Monuments are sites of symbolic exchange.

Last week Granada’s monument to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder + leader of the anti-republican, fascist Falange party, was decorated with a laurel crown, the symbol of victory and invincibility. Thus decorated the monument speaks about the future (rather than the past or the present) for Primo de Rivera was neither victorious nor invincible — found guilty of anti-republican conspiracy and insurrection he was sentenced to death and executed on Nov. 20, 1936.

Today someone left a reply.

"Granada será la tumba del fascismo," (Granada will be the grave of fascism), monument to Josè Antonio Primo de Rivera, Nov. 26, 2009

Granada 19 (the grave of fascism) originally appeared on unguided tour on November 26, 2009.
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I’m reading a love poem from Al-Andalus in a language twice removed from the original Arabic. My English version is based on a Spanish translation.  As I have no Arabic, I don’t feel bound by gendered pronouns. He-his-him doesn’t speak to me, it is you I care about:

When the wine you drank
put you to sleep and the eyes
of the watchmen closed also

I approached you timidly
like one who seeks to come close,
but on the sly, pretending not to.

I crept towards you, imperceptible
as a dream, moved myself close
to you, softly as a breath.

I kissed your throat, a white jewel,
drank the vivid red of your mouth
and so passed my night with you
deliciously, until the darkness smiled,
showing the white teeth of dawn.

Adapted from AFTER THE REVELS by Ibn Shuhayd, 992 – 1034, Córdoba,
translated into English by Cola Franzen.

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Granada 18 (pronouns) originally appeared on unguided tour on November 13, 2009.
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Here’s another feast from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons:

Mouse and mountain and a quiver, a quaint statue and pain in an exterior and silence more silence louder shows salmon a mischief intender. A cake, a real salve made of mutton and liquor, a specially retained rinsing and an established cork and blazing, this which resignation influences and restrains, restrains more altogether. A sign is the specimen spoken.
A meal in mutton, mutton, why is lamb cheaper, it is cheaper because so little is more. Lecture, lecture and repeat instruction.

Granada 16 (mutton) originally appeared on unguided tour on November 9, 2009.
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The architecture is stunning. Marvelous. So beautiful it brings tears to my eyes.

Not a single image! A space to cleanse my mind. For this is the purpose of the tears: to disinfect my glance, wash away the invisible armor I don to protect myself in order to navigate the image saturated environment I live in.

Many visitors cannot tolerate the lack of visual images. Like smokers lighting up outside the airport after a transatlantic flight, they raise their cell phones + digital cameras the moment we enter the site. The Alhambra endures the clicking + flashing with dignity. And I’m too entranced by the exquisiteness of the architecture to be annoyed.

Tomorrow I’ll go again, and the day after…

Granada 15 (Alhambra) originally appeared on unguided tour on October 28, 2009.
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Mornings are different.  At 9 a.m. the plaza is quiet, almost somber. Shops still closed (not only here, everywhere in the city); tourists  just beginning their day’s work. Elderly men (pensioners?) sit on the benches reading the morning paper in identical poses: perched on the very edge of the bench, elbow on arm rest. Every so often another pensioner walks across the square, morning paper in hand. There’s no greeting and chatting. They barely look at each other. Etiquette forbids joining a person on his bench. As all the benches in the sun are occupied, I settle for a  less sought after one in the shade.

Something tells me these men, who pretend not to notice one another, have known each other all their lives. For a split second there’s this keen, quick glance. No nodding, no winking. Just this glance. Sharp as a bullet. Clandestine as a spy’s hidden camera. Are they enemies or conspirators?

Granada 14 (9 o’clock) originally appeared on unguided tour on October 19, 2009.
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In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling there is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.
(Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons)

Granada 13 (roastbeef) originally appeared on unguided tour on October 14, 2009.
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Here’s the Granada rap:

You, and Columbus, and the slave trade –

is that why you don’t sleep?

You, and the bells, and the incense –

the ghosts won’t go away.

You: anti-Semite, Islamophobe — when

you look in the mirror, what do you see?

You, and the Virgen, and her anguish –

is misogyny your trade?

After the music, and the parade –

what else makes you proud?

Granada 12 (holiday rap) originally appeared on unguided tour on October 13, 2009.
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When I fall asleep, you wake me up.

Midnight: Hanging out on my porch. Smoking, drinking, shouting. You’re too cool to be tired.

2 a.m.: Making out beneath my  window. Grinding, groaning, moaning. Don’t you want to be alone?

