Daughters of Spain

I was delighted when Ybernia SL approached me to say they would like to publish a new edition of my book Daughters of Spain, a collection of first-hand interviews with a variety of Spanish women. It was the first book I ever published, back in 2009. Although in actual fact the idea behind the book was conceived twenty years earlier, in 1989, when I first came to Málaga. At that time, a democratic Spain had only been in existence for fourteen years, and my expectations of what life was like for the women of Spain was quite different from what I actually experienced when I arrived there. In that short space of time women’s lives had changed so much that they were not much different from those of women in Britain in the twentieth century. I had joined a Spanish language school which was owned and run by two young women, one of whom was divorced and both were financially independent of their families. That alone would have inspired me to look further into the changes that had taken place since the death of Franco, but there were other reasons which stemmed from further back in my own past.

I had worked in education all my life, but during the 1970s and 80s I found myself constantly coming up against the ‘Glass Ceiling’, as it was referred to at the time. Despite having a long list of qualifications and experience, the top jobs were always going to the men I was competing against. But that wasn’t all; I soon realised that being a woman could also mean that I would not necessarily be treated as an equal even in my social life. I had been playing golf since I was in my early twenties, but by the end of the 1980s there were still golf clubs in existence where women were not allowed to enter the club house through the front door and were not allowed to play at weekends (the assumption there being that they had all week to play golf!) So I suppose that is why I have been a campaigner for women’s equality for most of my life, and as such was keen to see what had changed for the women of Spain and how they felt about it.

Another factor which lay behind my interest in interviewing these women was that I have always been fascinated by Spain, not just its culture but also in its politics. When I was a teenager my English teacher introduced me to the works of Ernest Hemingway, including For Whom the Bell Tolls, where the main protagonist goes to Spain to fight on the side of the Republican forces. This, and the fact that my father had reportedly gone to Spain to join the International Brigade for a brief period in 1938, gave rise to an interest in the Spanish Civil War on my part. He never spoke to me about it, just as he didn’t speak about his experiences in World War II. 

Many of the women I interviewed had lived through the civil war and were happy to tell me about their experiences and those of their families. One thing that became clear after talking to them was that not all of them looked back on their lives with regret. The restrictions were there for all the women, not being allowed to have a bank account, no chance of divorce from an abusive husband, no abortion, restricted education and being under the strict control of both State and Church. However, while some women had truly terrible stories to relate, others remembered their childhood and the civil war with equanimity. For some the civil war barely touched their lives whilst for others it was a devastating part of them.

FLAMENCO

Traditionally, flamenco has always been associated with Spain and the Roma or gypsy way of life, but in fact there was a similar culture of music and dance in southern Spain a thousand years before the gypsies arrived in Andalusia. The city of Cádiz, known as Gades during the the time of the Phoenicians and the later Roman occupation of the country, was famous for its female dancers who were renowned all across the Mediterranean world for their beauty and sensual dancing. The dancers were often accompanied by musicians and a singer, just as they are today. The ancient works of many Roman writers and historians reveal how popular the Gaditanae, as the women were called, were at the time, and we actually know the name of one of those dancers; she was called Telethusa and she lived in Gades during the first century. And the reason we know about her is due to the poems of the Roman poet, Marcus Valerias Martialis. Apparently he saw her dancing in the market place when he visited Gades and is said to have become infatuated with her, eventually making her his mistress. He was not the only one to write about these sensuous dancers; men, such as the poets Lord Byron and Federico Lorca, the author Cervantes and the historian Richard Ford also wrote about Cádiz and its fascinating Gaditanae.

They describe Telethusa as dancing with her arms above her head, playing the castanets and moving her body to a rhythmic beat. This provocative Oriental style dance was a precursor to flamenco as we see it today. 

