Viviendo en lo global: una identidad vasca en Bernardo Atxaga

Abstract

In The Son of the Accordion Player, novelist Bernardo Atxaga proposes a new model of Basque identity for the 21st century, a model that distances itself from Romantic notions of identification linked to language, land, and ethnicity. David, the protagonist of the novel, is immersed in a long process of self and collective discovery, one that puts him at first on the road to political violence in the name of Basque identity if only to ''survive'' this terror and discover through the power of writing a more subdued and tranquil cultural identity that he then learns to pass on. This new model he discovers wrestles with the violences of the Spanish Civil War and of the Franco dictatorship in order to put them to rest. Writing, the writing of The Son of the Accordion Player, becomes a site for a version of memory free from melancholia and of impossible redemption.Me propongo estudiar cómo en El hijo del acordeonista (2004) de Bernardo Atxaga emerge una identidad que quiero llamar local, ceñida a un espacio y tiempo concretos. Lo local en el autor no es exclusivamente nacional, pues no se agota en un deseo de estado-nación; no se relaciona con una sola lengua, pues lo vertebran varias; ni es, finalmente, puramente étnico, pues no se encierra en sí mismo, sino

Margin and freedom: The space of world literature seen from the Basque Country and Catalonia

“…(The Basque identity, far from barricading itself in essentialism or diluting itself in the unrecognizable – the two extremes of global identity – is provided with a content coming from those who with their reflection want to enter the twenty-first century, and those who, guided by their cosmopolitism, want to keep on traversing the world from its corner known as Obaba.) (2009: 90) Thus he stresses the paradox that recognizing one’s own difference – even marginality – leads to feeling even more part of the world.…”