3 a.m.: Passing out at my front door. Will you find your way home?

4 a.m.: Your dog barking on your balcony, famished, agonized. You never take the dog with you when you go out.

5 a.m.: You slam the front door. Bravo!

6 a.m.: You move your furniture. Because that’s what you do.

7 a.m.:  You’re feeling blue, post-Franco blue.

Granada 11 (sleep) originally appeared on unguided tour on October 11, 2009.
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The tourists who come to the city long to see with their own eyes the “green-purple moon appear in the bluish mist of the Sierra Nevada;” hear with their own ears Granada’s purest voice: “the sound of hidden water, like the pulsing of an ever-living mystery;” feel on their skin the “breeze that comes from the old hills of the Alhambra — from the bonfire of saffron, deep gray, and blotting paper pink of its walls,” “an air so beautiful it is almost thought.” They too, upon returning home, want to be able to say, “Granada looks splendid. Autumn has begun with all the elegance and light sent by the Sierra Nevada. The first snow has already fallen. The yellows begin, deep and infinite, playing with twenty shades of blue. It is an astounding richness, which no matter how stylized, cannot be captured.”

For the traveler less attuned to bourgeois literary tastes the ubiquitous postcards make every effort to capture “the atmosphere of sensuous beauty and mystery that floats over Granada.” The Alhambra girded by the snowy mountain tops of the Sierra Nevada seen in spring, summer, autumn and winter; in the soft morning sun, and under the cool blue light of the full moon. Has beauty ever been more beautiful?

“Beauty,” Susan Sontag writes, “is part of the history of idealizing which is itself part of the history of consolation.” I wonder what consolation the beauty hungry tourist may find in a postcard of a beautiful sunset south of the Alhambra.

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Granada 10 (beauty) originally appeared on unguided tour on October 11, 2009.
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Granada 9 (black horses) originally appeared on unguided tour on October 2, 2009.
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Perhaps the best way to get to know the ghosts of a city is by looking for an apartment. A sucker for historical settings I begin my search in the Albayzin, the city’s oldest quarter and for almost eight centuries the heart of muslim Granada. Today the district houses the most complete structure of medieval muslim domestic architecture in Europe and was declared UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984. Situated on a hill opposite the Alhambra (another World Heritage Site) the Albayzin attracts tens of thousands of tourist every year.
Very few, if any, muslims are left in the Albayzin. When the Catholic Monarchs conquered Granada, they initiated a process of forced conversion, expulsion and dispossession. Today the Christian owners of one of the world’s most famous muslim World Heritage Site, well aware of the tourist’s taste for history, advertise their lodgings as “traditional moorish,” “uniquely Arabic”, or simply “historic.” The “historic studio” I end up renting belongs to a white woman from North America.

I don’t sleep well in my new home. Troubled by nightmares I  decide to move to a less touristy quarter. The Realejo district, south of the Alhambra, seems a better choice. Before 1492 most of the city’s 20,000 Jews used to live here. Unlike the Albayzin, the Realejo does not advertise its “tradition.” Except for a monument to the 12th-century scholar, translator, poet & physician Yehuda Ibn Tibon, awkwardly placed in front of a large tourist restaurant and a bank, finding traces of former synagogues, bath houses, book shops is left to my imagination. Granada, which owes its name to Gránata al-Yahud, the name of the flourishing jewish quarter when the city was still known as Ilbiria — refuses to pay attention to its jewish history. (Ibn Tibon’s monument, erected a few years ago, was paid for by his family’s descendants.)

The statue is placed such that this “son of Granada,” whose slender upright figure signals curiosity and openness, seems to greet the colonizer and Jew hater, Isabel la Catolica. The huge monument — erected at the end of 19th-century and within eyesight of Ibn Tibon’s — shows the queen sitting on her throne handing money to her obedient protegé Christopher Columbus, funding his voyage to the New World. A few yards further south another son of Granada, one who didn’t have to pay for his monument, is honored: José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the fascist Falange party. “Granada a José Antonio, November 1972″ reads the inscription on the plinth.

Although most of the buildings in the Realejo district go back to the 15th century or earlier, all the apartments I look at are decorated in a neutral, relaxed, modern style. In the lovely studio I decide to rent — brand new with breathtaking views of the city — everything from desk to sofa to bed to plates to sheets & towels comes from IKEA. A postmodern way of exorcism, I guess — but not a very successful one. My nightmares persist. After a few days find myself longing for local color. In a tourist shop on Cuesta de Gomerez I buy plates, bowls and cups in the traditional white and blue pomegranate (granada) design.

