Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

But Lorca, according to a paper by Dr Ahmed Abdel-Aziz submitted to a conference I attended last week, is not just of interest to western writers and critics. He has, Abdel-Aziz argues, become a myth in the Arab world. His anti-Fascist stands influenced and inspired a generation of Arab and European intellectuals, and the fact that he was arrested and executed by Franco's soldiers on the eve of the Spanish Civil War served only to consolidate the myth. He became a hero within leftist Arab circles.

The Lorca myth neatly transferred from the political to the literary sphere, a transference made all the more smooth by the gypsy and Arab sympathies that are such a feature of his writing, and a number of Arab writers fell under his influence, among them Bakr Shaker Al-Sayab, the Iraqi poet.

Perhaps Lorca's most famous works are the dramas that came collectively to be termed the Blood Trilogy -- Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba. Blood Wedding tells the story of a bride who, on her planned wedding night elopes with the man she loves. In the end both lovers are killed. The heart is sacrificed to the strict social traditions that the bride, by her elopement, challenges.

Yerma is no less tragic in its conclusion, though it is perhaps The House of Bernarda Alba, which Lorca completed in 1936, on which his greatest fame rests. It is seldom, if ever, out of production, and most theatres in major cities across the globe must at some time have staged the play.

Unlike the first two plays in the trilogy, the third is written in prose rather than poetry. It is the tale of five girls who live their lives in the shadow of a strict and dominating mother. The house is engulfed in an atmosphere of gloom and overriding sense of incipient disaster and the surface of the girls' lives is constantly disrupted by undercurrents of anger, desire and frustration. The mother, incidentally, dresses only in black.

The youngest of the sisters rebels against her mother and begins an affair with the fiancé of the eldest sister. When the affair is discovered she commits suicide.

According to the paper submitted to the conference by Dr Thoraya Saadeddin, the trilogy embodies a feminine revolt against the strict traditions of rural Andalusian society, a result of centuries of Arab rule. Yet it is this very heritage that is celebrated in Lorca's own poetry, particularly in the collection Divan del Tamrit.

One does well to remember, though, that although Lorca's reputation rests on three tragedies, in the words of one critic, he "was known to his friends as a young man with a singular passion for laughter".

There could be no better reminder of this aspect of his personality than the revival, at the Intar Hispanic American Arts Society, of a farce Lorca penned in 1929. It is the story of a shoemaker who marries an 18-year-old girl, much to the delight of the local gossips. That she taunts him with tales of all the young suitors she might have married furthers the delight of the malicious gossips and eventually the shoemaker leaves his young bride. In order to make a living she is forced to turn his cobbler's shop into a bar, and spends all her time fending off the young lotharios she had been only too happy to boast about. Finally she breaks down in front of an itinerant puppeteer, confessing that her only really love was the shoemaker. Overcome by this show of fidelity, the puppeteer reveals himself as the shoemaker in disguise. After a moment of bliss, though, the young bride is back to her old self, berating her poor, and once again smitten, husband.