The Chaleur Bay Review of Books: A Brief Manifesto

El fascismo se cura leyendo, y el racismo se cura viajando

Miguel de Unamuno. Unsourced quote.

During the fascist years of Franco, in Spain, the Basque novelist Miguel de Unamuno was once presiding over a meeting at the University of Salamanca. The meeting was attended by people of diverse political backgrounds, including General Millan-Astray. The evening began, according to some historical accounts, with a speech by the Falangist writer José María Pemán and was followed by the comments of a professor who excoriated Catalonia and the Basque country as cancers on the body of the nation, which Fascism would exterminate. These speeches enthused some of the fascists in the crowd who cried out, “Viva la muerte.” (Long live death, a fascist slogan.) Upon hearing these words Unamuno rose and addressed the crowd, “

You are waiting for my words. You know me well, and know I cannot remain silent for long. Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent. I want to comment on the so-called speech of Professor Maldonado, who is with us here. I will ignore the personal offence to the Basques and Catalans. I myself, as you know, was born in Bilbao. The Bishop,

Unamuno gestured to the Archbishop of Salamanca,

whether you like it or not, is Catalan, born in Barcelona. But now I have heard this insensitive and necrophilous oath, “¡Viva la Muerte!“, and I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent.”

Miguel de Unamuno, Speech on 12 October 1936 University of Salamanca. Accessed on Wikipedia. Accessed June 6, 2020.

Unamuno, the son of an outlying region – the Basque country – recognized the pact that fascist Spain had made with death was ridiculous and repellent; a necrophilious oath which, above all, loathed intelligence. Elsewhere Unamuno has said, “Fascism is cured by reading. Racism is cured by travelling.” It may be that this quote is altogether too simple, but there is a great deal of truth in it, and it is the inspiration for The Chaleur Bay Review of Books. When the Lieutenant Governor of Texas can say, with no sense of how ridiculous and disgusting his words are, “There are More Important Things than Living,” we stand within the insensate echoes of General Millan-Astray, with his crippled and crippling vision of reality.

We must protest, with the livid and living sensibilities of those who live, and breathe, and suffer, that we will not silently stand by and assent to the destruction of human lives, of the knowledges and languages of nations, and of the curiosity and intelligence of inquiring minds. As an immigrant to the Gaspésie, where the Baie des Chaleurs is found, I have long been interested in the unique historical relationship between the Basque people and the Mi’kmaq – the First Nation of the Gaspé Peninsula. Common to both these groups is their regional distinctiveness, and the efforts to preserve language and culture in the face of a homogenizing modernity. (See Aitor Esteban, “Aniaq: Mi’kmaq and Basques.” The story of these two peoples depict possibilities of resilience and relationship for peoples of linguistic and geographical minorities rooted in the practical curiosity of human intelligence.

The devastating legacy of settler colonialism stems, in part, from lack of curiosity and lack of awareness. Intelligence is dangerous, because it may unsettle the claims and privileges which a certain group wishes to exert over another. Getting to know the place in which one lives – its history, its beauty, its violence, and its shame – is the way to know the place from which one thinks. Travel is an antidote to racism, only if the traveller voyages with genuine interest and openness. If I travel to a new land, but refuse to learn its language, history, rhythms, and culture, then I have not travelled, I have only invaded.

It is my hope that the Review will be a place of genuine travel and literacy; a work of learning for myself as much as for any of my fellow travelers and readers who chance by this locale. Literacy, in my mind, is about much more than the ability to read scratch marks on a page or a screen. Literacy encompasses the landscape of the soul; it is an adventure and exploration of the self and others. As with any adventure or any exploration, literacy is not without its perils. Certain forms of literacy might, for example, lead one to deprecate or depreciate other forms, rendering us illiterate in crippling ways. If we only speak the language of the conquerors, then how will we listen to the voices of those who have resisted and stood on the margins? How shall we begin to travel, in our souls, to those places that have been long neglected? How shall we avoid the crippling fears that might lead us, like a one-eyed military general, to long for death?

These are hard questions, which I raise here only to frame the work that the Review will undertake. There are risks involved in reading, and in travelling, but these risks are necessary and invigorating.

There is hatred and fear to be undone, and there is pain to be confronted. Pain which, perhaps, can be better borne if rooted in a robust sense of place.

A sense of place, of a place in this world, is at once a general and specific reality. Concrete experiences of place have to be named, and they have to be named well and truly. Nativism and fascism cloak their invocations of place – blood and soil – in the threadbare mantle of the flag, thereby undermining the emergence of true regional consciousness and replacing intelligence and persuasion with the blunt brutality of force. Every generation is required to confront the regressive forms of social belonging which threaten, as they threaten particular persons and communities, the destruction of the human race and of the planet.

It is my hope that, along with a search for a regionally-rooted consciousness – a place from which to think – the reflections here might also be offered in the spirit of what Gayatri Spivak calls “planetarity” that is, thinking with the planet. Planetarity, as she defines it, has to do with a dialogic of accountability and exchange. She offers it in the context of a call to

“imagine anew the imperatives that structure all of us, as giver and taker, female and male, planetary human beings.”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2012), 350

The imperative to re-imagine the planet – away from and perhaps against – globalization – is not an easy call to heed. Spivak notes that the “globe” is the symbol of electronic capital – a gridlocked world which imposes the same system of exchange everywhere. “The globe is on our computers. It is the symbol of the World Bank.” To propose, as Spivak does, the planet to overwrite the globe, brings us into the realms of dialogics – freedom of contradiction without synthesis, as well as the logic of supplementarity.

The Review, indeed, could be conceived as a literary supplement, a small effort, in the era of globalization, to wrestle with place, planet, people. An attempt to preserve an agility of the mind and to inhabit those paradoxes and double binds in which life constantly involves us without ever having recourse to the brutal, insensate, and crippling resignation which cries out, “Viva la muerte.”

Let us, with Unamuno, be priests in the temple of intelligence, seeking not to win, but to speak the truth about who and where we are in the convincing tones of love.