Excursion into Myth and Language

Well, I promised Debora Ferreira I would relate the story of the bat and, I shall. 

I could do so very briefly. Though simple in itself, it un-walls the cave on so many other issues of intriguing history and folklore in this part of Spain. 

Simply, the bat, called in Valenciano, the rat penat or flying mouse, is on its crest prominently.  It stands over other significant symbols of Valencian identity.  Why?

Well, here we go. 

The city of Valencia, a prominent port of the Mediterranean located in marshes on the mouth of the … river., once was a Moorish city. Mosquitos were a terrible problem as one might imagine, perhaps even worse than the pesky Christians that would attack from time to time. 

It is said that the moors relied on bats to control mosquitos, though I do not know about Christians. 

Nonetheless, one time, when the King of Aragon, Jaume I invaded and was outside the city waiting to stage his attack, a bat flew into his camp. It made a big noise by striking the armaments and then flapping its wings on a drum. It sounded the alarm that the Moors were about to stealthfully attack Jaume’s forces. 

As a result of the bat’s sounding the war drums, the Christians were ready and able to fend of the soldiers of Valencia.  As a result, the Christians took over the city and region.

Ever since, they say, the rat penat has been considered a defender of the city; the bat saved it from ongoing Moorish occupation and the Christians from almost certain defeat. 

Curiously, the bat is somewhat similar to the dragon though a mammal rather than a reptile that occupies and important place in Aragon’s history. There they relate that St. George, yes  that St. George, managed to appear in Aragon and defeat the dragon who had been terrorizing the region, demanding a daily human sacrifice to assuage his attacks. The king had promised his daughter to whoever could take out the dragon.

What is it with these kings always wanting to give away their daughters? The King in Alicante was said to do the same thing, though for water rather than to defeat a dragon. 

So anyway. St. George killed the dragon as he did all over Europe. The dude really got around.  He left his image and his red bars on the coat of arms of Aragon.

Though part of Valencia as a Spanish region and though the second city of Valencia in terms of population, Alicante does not ostentate the bat in its heraldry. Instead it has the three red bars of Aragon in recognition of St George.

Jaume did conquer Alicante too, it is said, but his son-in law, King Alfonso the Wise of Castille redid the task.

In these dynastic struggles with the Arabs, and the effort by historians to say whose…”dragon”… is bigger or mightie—as in the flying mouse.

In short, or in tall, if you prefer, these conquests are origin stories for the cultural and linguistic diversity of Valencia and Alicante.  They are also contested but we shall not go there.

Both Valencia and Alicanjte have the language Valenciano, a close relative of Barcelona’s Catalan—Jaume sponsored literature in Catalan and was said to have spoken the tongue as well as, Aragonese, a different language now on the verge of extinction. (kings and noblemen are strangely multilingual).

While Catalan stems from the same family as French—this story helps explain why King Jaume did not go to war against the French—Aragonese is fromn the same family as Castillian.

Now called Churro (like the Iberian-descendent sheep of New Mexico), the Spanish of the western mountains of Valencia is heavily influenced by it if not being in fact its daughter with a more modern Castillian influence. 

The lowlands of Valencia are said to speak a language related to Catalan and the highlands a language related to that of Aragon, due to the fact that Jaume was the head of both provinces. He is said to hav brought colonists from both to “resettle” the lands taken from the Moors. 

However, In Alicante, the issue is more complex.  The north is like Valencia with Valenciano in the East and Castillian—now like Alfonso’s Manchego in the west. 

To the south, the City of Elce (Elx) is officially Valenciano speaking as are highland areas, while the broad southen Vinalopó valley is Spanish speaking. There the Spanish is more like Murcian.

Alicante was near the boundary established between the vassal kingdom of Alphonso, Murcia, and Catalonia. 

Thus in the city you hear Spanishes similar to Murcian in pronunciation if not in all the Murcian words,  and some similar to Manchego. You can also hear Valenciano, as well as their own Spanish of their bilingual life. 

I have now finished my wonderful dim sum from a cool local Chinese place near the sea, and will go back into my bat-world of poetry and strange ideas, like that of dappled sunlight and shadow from the Japanese Komorebi. Later…

Braves Running in Violence at Dusk

 

As I was leaving, the mood in Alicante’s Public Market turned fierce this morning. Normally it is calm and businesslike, except when knots of tourists block stands and paths to listen to their guides and then buy nothing. 

