Language and Identity: Catalan Case

Language functions as a carrier for culture. The very concept of a culture is rooted in its language. On language, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the most prominent poets and philosophers of the Romantic period, said that it is the armoury of the human mind that contains the trophies of the past and the weapon of its future conquests. Language is the mold that surrounds our cultural identity. The culture is carved in our language – the primary method of identity.

      

John E Joseph, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, in his book ‘Language and Identity’ (2004) defines linguistic identities as ‘double-edged swords’. While acting in a constructive manner to give individuals a sense of belonging by representing an ‘us’ opposed to a ‘them’, it also becomes easy for linguistic identities to demonise themselves. A language’s cultural allegiance also gives rises to regionalism, which often converts itself into a political ideology, and, on occasions, separatism.

      

Catalan case  

On one day towards the end of the summer of 2012, an unwonted development occurred in Catalonia, an autonomous region of Spain. Under the slogan ‘Catalunya, nou estat d'Europa’ (‘Catalonia, new state in Europe’), up to 2m Catalans gathered in central areas of Barcelona, bringing the city centre to a standstill for hours.

The rally – the largest ever organised in Catalonia since La Transición (the Spanish transition to democracy) following the death of the Spain’s military dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 – marked the culmination of a series of protests called ‘Marxa cap a la Independència’ (‘March towards Independence’) that had begun in June that year to demand independence of the region from Spain.

This was not the first time Catalans poured into the streets en masse as part of their independence movement. The political movement started in nineteen-twenties, though the movement in modern days had its seeds sown in 2010 when the Constitutional Court, Spain’s highest judicial body, annulled parts of constitutional regulations granting Catalonia powers of self-rule. The move has since prompted protests on various occasions over these years.

The issue significantly escalated in the second half of 2017, with unprecedented events such as independence referendum held in October and the Constitutional Court declaring it illegal, the imposition of Spain’s direct rule on Catalonia, arrests of several regional government officials, and regional elections in December in which pro-independence parties won a majority.                            

Catalan separatist flag outside the regional government headquarters in Barcelona (pic courtesy: Reuters/Juan Medina)

The separatist sentiment in Catalonia has long been fuelled partly due to the perception that Spain threatens Catalan linguistic identity by attempting to ‘hispanicise’ the region. Catalan language was banned for around forty years during the dictatorship of General Franco, who came into power following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The tyranny of military rule not only impacted Catalonia politically but culturally as well. As democracy returned in Spain in the nineteen-seventies, Catalans have contributed by letting flow their time and money into safeguarding the centuries-old language.  

Death of linguistic identities and cultures occur in severe cases of marginalisation. Fortuitously, it is not the case with Catalonia. Catalan ideologies about their identity can be viewed in two ways: language-and-identity and language-and-territory, with the former sharing more an emotional link with language and the other implying that Catalan language should be the one practiced as the main language in public settings. Catalonian’s law mandates the use of Catalan language at schools, hospitals and public sector offices.

In comparison with majority of socio-political and cultural movements that are based on race and ethnicity, language has played a crucial role in firmly determining a Catalan identity. Conversely, a pivotal part of the Catalan identity is not only the local language, but the fact that Catalans are amicably bilingual in both Spanish and Catalan. The Catalan Institute for Statistics suggests that more than fifty percent of Catalans adjudge Spanish to be their native language despite the fact that over eighty percent of the regional population can speak Catalan.

Amid an unceasing, heated pro-independence movement and nationalist parties coming back in power in regional parliament, the time may be ripe for Catalans to realise that secessionism is bad not just for Catalonia but also Spain, as well as Europe. There are constructive social elements such as pluralism and integration that Catalans ought to hold in high regard rather than embracing separatist groups. Multiculturalism and multilingualism can not only aggrandise socio-economic opportunities but also counter marginalisation and culture decay of the region.

Rodin’s Kiss

In his own words, Auguste Rodin – one of the most prominent sculptors of the nineteenth century – was like a moon that shone on an immense, unknown sea where ships never passed. He was born in 1840 in Paris in a family with a modest background, and his artistic interests – centered on pencils and clays – were supported by his father. In his late adolescence, he was refused thrice admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris’s leading school of art, because of his early old-fashioned taste in arts. He belonged to traditional school of sculpture, while judges at the Ecole had Neoclassical taste. The refusal, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the artist in order to be what he became known for later in his life.

Known to be a naturalist, Rodin believed conflict and suffering to be trademarks of modern arts. This helped him depart with the traditional Greek idealism of sculpture and monumental expression in his works and focus more on emotion and character. Immensely renowned for a wide range of his works, including The Thinker, The Age of Bronze, The Walking Man, The Burghers of Calais, The Gates of Hell and The Kiss, Rodin, in his heyday, was associated habitually with high-profile artists, intellectuals and social influencers. His social circle included Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the eminent French Impressionist painter, and Claude Monet, a founder of French Impressionist painting, with whom he shared a lifelong friendship. Rodin said that it was Monet who helped him comprehend clouds, light, sea and cathedrals.

