Nothing Fixes Itself Nothing Fixes Itself
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Almudena Grandes. Photo by Pep Avila
Experiences

Nothing Fixes Itself

An Interview with Almudena Grandes
Aleksandra Lipczak
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time 20 minutes

“Women of my generation had no role models. We began our journey into adulthood without signposts. We moved forward taking good decisions, but also making mistakes. We progressed, although it was sometimes hellishly difficult,” recounts Almudena Grandes, the best-selling Spanish writer, whose novel Dr Garcia’s Patients was published this year in Polish.

Aleksandra Lipczak: We are talking the day after Franco’s exhumation.

Almudena Grandes: I am a little disorientated, because for me it was a strange experience. After everything I have written and said, after all the documentaries I was involved in, I spent the day they finally exhumed Franco in Kraków. Actually, not even in Kraków, but on a plane.

Today, over breakfast, I watched all the videos and read the commentaries. What do I think? I think that it is all connected to the Spanish anomaly. The fact that the dictator had been buried in a place maintained with public money, where anyone could take a selfie at his grave, had made it into a folkloric anomaly. However, this isn’t the heart of the problem.

So, what is it?

The fact that, during the transformation, they went for a slogan which sounded really good: “To move forward, one must forget.”

Spain decided to rebuild its democracy from scratch. Without recognition of earlier democratic traditions, and without breaking ties with the dictatorship. We won’t go there; we won’t talk about it. We’ll see if the problem fixes itself. This was the approach. Only, nothing fixes itself. A dictatorship that lasts 40 years shapes the feelings, thought processes and conscience of the entire country. Four decades of indoctrination and manipulation don’t just disappear overnight if we say: “From henceforth we are democrats, and the best democrats at that.”

The fact that Franco’s body was, until now, buried at the Valley of the Fallen was part of that strategy. We didn’t discuss it, because we had already moved on. As we say in Spain, we tried to make a tortilla without breaking eggs. Let me be clear: you can’t.

The exhumation is a very powerful image. It came 40 years too late, but that is no reason not to do it. I see it above all as a form of redress for the victims of the war and dictatorship. More than a hundred thousand people in Spain are still buried by roadsides, in mass graves and in the forests.

Spain comes second only to Cambodia in terms of the number of people in the world who disappeared during wartime. And our judges haven’t spent even a fraction of the time on helping the families of the missing as they have

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The Legacy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
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The writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o served his time not under British rule, but in the new, magnificent and independent Kenya. Because it sometimes turns out that one of the legacies of colonialism can be corrupt and broken elites – and Ngũgĩ waged war on them with his pen.

When the distinguished guests of the Norfolk Hotel, quaffing champagne, fired from the windows at a crowd of protesting Kenyans, there was darkness on the other side of the road. Perhaps by firing at people, they fancied that they were honing their hunting skills, or perhaps, quite simply, they were killing time on a boring afternoon. That was Nairobi in spring 1922. There was no theatre yet opposite the hotel. The theatre was built 40 years later, the year before Kenya won its fight for independence. But a further four decades were to pass before the National Theatre in Nairobi became accessible to all: “A home for our common Kenyan dreams,” as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, once known as James Ngugi, wrote.

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