Blank Resistance Now!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While not actually apologising, the commissioner for the Met has issued a statement emphasising that the police have been reminded that the right to protest exists and that it is enshrined in law.  Is it?  I wonder.

     What are protesters against the unelected imposition of a head of state like Charles III – not him personally of course (though there could be valid objections to his assuming the role given his suspect character) – but to anyone who gets the top job because,  solely because, he happens to be his mother’s eldest son to do?

     Any attempt by the police to interpret laws in a way that restricts reasonable freedom of expression is to be resisted.  But how to resist without putting oneself in the way of considerable danger (both social, political, and legal) and of being true to the cause that you think is worth speaking out for?

     Some protesters have found a way, by holding up blank pieces of paper and having a large banner on which nothing is written.  This is a response to the ill-advised attempt by some hapless policeman to try to arrest someone (in fact a barrister) in Westminster who had held up a blank sheet of paper and asked what would have happened if he had written, “Not My King” on it.  He was promptly asked for his details which the barrister refused to give demanding to be told why he was being asked for them, “Because you said you were going to write stuff on it that may offend people around the king . . .  it may offend someone.”  That sort of response makes any use of an exclamation mark at the end of that extraordinary explanation complete redundant – and of course, inadequate.

     “May offend” is an open invitation for its use being employed to ensure our complete lack of freedom of expression.  Yes, at a time of national mourning, it could be considered crass or bad manners to protest – but being crass and bad mannered are not criminal offences.   

     At this time the police should accommodate protest and not be seen to supress it.  The police are there to protect ordinary people, they are a non-military force who serve the interests of the general public, and they should need to be reminded of their status and their duties.

     I am the first to admit that the policing of a public event like the funeral of the Queen, and the gathering of heads of state concentrating in The Abbey must be a considerable nightmare, and most people recognize that general safety means that some restriction on freedom of movement and access must be allowed.  But apart from the family event of the death of a matriarch, it must also be recognized that the whole concept of the way that this country continues to be governed is also a discussion that needs to be protected.

     If the police and the government are not careful then they will have given protesters against the anti-democratic imposition of a hereditary ruler imposed on them by tradition the simplest of all protests to show that this is not the way that they wish ruled.  All they have to do is hold up a blank piece of paper.  No protest is simpler to make: no writing or sloganizing necessary; no use of felt tips and paint brushes, just a simple blankness.

     After the vicious governmental oppression during and after the 1^st of October Referendum on Independence in 2017, a yellow ribbon became a symbol of support (my Christmas tree in 2017 was covered in them!) and the Spanish government went full paranoid and began banning the colour yellow wherever they could.  So, if you were wearing a yellow t-shirt you were not allowed to go into a football match, or enter certain government buildings, in short it became an absurdity, and the symbol of the yellow ribbon grew and grew.

     If the authorities are not careful, then the blank sheet of paper could take on a similar significance and become a potent symbol in its own right.

 

 

 

 

Sunday start

A lazy day today, I didn’t get up until 8.15 am!  I decided to give swimming a miss and will compensate by having an extended bike ride on the way to and from getting lunch in the local chicken place.

     I’ve completed the quick Guardian crossword, though it was a little more taxing than usual and I am sometimes stuck by the brevity of the clues that give a slanted version of the necessary word’s definition, so I often get the word before I realize its link to the clue!  Still, it’s done and that gives the start of the day a sort of achievement to add to the impetus of filling time with something useful.  Not that I have to search around for things to do as each day ends with my only having completed a part of my ‘to do’ list.  At the moment, for example, Catalan homework is handing over me and this writing is, yet again, displacement activity to compensate for my not doing it!

     There is a whip to get me in line with the work that I need to do for Catalan, as the examination for this section of the course will take place on the 13^th of this month.  We have been given fair warning, have been told what sort of vocabulary is going to be tested and have been given direct and clear indications of what sort of writing we will need to complete.  With such clear directions it is perverse and churlish not to get stuck in to the work and start the process of learning.  But I haven’t yet got round to starting this.  In my notebook that is supposed to be for my ideas for poems, I often find myself writing encouraging or admonitory notes to myself about work that needs to be done.  This writing too is another way of my communicating with myself to get geared up to start the hard work of learning.

