The Canary Islands by Juan Cruz Ruiz

Author:Juan Cruz Ruiz [Cruz Ruiz, Juan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS054000, HIS001030
ISBN: 9781468315448
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

THE BEAUTIFUL DESERT

WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT FUERTEVENTURA, JUST AS WHEN YOU ARRIVE at every island, you should look out of the window of the aeroplane, if you are not coming by boat; in the case of Fuerteventura, this is obligatory in order to see if Miguel de Unamuno was right when, living here in exile in the 1920s, he said that you have to approach this beautiful desert with a clean soul. Unamuno said as much in a famous sonnet from his sequence From Fuerteventura to Paris where he wrote that that Fuerteventura is a skeleton of an island. And that is how you see it from above: a skeleton which grows larger and smaller, like a size-shifting lizard that somehow manages to stay alive and vigilant no matter its size; wounded or whatever else, the lizard keeps on breathing whatever its dimensions.

And that was how I saw it from the air; Fuerteventura is the air itself, like the air of the earth; it is an island in search of shade, and it is a skeleton. Unamuno compared it with gofio as well, the major source of food for the primitive inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and of all of us who have continued to think of this food as the symbol of all our meals; if you say ‘bread’, then you are talking about the basis of your diet, and if you say ‘papas’, then you are talking about what the Canary Islanders and the Southern Americans eat, and if you say ‘gofio’, then you are referring to the Canary Islands, or to Fuerteventura in particular. The same Fuerteventura that Miguel de Unamuno saw.

So, when I read Unamuno and saw him identify the island with gofio, I felt that he was my poet, that he knew where the Islands’ childhood came from, how we were able to survive when there were only papas, fish, gofio and cheese, the basic elements in the diet of generations of Canary Islanders. And Fuerteventura, which is an island that has been extremely isolated by its poverty, felt more than any other island, at least as much as El Hierro or the south of Tenerife, the humble solidarity of gofio with one’s stomach.

But we had reached Fuerteventura, and some verses of Unamuno took me back to everybody’s childhood. Now a great deal of time has gone by, and childhood no longer exists save as the memory of a memory, or the distant gleam of an event in the past, and Fuerteventura is a different island from the one which welcomed Miguel de Unamuno (which embraced him, literally, preventing his exile from turning into an imprisonment). Back then Unamuno—who was the rector of Salamanca University in 1936 when Franco started the Civil War, but who in the 1920s was a thunderous professor, a republican member of parliament, and opposed to the soft dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, who had him sent into exile—scandalised the whole of the conservative society of the capital of Fuerteventura, Puerto Cabras, now known as Puerto del Rosario.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.