The Archivo Histórico Nacional and the publishing group SIAL Pygmalion present the book Seguirillas sudanesas, by Juan González-Barba, on Thursday 3 March at 7 p.m. in the Assembly Hall of the Archive (Calle Serrano 115).
The event will be presented by Juan Ramón Romero Fernández-Pacheco, director of the National Historical Archive; Jesús Valencia, policeman of the National Police Corps and former member of the security team of the Embassy of Khartoum; Basilio Rodríguez Cañada, president of the SIAL Pygmalion Publishing Group, and Juan González-Barba, author of the book.
In 2012, two national policemen assigned to the security team of the Embassy in Sudan decide to create, together with their chancellor, the flamenco group “Los niños de Cádiz”, in which they enlist as a dancer a Belgian anthropologist who was doing fieldwork in the Nuba Mountains and who had spent part of her youth in the Alpujarra. The group was an immediate success and entertained the Khartoum society. But its members, for different reasons, begin to frequent companies that end up provoking a diplomatic conflict. The main characters, basic and schematic at the beginning of the novel, gradually acquire density thanks to their amorous experiences and, above all, thanks to flamenco. The novel, brimming with humour, offers a picture of the last years of what was the first Islamist regime in the Arab world. It also anticipates, in the relationships of the artists who make up the flamenco group, the resurgence of the two Spains, which would be accentuated in the following decade. Or rather, of the three, because one of the civil servant-artists is a fervent pro-independence activist, but of the Andalusian nation. And, in the background, a tribute to García Lorca and Camarón from Sudanese lands.