* * * * *

There must be after-effects when a city, within just a few months’ time, places itself on a new symbolic foundation — changing from a muslim inspired multi-religious, polyglot culture to a Christian monoculture that speaks + understands only castellano — but keeps much of the old architecture and infrastructure.

What does it feel like to go to sleep and wake up in a stolen house?

What does it feel like to pray in a church built with  tombstones taken from a vandalized muslim cemetery?

What does it feel like to earn a comfortable living from the revered architectural achievements of a culture & religion whose books were burnt, whose adherents persecuted, and whose  followers are still regarded with hostility?

There are no simple answers, no definitive conclusions. There are only personal responses.

* * * * *

In 1492 Granada moved from the center to the periphery. Once the home of world famous scholars, poets, artists and architects today it’s mainly tourists who come to Granada. Is that why Granadinos seem so unperturbed? Oblivious. Am I the only one who is worried? The unconscious never forgets, the repressed is part of memory.  History, this “the wandering horse of bad dreams,” is wide awake. I worry how much longer the city will go on living under the deceptive protection of its triumphant Madonnas,  proud church towers, and five-hundred years of self-righteous national catholicism.

Nightmares anyone?

Granada 8 (nightmares) originally appeared on unguided tour on October 1, 2009.
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Francisco Franco knew that the investiture of Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon as his heir and future King of Spain — after Franco’s death or (unlikely) resignation — would expose the dictator’s insecurity and vulnerability.  He staged this moment with great care.

Just how much was at stake can (still) be discerned on a photograph the New York Times printed in an article reporting on the ceremonial swearing in of Juan Carlos on July 23, 1969.

A youthful Juan Carlos, he is 31 years old, at his residence the Zarzuela Palace in front of a microphone of the state controlled Radio Nacional de España. Acceptance speech in hand. He’s wearing a white navy officer’s uniform. Behind him his wife and three children. In the background a personal assistant is holding the Prince’s hat. A larger than life portrait of his mother presides over the ceremony, approvingly. The scene speaks of youth, fresh air — a touch of Kennedy à la español even. But there’s someone else in the room.

Positioned at the photograph’s symbolic center is a photographer, aiming his instrument at me — and you. Make no mistake, he tells us. The Prince may sooner or later hold power, but real power, the power that affects you, is faceless, anonymous. Built on observation + surveillance. I am the man behind the curtain.

Strangely reminiscent of Velazquez’s Las Meninas the photograph announces a shift in the ways power is going to operate. From the direct and obvious violence of Franco’s guns and torture chambers to the more subtle forms of surveillance and observation. Juan Carlos, whose education was overseen by Franco himself, seemed to be the ideal candidate to represent the transition from old power to new power. Two quotes from the New York Times article:

“Whatever the sacrifices this may involve, I am certain that my hand will not tremble in doing whatever is necessary to defend the principles and laws I have just sworn to.”

“I am close to the young. I admire them and I share their desire to find a better and more more genuine world. I know that in the rebelliousness that worries so many there lives the best generosity of those who want an open future, often with impossible dreams, but always with a noble desire for the good of the people.”

Today, forty years later, Spain is a democracy. Has been a democracy for three decades. Juan Carlos looks beaten, if comfortably so. A hint of melancholy hovering over his face. A monarch marked for life by that new regime he helped to usher in and has supported ever since. He’s not young anymore — and he knows it.

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photo: The New York Times, July 23, 1969

Granada 7 (1969) originally appeared on unguided tour on September 26, 2009.
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In Granada sound is crisp, traveling fast. On the steep, serpentine  calles & cuestas of Realejo + Albayzin (the city’s oldest neighborhoods) I may never catch sight of the bodies whose steps and voices are following me. It took a while but this morning walking down to the bakery, as usual, I’ve made the sounds & whispers my companions. I no longer feel persecuted.

How will I distinguish the ghosts of the present from the ghosts of the past?

Granada 6 (ghosts) originally appeared on unguided tour on September 23, 2009.
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At dusk the women have to find a man to protect them through Granada’s long nights when the streets of the barrios turn against those who make them their home during the day.

Granada 5 (home) originally appeared on unguided tour on September 20, 2009.
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Wednesdays are in between days.

In between what?

