Understanding Metabolized Violence: Intimate and Socio-affective Ties of Terror in Basque Writer Edurne Portela’s El eco de los disparos (2016) and Mejor la ausencia (2017)

Abstract

This essay studies the writing of Basque author Edurne Portela (1974) and its special sensitivity toward the micropolitics of violence. Rejecting Basque society’s immunity to the tragedy of ETA violence, ignoring the call to “turn the page” after ETA’s permanent disarmament (2011) and disappearance (2018), Portela’s fiction betrays Basque and Spanish society’s ignorance and insensitivity toward the ways trauma infiltrates the fabric of societal, familial, and interpersonal relationships. Instead of promoting a lazy and cowardly amnesiac turn for post ETA society, Portela prefers to look straight into the eyes of a community known for turning its back on what philosopher Reyes Mate terms a society’s “deber de memoria” or responsibility to remember. Portela’s fiction, essay, and autobiographical writing do just that. On the one hand, they confront readers with the uncomfortable weight of the traumatic experiences unjustly suffered by members of Basque society, injuries that undermine its democratic fabric; on the other, and even more importantly, Portela looks inward, and her fictional universe begs readers to question how this indifference also mutilates the affective life of characters who either look the other way or find it easy to participate and justify the logic of terror and violence.

Keywords:

• Edurne Portela
• El eco de los disparos
• Mejor la ausencia
• Reyes Mate
• ETA

Notes

1 Edurne Portela began her writing career in the world of academia in the United States where she completed her doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and was a faculty member for thirteen years at Lehigh University (Pennsylvania) and director of its Humanities Center. Relocating to Madrid in 2016, Portela successfully launched her career as a writer of fiction with her hybrid text, El eco de los disparos (2016). Portela has quickly become one of the leading voices of a generation of extraordinary writers and filmmakers from the Basque Country unafraid to tackle pressing political and ethical concerns in their work. In addition to her creative work, the novels Mejor la ausencia (2017), Formas de estar lejos (2019), and Los ojos cerrados (2021), Portela has a very active presence in the Spanish media (newspapers, radio, blogs) adding a critical, wise, and sensitive voice to all things political. See: https://edurneportela.com.

2 For more detailed information on ETA and the effects of its violence on Basque society, see the anthology ETA’s Terrorist Campaign: From Violence to Politics, 1968-2015 edited by Rafael Leonisio, Fernando Molina, and Diego Muro (2017).

3 See Cristina Ortiz and María Pilar Rodríguez’s chapter on Mejor la ausencia in their book Ellas cuentan: Representaciones artísticas de la violencia en el País Vasco desde la perspectiva de género (2020). Ortiz and Rodríguez appropriately study the novel within a feminist framing of the bildungsroman to better appreciate Portela’s linkage of gender and political violence within the novel. Their focus on affective social ties is key.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annabel Martín

Annabel Martín is Associate Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies at Dartmouth College (USA) and was the founding director of the Gender Research Institute (GRID) at that institution. She has published extensively on nationalism, gender, historical memory, Basque terrorist violence, reconciliation, as well as on film, gender, and tourism in 1960s desarrollista Spain, and on the importance of the humanities and gender studies in educational curricula. Most recently she has co-edited Transatlantic Letters: An Epistolary Exchange Between Basque and US Students on Violence and Community (2022) and Tras las huellas del terrorismo en Euskadi: Justicia restaurativa, convivencia y reconciliación (2019). She is a member of several international research groups, including CITUR (Cine y Turismo) and CinemAGEnder. She is also an advisory board member of the EU Horizon 2020 project “GEARING Roles” on gender equality and chairs the advisory board of the research group ARES (Antifeminist Resistance-U of Deusto, Spain). She serves as an advisory board member of Feminism(s), is co-founder and board member of the Jahjaga Foundation (Kosovo) dedicated to human rights and gender, and in 2019 held the Bernardo Atxaga Chair of Basque Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center (Instituto Etxepare-Gobierno Vasco).