upon her lap–a pudgy monster that had just learned to say a few words. The most interesting and intelligent of the women sat almost opposite me; she was about forty, wore eyeglasses, and seemed to spend her time studying the other occupants of the compartment, including me, with an amused and ironic air, but with no trace of condescension; indeed, she seemed to possess a capacity of entertaining herself with what was at hand. I was no doubt a great oddity to her, for my eyes caught her looking at me with great wonder more than once. Was she a businesswoman, a professional woman, a housewife?
We men were polite and reserved toward one another, but the antics of the baby provided a means for the women to unbend and talk.
“Qué guapa!” sounded endlessly as they touched, smiled and patted.
Fatigued, I settled into my seat, and dozed. Some time later I was awakened by the train’s jerking motion, the clack-clack-clack of the wheels over steel rails, the soft sound of rhythmic handclapping, and the melancholy, quavering lilts of flamenco singing. I sat up and stared. The lights had been dimmed. The baby was sleeping in its mother’s arms. The five women were singing and I felt enclosed in a warm, cozy dream. Smiling, I leaned forward and nodded affirmatively to show my appreciation. The two men slept or pretended to. The women saw that I loved their singing and they smiled.
“Le gusta á usted el flamenco?” the woman who wore eyeglasses asked me.
“Sí, sí, mucho, mucho,” I answered with such glee that they paused in their singing and laughed.
When they had finished, I called feelingly: “Más flamenco!“
“Señor Flamenco!” the woman wearing eyeglasses said.
“Señora Flamenco,” I said, bowing.
The names stuck. The women howled with laughter, pointing to me and saying: “Señor Flamenco!” and then to the woman with the eyeglasses, saying: “Señora Flamenco!“
Through the black night the train rattled up and down the mountainsides and the women sang, their trembling voices and quivering throats evoking sad, accusative moods, celebrating death, lonely love, futile yearning. Exhausted, they leaned back and stared with nostalgic eyes, resigned to disappointment and sorrow…
…..
The women slept, heads resting on others’ hips, knees drawn up and touching others’ backs, arms flung out in unconscious abandon upon others’ laps, their bodies swaying as the train groaned through the black Andalusian mountains. The pungent odor of vomit hung in the air; all about me was a yeasty stickiness.
I took out my notebook and began to jot down my impressions; I had been scribbling for some time when I glanced up. Señora Flamenco was staring at me with an open mouth. I felt guilty, for I could see that she knew that I was making notes of what I had observed. I braced myself for a negative reaction. But, no. She smiled and nodded her head with an air of understanding.
“Es usted un hombre muy inteligente!” she whispered. “Escritor?“
“Sh,” I sounded, placing my finger over my lips and looking significantly at her sleeping sisters. “Sí.“
“Comprendo,” she whispered. She touched my knee with her hand to show that she approved.
“La vida es muy mala.” She sighed and closed her eyes.
The doctor ran up the train curtains and daylight revealed scarred mountains. The compartment awakened, yawned, stretched.
Señora Flamenco was holding a handkerchief to her eyes.
“Daño a los ojos?” I asked her.
She lowered the handkerchief and pointed to her eyes, from which a yellowish matter oozed.
“Médico,” I said, motioning toward the doctor.
The doctor glared at me and shrugged. He was not interested in the woman’s ailment. I had a vial of eyewash in my briefcase–a solution of parts of novocaine and adrenalin suspended in distilled water. I offered it to Señora Flamenco, but she was too frightened to use it. She stared questioningly at the doctor, wanting his approval. The doctor took the vial from my fingers and examined the label.
“Es usted médico?” he asked me abruptly.
“No, Señor,” I said.
He returned the bottle and shrugged his shoulders.
I put two drops of the medicine in each of my eyes.
“Bueno,” I told her.
“Sí,” she said.
She threw back her head and I stood and doctored her eyes. They cleared at once. The fumigated doctor gaped in amazement. Señora Flamenco examined her eyes in her purse mirror.
“Dr. Flamenco!” she cried with joy.
Everybody in the compartment, including the disdainful doctor, burst into a loud and long laugh.
When I was ready to get off the train in Granada, I felt that I had known them all of my life.
Crafts & Vintage