     I find learning new words difficult; I discover a new, often useful word in Catalan, look at it, try and memorize it, write it down a few times – and then it’s gone.  The amount of effort needed to set the words in my memory seems disproportionate and I therefore tend to enter my learning zone with negativity washing around my mind.  I try and reason with myself: I live in Catalonia, I am surrounded by the language, learning it is merely a matter of common courtesy as well as increasing my understanding and so on and so on – but whatever psychological boosts I give myself, the simple inability to retain new vocab. Is a settled fact.  This in turn means that the examination will be another depressing indication of inability as I stagger my illiterate way towards the end of the scholastic year!

     In my own language, however, I continue to thrive.  The latest work on the ‘recalcitrant’ poem is producing good results.  Even though I may not have written a single line of poetry, the ideas and some phrases are steadily coalescing and the structure is beginning to emerge from all my pencilled scribbles.  I know for past experience that the present discrete idea elements scattered throughout the pages that I have already written will, eventually come together into a (hopefully) coherent poem.  Even if it doesn’t, the process is one that is enjoyable if demanding!

 

Today is Saint David’s Day and I have hunted around (as I do each year) to find the little artificial daffodil (purchased in aid of the Marie Curie Foundation) to wear for my National Day.  And, each time I wear it, it focuses my attention on my nationality.  In my next book, The eloquence of broken things, there is a section that brings together poems I have written that consider my nationality and what it mean to me.  For a numerically small nation, identity is a constant preoccupation and with the swamping proximity of England and the overwhelming use of English as the language of Wales the relationship between Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom is a critical element in the national sense of identity.  Each St David’s Day has become an opportunity for me to indulge (and I think that is the right word) in a particular form of introspection that rarely affects me on other days of the year – which is significant in itself!

     Only once has anyone commented on my wearing of a daffodil on St David’s Day and I assume that it will go generally unnoticed today as well.  Though there is a slightly different dimension because daffodils are yellow. 

     Let me explain.  I wear a metal pin of a yellow ribbon to show my support for the Catalans who are still in prison or restricted in their public lives because of the Spanish justice system in the aftermath of the referendum for Catalan independence.  Putting the question of independence aside for a moment, I consider the jailing of so many Catalan politicians to be reprehensible and perhaps an indication of the politicisation of the Spanish justice system. 

     The reaction of the Spanish to the Catalans has sometimes been little short of paranoid, with some instances of the banning of the colour yellow e.g. football supporters wearing yellow t-shirts or scarves having to give up pieces of yellow clothing before they were allowed into the games!  So a yellow daffodil could be seen as a statement of support for the prisoners and Catalan independence.

     In my case as I am wearing it next to the yellow ribbon, obviously for aesthetic rather than political reasons, the link is more obvious!

Unity?

Spain is a divided country: that is a fact.  The only point of discussion is how you think it is divided, and by whom.

This division was brought home to me by the reaction of a lady I spoke to this morning when going for an early morning swim before my first Catalan lesson of the week.  She remarked my yellow ribbon badge and we had a whispered conversation about those of the country who are opposed to the attitude that the ribbon represents, and who, to use her words, have the brains of mosquitoes.

The yellow ribbon badge is a signal to observers that I support the political prisoners that we have in Spain.  The leaders of two organisations that were involved in the referendum about Catalan independence have now been in prison awaiting trial since October 2017. 

 

The charges that the Spanish government has brought against some Catalans, via their politically appointed judges, have signally failed to convince any other European government to extradite Catalans who have been charged with “rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds”. 

The continuing humiliation of the Spanish government in the eyes of other Europeans and the hugely negative impression that has been left in the collective mind since the police violence that attempted to suppress the referendum combine to force those supporters of the Spanish state into ever more ludicrous justifications to bolster up their positions.