"Nothing, really, is more moving than the maddened beast, dying from unfulfilled desire and asking in vain for grace to quell its passion." While Rodin may have professed this to express the importance of suffering and emotions in his works, his statement somewhat depicts the circumstance of Camille Claude – Rodin’s muse, assistant and mistress – in his life. Camille met Rodin when she was seventeen, and he forty-two or forty-three.

Copy of Rodin's 'The Kiss' at Rodin Museum in Philadelphia

The duo, in their more than ten years of affairs, formed an intense but blustery relationship and artistically impacted each other. Camille served as a model for several of Rodin’s works and assisted him on various assignments, becoming his most talented pupil. However, her intense relationship with Rodin was eclipsed by the latter’s unwavering association with Rose Beuret – Rodin’s lifelong partner – who he eventually married a few weeks before her death. Camille’s exasperation with Rodin’s refusal to abandon Rose finally led to separation between the master sculptor and his pupil in 1898, years after which Camille suffered a mental breakdown.

"I have fallen into an abyss. I live in a world so curious, so strange. Of the dream that was my life, this is my nightmare." - Camille Claudel

While there may not be any equivalence between Camille’s tragic love and melancholic elements and connotations of Rodin’s hugely famous work The Kiss, which depicted the illicit love between Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta in thirteenth century Italy, it’s worth reflecting on. Francesca, a high-class woman, falls in love with her husband's younger brother Paolo, and both of whom are stabbed to death by Francesca’s husband while the couple reads a book on courtly love. Rodin, in his work, depicts the moment before the two lovers intended to kiss each other; Paolo also holds the book in his hand, in the sculpture. Almost equally ailing was Camille’s romance with Rodin.  

Following her separation with Rodin, Camille’s mental health worsened over several years. She escaped Rodin’s umbra but succumbed to a nervous breakdown. In 1913, her family confined her to a mental asylum and later to a psychiatric hospital where she remained for around thirty years until her death. In her seclusion, she rarely received any visitors; Camille’s mother refused to see her daughter again, while her brother visited only occasionally in thirty years.  

Rodin had always shown his desire that there would be a room showcasing Camille’s works when a museum dedicated to his own work started in Paris. The Rodin Museum was inaugurated in 1919, two years after Rodin’s death. However, Rodin’s wish to have a Camille Claudel room in the museum took more than thirty years to materialise; in 1952, Camille’s brother donated four major sculptors by her to the museum.

Recently, in a major recognition to the sculptress’ talent, a museum entirely dedicated to her, the national Camille Claudel Museum, opened earlier this year in the north-central French town of Nogent-sur-Seine. Although Camille destroyed several of her sculptures when she was alive (“I took all my wax studies and threw them in the fire... that's the way it is when something unpleasant happens to me. I take my hammer and I squash a figure.”), the newly opened museum boasts of a collection of around 90 of her works, dispelling the gloom of isolation and obscurity that besieged her entire personal and artistic life more than a hundred years ago. 

When Disaster Strikes

Conversations about disasters are often tinged with dismay and grief. In the aftermath of a large fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in the North Kensington area of London on 14 June, the world witnessed a story being circulated about a child rescued from the 16th floor of the building 12 days after the fire broke out. What initially seemed to be a miraculous slice of good news, with users on social media buying in the heartening story, eventually turned out to be a false narrative.

Around 80 people are presumed to have been killed in the fire, which took around 200 freighters more than 24 hours to control, but only after it had destroyed at least 150 homes in the tower and its vicinity. Narrative serves as the terminus a quo for recovery. A wide array of discussions is now being held in the regular media and social media, and the UK government is coming up with the stricter implementation of fire safety policies to prevent further catastrophes. 

      

Amanda Ripley in her book ‘The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes ­– And Why’, which later turned into a PBS documentary, says that we worry about horrible things happening to us, but we do not know much about what it actually feels like. We flirt shamelessly with risk today, constructing city skylines in hurricane alleys and neighbourhoods on tops of fault lines. But as we build ever more impressive buildings and aeroplanes, we do less and less to build better survivors.   

Our disaster personalities are more multifaceted and primordial than we think. But they are also more pliable. As William Irwin Thompson said, “Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. “ It’s only when catastrophes hit us that we realise our potential. Disasters often start quite modestly, and it’s a proven fact that majority of serious accidents, including significant aircraft damage, severe injuries and fire, are survivable.

Luck during disasters is not to be trusted. Also, relying solely on the response by emergency officials may not be of much help, given that no professional lifesaver or staff of emergency response team can be everywhere immediately. In many instances, delayed or poor mitigating measures by the authorities have rather exacerbated the situation than resolving it appropriately. Many forms of disasters may be predictable, but surviving them may not. The bigger and more complex the catastrophe, the more and probably longer we will be on our own.

As Ripley impeccably sums up in her book, we have more control over our fates than we think. But we need to stop underestimating ourselves. We need to train ourselves to function more quickly and show better judgment under disastrous circumstances.