But the roots of flamenco are more complicated than that. Between the ninth and fourteenth century the Andalusian gypsies, or gitanos as they are known in Spain, migrated to the Iberian peninsula from north-west India. They brought their own culture of Hindu dance and song and with it the instruments that we associate with flamenco dancing: castanets, tambourines, bells and drums. In Andalusia they encountered Christians, Sephardic Jews and Moors, whose cultures were already well established in the land, and over the next five hundred years these cultural influences mingled with their own music. The Moors had brought many musical instruments to Andalusia, including the guitar which Zirab, a Moorish musician, brought from Baghdad in the 9th century. The guitar is the main form of accompaniment for both flamenco song and dance. This inter-mingling of the cultures is what has created flamenco.

There are two distinct parts to flamenco, the song and the dance, and it is the former which sets the character of the performance because it tells the story of the everyday life of the gitanos. The words of the song are then interpreted by the dancer. There are three types of song. Cante Jondo, (deep song) is very emotional and tells of death, despair and longing; it is believed to be the oldest type of cante or song. Then there is the light-hearted Cante Chico (small song) which tells of love and romance, life in the countryside, friendships and fiestas. It is technically a more complicated form of song but far less emotional, and full of humour. Then there is a third style which is a mix of the two and sometimes includes other styles of Spanish folk songs as well, such as the verdiales of the mountain villages. This is called Cante Intermedio. Most of these songs can be traced back many years. Some of them are only sung on certain occasions and it can bring bad luck if they are sung at the wrong time. You can only sing alboreás, for example, at weddings.

For me the dance is the most spectacular part of flamenco, but of course it would mean so much more to the spectator if they understood the words being sung because the dancer is interpreting them with the movements of her body. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, flamenco songs have been accompanied by the guitar and someone beating time with a small drum or a wooden stick against the ground. While the singer sings stories of love or death, the dancer begins to dance. If the performer is woman, she is dressed in an elaborate long dress, usually with lots of ruffles. Sometimes she wears a gaily decorated shawl which she uses as part of the dance, twirling it through the air or around her body. Or she plays the castanets, their clicking blending with the music and accentuating the beat. She dances sensuously, her arms and hands constantly twisting and turning, in a manner not dissimilar to a classical Hindu dancer, her feet tap and stamp in her high-heeled shoes, their metal caps beating out the rhythm of the music. The male dancer has a more upright style, his back is held erect and his arms and hands mirror those of his partner. When he dances alone his feet do most of the work, performing an intricate style of tap dancing that creates a music of its own. Men dancing in this manner where most of the movement comes from the legs and feet is a style of dance that goes back many years and can be seen in places as far apart as Ireland, the United States and West Africa.

The Golden Age of flamenco was from the end of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. At first it was an outdoor event centred around the family, but in 1842 the first café cantante was opened in Seville. After that many other indoor performances were started in neighbouring cities, but the emphasis was more on the musicians and the dancers; the singer was no longer so important. Many thought that this was downgrading flamenco and a movement was made by influential people such as Federico Lorca and the composer Manuel de Falla to restore flamenco to its pure form. To do this they organised a competition for Primitive Andalusian Cante and succeeded in preventing any further debasement to the original flamenco. That doesn't mean that the development of flamenco has stood still; many contemporary composers and performers are bringing it to a modern and international audience. And nowadays the Spanish regard flamenco as the music of Spain not just Andalusia.

Below are a couple of books to read if you want to learn more about the origins of flamenco and gypsy culture in Spain: 

"White Wall of Spain: the mysteries of Andalusian culture" by Allen Josephs 

"Andalusia: Between dream and reality" by Tony Bryant.

How living in Spain influenced my writing.

There are two questions I am often asked; one is whether living in Spain has influenced my writing and the other is, how much of my own life is in my stories. I will attempt to answer both those questions in this blog.

In fact when I moved to southern Spain in 1998 it was to be near my daughter who had decided to move to Malaga when she finished college. What had initially been intended as a brief stay on my part, had turned into becoming my home from then on.  At that time I knew very little about the country or its history, but I soon became captivated by both. My two great loves are literature and history, and here I found I could indulge both of these passions.