Today, a small gray-haired man, about my age, raised his arm and shook his fist at two tallish, darker skinned men behind the display case in a meat stand. Their eyes were ready to shoot fire as their skin turned darker with rage. 

Inevitably curious about Alicante, I paused.

Spaniards like you went to work in other countries, the gray haired man shouted. That was not so long ago.  

It is all because of you guys, the Right. You create these problems

Strangely ceding a couple of points, one of the taller men shouted back, well we did not go to delinguir.

That word means to commit misdemeanors and sometimes crimes. 

I moved away before the match drew more people and turned even more angry. In Bars, and elsewhere, Spanish can argue forcefully. Their voices are resonant and really boom. But I have never seen an argument in the market through this whole year of being here. 

Part of the reason I walked away was because the context seemed to me explosive and to draw from violence last night and the night before in a neighborhood of farm workers in the next door region of Murcia.

Everyone awakened these days to news that either focused on an elderly Spanish man being apparently beaten by a young Moroccan man whose friends filmed it and put it on a Tik Tok, the news says. I have not seen it. Or, people would perceive hordes of masked self-proclaimed Spanish nationalists marauding through the evening both nights in a hunt (cacería) for immigrants, read Moroccans.

The roving men, armed with machetes and sticks, shovels and hoes, if not more, came from as far away as Madrid, Valencia, or even Alicante, to heed the call of a local leader of VOX, the ultra right wing party to hunt Moros (Moors or Moroccans in local parlance). The call was for vengeance for the man’s beating and to take security into their own hands. 

But the call also comes after the national party has called for the repatriation of millions of immigrants and their Spanish-born children using language from Germany that Trump and his ghouls also rely on, including the notion of replacement theory. 

At the same time, the ruling party, the Socialists, argue that Spains economy  is growing because of immigration to meet the demand for workers, even if young men often find it hard to obtain work. 

The issues are hot, inflamed by face to face debates in parliament where VOX and the conservative, post Franco, PP, the People’s Party through verbal thrusts of sharpened rhetoric to slice and wound the country’s president, who of course sends similarly h9ned swords of words to pierce his enemies, the PP’s Feijoo and VOX’s Abascal. 

Sanchez, the President, stood at the podium: Señor Abascal, why do you hate immigrants. Abascal merely closed his face and looked smug. His deputies delivered the charge of racial replacement later. In the meantime, to not be left out, Feijoo who most likely will become president should the socialists fall, thrust out, you Mr Sanchez, are a hypocrite. You claim to be a feminist but you have lived from money your father-in-law made from owning brothels and Gay saunas. You literally, have live from the exploitation of women. 

Not even the bulls running down the streets of Pamplona and into the bull ring where they will be killed by matadors before thousands have created such tension as Mr. Feijoo slicing Mr Sanchez with the bellowing cry putero, pimp. 

To not be out done and to change the focus of national discourse, VOX’s strong young men and more rotund older men have gone hunting for Moroccans.

Here in Alicante, all this appears in the news as neighborhoods that used to be villages carry out one of the most important annual rituals, the Moros y Cristianos, the great battles between Moors and Cristians when the Cristian kings took Alicante from Spains Moorish kings and carried out an ethic cleansing, replacing them with Christians back in the twelfth century of so. Despite nine-hundred years, that event still draws people and creates memory as well as a division in the population between Spaniards (Cristians) and Moors).

Just as I do not know what happened in the market as the smaller man faced off against the two larger men, I do not know what will happen in Spain, nor in Murcia, nor even Alicante. 

History is far from dead here. The market celebrates annually the day the Italian fascists, in support of Franco’s fascist forces bombed the town’s market and killed more than three-hundred people. Yet one of the founders of Spain’s fascist party is from here and French right wing Pied Noirs colonists were withdrawn from Algeria and settled in Alicante when not even France would take them because of their history of violence. Still, the city was the last capital of the Republic and has/had a vital Communist and Socialist presence. 

I read on line that local Communists are organizing to defend workers rights against VOX’ threats of more general cacerías of immigrants. 

Yet the blood has not settled into the bricks and stones of the streets in Murcia, nor has it fully joined the sand in Parliament. Swords, lances, and colorful banderillas (hooked stakes) have not been put in lockers.  More is sure to come.