For me, there has clearly been mismanagement (at the very least) and judicial corruption (at the very worst) and there seems little chance of a satisfactory solution to a problem that polarises and divides. 

 

The last (disastrous) PP government of Spain took a pugnacious and absolutist attitude towards Catalonia and refused negotiation and manufactured ugly confrontation.  The new “socialist” government of PSOE is little different, while it has said that it will talk to the Catalan government, it has made it clear that the unity of Spain is of absolute, paramount importance. 

 

They have also authorised the expenditure of something like half a million euros of public money to finance the legal defence of Llarena (the appalling Supreme Court judge heavily involved in the (il)legal opposition to independence) even though the case being brought against him by our President in Belgium is a Civil issue.  And the Spanish government has delighted in accusing the Catalans of the misuse of public funds!

We are coming up to the anniversary of the referendum and, as you would expect, demonstrations have been planned.  Each demonstration hardens attitudes on both sides and makes a negotiated settlement even more difficult.

I have even had the, “Why are you learning Catalan?” question thrown at me, as I start the new academic year in my Beginners Catalan class.  With the supplied accusation that, “Catalonia is part of Spain, and Spanish is the language of Spain, not Catalan!” 

To which you might reply that Catalan is the language of Catalonia and is an officially recognised national language in Spain itself – though try speaking it in the Senate or Congress and you will get short shrift!

I think that one of the problems about the language in Castelldefels is that the linguistic make-up of this particular part of Catalonia is one where Spanish is the dominant language.  There are many people in the city who are not native Catalans so it is natural to hear Spanish as the language of general use.  Get away from the coastal strip of Catalonia and you hear Catalan much more.  All Catalan speakers also speak Spanish and it is fairly common to hear conversations where one person will speak Catalan while the response will be in Spanish: there being a clear difference between understanding and speaking.

It is inevitable that there is a political dimension to the language.  Statistics vary, but 70%-80% of the Catalan population speak Catalan and more than 90% understand it – figures that Welsh can only fantasise about! 

These are not proportions that can be dismissed and they have to be taken seriously.  Quite how you define “seriously” is, I suppose, part of the problem.

I have not been in Catalonia for very long.  Years, yes, but not very long in the history of Catalonia and the generations of resentment about the way that they have been treated  by the powers in Madrid!  But in the (relatively) short time that I have been here I have seen a marked difference in the attitudes of people to the concept of independence. 

 

For reasons that I do not entirely remember: firstly, I went to a football game of Catalonia versus China in Camp Nou, and secondly, I went alone!  I remember looking around at the Catalan supporters and seeing Catalan flags waved vigorously.  These were the ‘ordinary’ Catalan flags of a plain ground and four bars. 

There were very few Catalan independence flags, that is, the ordinary Catalan flag with the addition of a star within a triangle of blue.  When the Catalan national anthem was played, one person near me raised his right arm in a clenched-fist power-salute until his clearly embarrassed companion told him to put his hand down!

Now, in any mass gathering of Catalans, the independentist flag is in the majority

and you hear talk of the founding of a republic and cutting links with Spain as an ordinary topic of conversation.  How times have changed!  And those inept politicians who find is so hard to ‘do’ politics are to blame for the present on-going disaster.

So, my determination to learn ‘some’ Catalan is not only a recognition of one of the cultural values of the area in which I live, but is also a political statement that sides with the Catalan desire to be seen to be different from the suspect government from Madrid.

In some ways I realise that I am emphasising the political dimension of my attempts to learn Catalan to counteract my horror at having been introduced to the first verb we have to learn in Catalan, by making the learning of it some sort of political/cultural activism!

My only fear is that this blog will be read by my friend Dianne whose first language is Welsh and has, in the past, threatened all sorts of trials and tribulations if I dare learn Catalan before I learn the language of the country I profess to come from.  With an even deeper irony, it turns out that there is another Welshman in my Catalan class.  And he does speak Welsh!

We shall see how far I progress.  And we shall also see if the idea that learning more than one language at a time is somehow easier, with the brain responding to informational overload with compartmentalized ease.

We shall see!