The first historical novel I wrote was related to recent Spanish history and it evolved from a collection of interviews I made with Spanish women of different ages, where I learnt about their lives during the Spanish Civil War and afterwards. These interviews gave me the inspiration to write a love story set in Málaga during that civil war (Spanish Lavender) and also a novel entitled The House on the Beach which was about two girls struggling against the post-war restrictions imposed by both the State and the Church during the dictatorship of Franco. Neither of which I could have done adequately if I had not been living here. A lot of my writing looks at social class and inequality, particularly the position of women in Spain, but there is another aspect of Spanish history that intrigues me as well, the Muslim—or Moorish as it was called at the time—occupation of Spain. 

Anyone visiting the autonomous community of Andalusia in the south of Spain, cannot help but come across reminders of the Muslim inhabitants of the land they occupied for almost 800 years, be it its magnificent buildings such as the Alhambra in Granada and the Mosque in Córdoba, or the traditional designs of colourful wall tiles, Arabic archways, the Arabic words that are part of everyday use, irrigation systems; the land is full of reminders of what the Muslims left behind.

It was in 2000 that I first became fascinated by these Muslim conquerors and their influence on Spain and its culture. I had visited an exhibition of Moorish art in the ruined city of Madinat-al-Zahra, near Córdoba and what I learned there inspireded me to write a historical novel telling the story of how the caliph Abd al Rahman III had built the city in the 10th century as a symbol to the world of his wealth and power. This was the Golden Age of Moorish Spain and at the time al-Andalus was renowned throughout the civilised world for its learning and culture. Once the caliph died, it was not many years before the city fell into disrepair and was forgotten. The more I read about the history of the period, the more surprised I became to learn just how much Spain and the rest of the western world owed to the Muslims of the 10th century and the more I wanted to write about it and share it with others. So what was originally going to be a single historical novel, The Shining City, turned into three novels, with The Eye of the Falcon and The Ring of Flames completing The al-Andalus trilogy.  

The demise of Córdoba, after a terrible prolonged siege and the deaths of many citizens, led to what had once been the most cultured and wealthy city in al-Andalus being abandoned and the royal court being transferred to Málaga. As a resident of Málaga, I felt duty bound to continue my research into Muslim Spain and wrote a second trilogy set in Málaga during the succeeding century. I called this one The City of Dreams Trilogy because my characters, both real and fictitious, were moving there to fulfil their dreams and escape from war-torn Córdoba.

So far, I haven’t explained how much of my own life lies in my stories. The answer is both nothing and everything. I expect I am no different from many other writers, in that I am by nature, an observant person. A writer needs to notice details, mannerisms, behaviours, colours. As we go through life we all absorb ideas, events, emotions that are in some small way unique to us, without even realising it. For a writer this is like having a large compendium of characters, places, conversations and events that you can dip into at any time. And that is exactly what I do. When writing historical fiction for example, it is important to create a balance between the characters that you have researched and know existed and those that you have invented. This is when a writer relies on their personal compendium of experiences to bring their fictitious characters to life, while not turning them into a photofit of someone you already know. They are like prompts for the writer, an extra cherry in the pie, a drop more icing on the cake. They are a mosaic of details that have been unconsciously collected during my life and they are available when I need them.

They say that a writer should write about what they know and to a certain extent I agree with that. Of course in the realms of story telling, be it historical fiction or science fiction, we must sometimes cut loose from what we know to be certain and true facts, and let our imaginations take over. The real joy of writing fiction is that the writer can create their own world, with characters that do not really exist, but whom the reader may feel that they recognise and often can empathise with them.

It’s probably easier to see how Spain has influenced my historical fiction, but its influence is also very evident in some of my contemporary works as well. Recently, when I set about creating my female private detective, I decided to set the action in the centre of Málaga because that is somewhere I know well and can readily bring it to mind while I am writing. It’s what all writers do. If you are a fan of the Rebus detective series, you will by now be fairly familiar with Edinburgh, a city that the author Ian Rankin obviously knows very well. Centuries ago, Thomas Hardy lived and wrote in Dorset and his books are set in Wessex, a place he knew and loved well, and which his readers too have grown to recognise.

By and large, writers are eclectic people, who use a mix of their personal store of experiences and creative skills to enhance what they are writing and bring their readers into their world to share them.