Pedro González
Journalist
“The first time I shot a man I forgot to brush my teeth”. This is the resounding sentence like a whiplash that opens the novel. En el nombre de Padre (Ed. La Huerta Grande, 332 pages), by the Valencian Luis Salvago, presented at the Casa Árabe in Madrid together with the third work by the Palestinian Hussein Yassin: Alí, el brigadista. Historia de un hombre recto (Ed. Comares, 326 pages). Two stark stories, dissected by both in a vibrant colloquium moderated by Carmen Bravo Villasante.
Both books show that the Spanish Civil War is a wound that has not yet closed, and that there are still episodes that remain largely unknown to the general public. One of them is the participation of Arab combatants in the two sides of that cruel confrontation between Spaniards.
Salvago, a non-commissioned officer in the Air Force, approaches the genesis of that conflict from the obsessive desire of a father who tries to impose the logic of his convictions on his son. It is the story of a young man from Tangier who is assigned to the disciplinary company in charge of the firing squad at Cape Juby, in the then Spanish protectorate in North Africa. In addition to the harshness of the African desert and the horror of the task entrusted to him, there is his own personal battle to free himself from the father’s imprint, which will bring him back to relive his past because, as the author says: “a generation expects the one that succeeds it to resolve what was left pending from the previous generation”.
The novel is plagued by the many doubts of someone who has the routine mission of liquidating with a point-blank bullet other lives, other men, other illusions and hopes cut short with the flash of a single shot. “Do you really think it is necessary to feel fear”… I told him yes, “fear without reason, fundamental fear, makes you feel alive”. Reflections that move, because at the end of the day “between memory and the ground, sometimes, there is only the height of a bed”.
A story that is presented as that of those who fought on the wrong side, and for whom the outcome of the war was always a defeat. Although the underlying doubt is whether that defeat was not the defeat of all, the inexorable corollary of any civil war.
Palestinian and Communist Party
Ali, qissat rayul mustqim is the original title of the third novel by Hussein Yassim, born in Arrabat al-Battuf, northern Galilee in 1943 and now living in Jerusalem. In Ali, the Brigadier, Yassim focuses on the story of five Palestinian Arabs who came to Spain in defense of the Republic: Nayati Sidqi, Fawzi Sabri al-Nablusi, Nayib Yusuf, Malih al-Jaruf and, above all, Ali Abduljáliq, the protagonist of the work, whose remains currently lie in the common ossuary of the Los Llanos cemetery in Albacete.
Starting from a real and incontrovertible fact, Hussein Yassim reconstructs Ali’s life from birth to the grave. He goes through the scenarios that led him to graze in the village as a child, to register as an active member of the Communist Party of Palestine, to receive the corresponding political training in Moscow and to be imprisoned several times, accused of attacks and subversive and terrorist activities. The British authorities gave him the choice between serving his full sentence or leaving the country to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
Throughout the story, whose Spanish translation is the work of Antonio Martínez Castro, all the British political maneuvers that would progressively lead to clashes between Arabs and Jews in that Palestine doomed to a future partition parade. And, of course, the vicissitudes that led Ali and hundreds of other Arabs to fight with the International Brigades under the suffocating propaganda of making them believe that the Spanish civil war was also theirs. A conviction that goes through various stages of doubt, when what they witness in the trenches on this side of the Mediterranean makes him reflect on the lies and propaganda in which he grew up and was formed in his native Palestine.
The work opens with a prologue by Arabist Pedro Martínez Montávez, who recalls the pain and plunder suffered by Palestine since the 1930s.
It should be noted that this work is also available online in chapters in audio-novel format, an increasingly widespread phenomenon, which reflects the importance of sonority and the weight of the oral tradition in Arabic literature.
© This article is a translation of the originally published in Atalayar / All rights reserved
