11-We are a repression
Now that school is starting, one could try the pedagogy of Enric Arderiu Valls (1868-1920). He was seven years old. His parents dragged him from Linyola to Lleida. They got it into their heads: off to the seminary. The whole thing was so devilishly didactic that he had to repeat a year for arriving late to mass. That divine failure led him to embrace two other infernal beasts: culture and Catalonia.
A graduate in law and philosophy and letters, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic poured from his mouth in bulk. Many believed he was possessed, but he ended up possessing a position in the corps of Archivists, Librarians, and Archaeologists. And of course, the Catalonia thing is explained by what they said back then (the Catalan left): it is the “subconscious nationalism.” Like dormant cells, Catalonia would awaken within them. The chip, the DNA, the carbon-14 stuffed into their skulls. In short: Enric was one of the leaders of the Renaixença in Lleida and Catalonia. But he who goes to bed with devils wakes up with devils.
His great enemy was José Martos O’Neale, civil governor of Lleida. He came from the Philippines. It stopped being a colony and they reassigned him to another colony. He had only one mission: to bring Catalanists to the stake. His flamethrower book Peligro nacional. Estudios e impresiones sobre el catalanismo caused more fires than all those of the 21st century. As Arderiu wrote: “Mr. Martos himself alone made more Catalanists than all the propaganda of his fellow cause-members.” He forbade teachers from teaching Catalan in schools, singing Els segadors, meetings, picking one's nose with the vernacular finger… And Arderiu and many young people (now they would call them “bourgeois,” “conservatives”) grabbed the gasoline can to do kale borroka.
They wanted to burn the Segre on September 11, 1900, but they decided to do it on the 30th to throw the enemy off. On the last day of that month, the river caught fire. A boat full of young people left Lleida for Torres de Segre. The spark: a giant senyera, barretinas, and shouts. The people of Lleida ran as they passed by. And Martos, ablaze, watched them from home. They greeted him politely. The police tried from the banks to catch the boat. Nothing. They threw rocks from the bridges. Nothing. That first march of freedom, a water-based holiday, a liquid Catalan way, kept passing through the towns and people cheered, shouted, sang… The river is life.
Lo and behold, as if by chance, who would have thought, upon returning they were awaited by mysterious men. In their hands they carried batons that resembled those of the police. They fled on foot. The next day they were legally burned: prosecuted. But the one who died at the stake was Arderiu. He was a civil servant archivist and was left without a job or salary. They professionally deported him first to Huelva and then to Huesca. It is not just him: it is thousands.
Those 13 river youths were a source of inspiration for thousands more. Like the thirty youths who were the first to be arrested on September 11th. It was 1901 and it marked a change of direction in the way of commemorating the Diada (the Reeixida Foundation has investigated their names and the facts). All for a floral offering at the monument of Rafael Casanova in Barcelona. All for shouting: independence. All for being Catalan. All for existing. Detention and prison. And from there, massive demonstrations, the birth of La Reixa for the repressed... There is no Diada: there is day by day. Hence why we are not a nation: 11-We are a repression.