In between the beginning & the end of the week. In between the sun & the moon. In between departure & arrival. In between sender & receiver.

The city tranquil, relaxed. The quiet before the storm. On Wednesdays the messenger carries dreams.

Tomorrow the Grenadinas y Grenadinos will diligently greet a new contingent of tourists.

Tomorrow is jueves. Thursday.

Granada 4 (miércoles) originally appeared on unguided tour on September 16, 2009.
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Couples on vacation. I recognize them by their silent meals: 9 o’clock, 2 o’clock, 8 o’clock. And by the thoughts they keep to themselves.

Granada 3 (couples) originally appeared on unguided tour on September 15, 2009.
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Granada is fit for dream and daydream, and it borders everywhere on the ineffable. … Her tender personality is hidden away inside her houses and her landscape. Her voice comes down from a little mirador, or rises from a dark window. … To hear that voice, one must enter the tiny chambers and corners of the city, live the city’s unpeopled interior and well girded solitude. And, what’s even more admirable, explore one’s own intimacy, one’s own secret, taking a definitely lyrical perspective on things. One must make oneself a little poorer, forget one’s name, renounce what people call ‘personality.’ (FG Lorca, Granada, Paradise Closed to Many)

I love to read this passage — the whole essay — over and over again. I wish this was the Granada I know. But it isn’t.

The more I learn about this city closed to many, the more I’m led to believe it wasn’t  Lorca’s Granada either. Lorca’s Granada is a daydream. The nightmares she gave him he fought by feeding the dream. His poetry is a declaration of love to his native city. Granada didn’t love him back. A homosexual and Republican, Lorca wasn’t worthy of her love.

The tourists who come to Granada today are in love with Lorca’s dream.

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Granada 2 (tiny chambers) originally appeared on unguided tour on September 14, 2009.
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Granada, Spain. A group of tourists trying to locate the remnants of a mosque. “It must be right here … somewhere… This looks exactly like on the photograph, doesn’t it? ”

Granada is protected by images.

There are the images the foreigner brings to the city. No-one comes to Granada who hasn’t seen pictures of the magnificent Alhambra, or the imposing Cathedral, or the nostalgic charm of the Albayzin, or of toreros and flamenco dancers. Then there are the images the visitor takes with him when he leaves the city: photographs taken with a cell phone or the digital camera dangling from his wrist; picture postcards bought in the souvenir shops between Plaza Nueva and Puerta Real, and along Gran Via de Colón. Often he tries to replicate the view of a postcard he has just bought.

The postcards fall into two categories. Glossy, colorful bird’s-eye views of the city and its major sights, and nostalgic sepia toned scenes of “historic Granada” — an old fashioned tram at Puerta Real, a group of children on a dusty road in front of a church, a peasant with his donkey. While the postcards specifically tell me what they show — the Alhambra, a historic view of Gran Via — they are not as forthcoming regarding information about when the picture was taken. As if, strange to say, in this ancient city the past had no time.

“Every photograph,” writes John Berger,” presents us with two messages. A message concerning the event photographed and another concerning a shock of discontinuity.” For some viewers this shock can be traumatic — the photograph ‘kills,’ arrests time — for others the shock can bring relief. Granada, I think, takes comfort in the stillness of the past, sees it as a safeguard against the return of traumatic memories that are part of the city’s history.

Is this the reason Granada prefers to rely on the ambiguity of images and appearances, on the fact that photographs (and architecture) can’t speak for themselves? If they could speak, what would they tell of?

They would tell of the killing of the Jews and the forced conversion of the Muslims after the city’s conquest in 1492 by the catholic monarchs Isabel and Fernando; the would tell of the murder of those who continued practicing their religion, of the destruction of synagogues and mosques, the burning of more than 30,000 books in Arabic, the banishing of the Arabic language, the prohibition to wear Muslim-style clothes, and the closing of the city’s bath houses; they would remark on the ostentatious, almost religious consumption of jamón (pork); and they would tell of the mass graves just outside the city where the corpses of those executed by Francisco Franco’s fascist followers during and after the Spanish civil war have been left to rot for more than seven decades.

In Granada postcards are shields. Every single one a defense against the intrusion of the city’s disavowed past. As long as the city sells postcards Granada is safe. Or is it?

Imagination begins with an image. Images are closer to the unconscious than words.

Tomorrow I’m going to buy postcards.

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Granada 1 (protected) originally appeared on unguided tour on September 11, 2009.
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