stop

"Stop" is one of those English words which have been adopted into usage by speakers of Spanish, Catalan, and probably half the languages on the planet. Traffic sign conventions have no doubt played a role in this, but the word itself has impeccable credentials for the job it has to do. Stop: it's short and to the point, when that's what matters. No need to waste time with soft-sounding, multi-syllabic Romance language imperatives, or indeed with the choice of what language will best get your message across. Just say STOP. Just STOP.

Among the cacophony of complex issues and affairs which are competing for the public's attention here in our crisis-bound country, there are currently a couple which you could call "Stop" issues: specific actions being taking by the authorities that are widely perceived as unjust, causing huge social harm, and needing to be stopped urgently. That is exactly the case in Spain with the issue of home evictions for people unable to keep up their mortgage payments. The obscene number of five hundred families are dumped out of their homes every day in Spain, according to 2012 figures. Horrific. But that is by no means the end of it. Under the draconian Spanish mortgage law, those who have suffered the trauma of being forced out of their homes cannot just hand over the keys and "try" to start again. No, no, no. They have to pay back the full value of the amount of the mortgage, and given that property prices have fallen by 35% since 2007, surrendering ownership of the apartment to the bank is only likely to cover part of what they "owe". So many are left with no home, no other assets, very likely no job, and huge debts still to pay. It is hardly surprising that there has been a steady stream of suicides among those threatened with  eviction.

So people have said, stop. Stop desahucios is the Spanglish slogan - stop evictions. Or Stop desnonaments in Catalanglès. This simple outcry has got louder and louder, due especially to about four years of struggle by a very dynamic pressure group, Plataforma d'Afectats per la Hipoteca, or PAH - the platform for people affected by mortgages (it's a bit of a mouthful - so maybe it's no wonder they just say "stop"). PAH started in Barcelona and has spread all over Spain. They organise physical blockades in front of buildings when evictions are scheduled, to stop the authorities from entering, as well as doing a lot of individual representation and negotiation with banks to enable people to stay in their homes. And working politically to change the law.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Government of the Partido Popular has basically just been sitting on its hands, with only a fairly cosmetic concession in 2012, affecting a small percentage of foreclosure cases. Rajoy and company get nervous about doing anything that might upset investors (in fact, that's actually a good summary of their entire economic policy). And yes, they have probably been counting on the issue remaining lost in the general din.

But PAH has persisted, and last week it won a battle. The Spanish parliament agreed to admit for debate a proposed bill on the matter - drafted by PAH itself, and brought to Parliament via a process of popular petition which exists in Spain, created by the previous Socialist government. The largest ever collection of signatures (around 1.4 million) backed the bill which includes three main proposals: a moratorium on further evictions, a retrospective law change so that evicted mortgage defaulters will no longer be left with extra debts if they have lost their home, and a plan to provide access to state-subsidised rental housing for these evicted homeowners - using the huge stock of flats which banks which have now acquired as a base. Up until the last minute, the governing PP - which has an absolute parliamentary majority - said it would block the passage of the bill. Suddenly on the afternoon of the parliamentary vote, the party leaders changed their minds.

Just how important a victory is this? On the face of it, it's nothing - yet. It's only an agreement to admit the bill to parliament, and the PP will surely propose ways to water it down or veto it. And in any case, even if it goes through, it's still only a band-aid to patch up a social disaster in one area while the system itself - and the PP's management of it - continues hacking apart the social fabric in lots of others. And yet, as a victory for protest, I think it's very important. The PAH people seem really well organised on lots of levels, with excellent leadership and use of all the media, old and new, and polls show they have overwhelming public support for the initiative (something like 90% of Spaniards are in favour of the law change). I think it can be said that democratic pressure, intelligently applied, has forced the PP to back down for once.

So it's a definite morale booster, but now it needs to be built on. By admitting the bill, the PP have bought time. The challenge for the PAH people is to keep the focus up so that the PP will not be able to weasel out of the provisions of the bill later on without a huge backlash. And keeping that focus up is not easy. I mentioned at the start of this post that there was another "Stop" issue around at the moment:

In fact, I lied. Corruption is not in the same category, even if you can easily put the word into a similar slogan, as in the photo. It's a huge and far more complex problem. As Catalan left wing MP  David Fernàndez said recently, corruption is not just systemic, it constitutes the system. He is not far wrong. There has been a storm of corruption cases gathering over most of the major Spanish political institutions (the government, all major political parties, the Spanish royal family) since Christmas, and in the last two weeks it has become a hurricane. But I won't discuss that here, I just mention it because you can see how the dilution of the stop desahucios / stop desnonaments campaign is already happening. It's going to be difficult to keep that little candle burning.



The photos were all taken with my mobile last Saturday in Barcelona, on one of the marches called by the PAH all over España. Plenty of creative protest going on too. You've probably heard of "bad banks" - there's an official bad bank in Spain now, it's called SAREB. It must be pretty bad, because here, to finish, are a couple of photos of the "good" banks:

death from above

Sunday morning in Barcelona, visibility good. 

It was on a day like this one, 75 years ago this week, that death struck from above, right here in our neighbourhood of El Call. Of the many air raids carried out on Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, the one on the morning of Sunday, January 30th, 1938 was one of the more tragic and infamous. 

Planes from Mussolini's Italian Air Force left their base on Mallorca loaded with bombs and targetted central Barcelona, apparently making two runs over the city a couple of hours apart. In Plaça Sant Felip Neri, fifty metres from where we live, a bomb caused the collapse of a vaulted basement which was being used as a bomb shelter and 42 people died, including 20 children. In our street, Carrer Sant Domènec del Call, another bomb destroyed at least two buildings, at number 13 and number 15, and I don't know how many human lives. Number 15 is our address; and our building (top right in the above photo) was erected on the site of the destruction in the early 1940s. We share our space with many stories that have never been told. 

It's just possible that some of the unknown aspects of the Barcelona bombings may come to light in the near future: although not the stories of those under the bombs, but rather of the bombers themselves. A group of expat Italians who live in Barcelona, AltraItalia, has just succeeded in getting a Barcelona court to investigate the accusation that those air raids constituted war crimes. In the first instance, the case will concentrate on finding out about the Italian pilots who carried out the bombings and the chain of command involved - it sounds a little macabre in itself because if any of those involved are still alive, it may be a case of pursuing and even extraditing old soldiers in their 90s. 

The AltraItalia people say, however, that what they are interested in is getting to the truth and there are certainly many blank spaces in that regard. Like the key question of who gave the orders: although the Italian forces were working to support Franco, it doesn't seem that their attacks on Barcelona and other cities responded to specific requests or indications from the Franquista leadership; rather, they were free agents, not officially part of the war, conducting what have been described as experiments in terror.

On that Sunday in 1938, the residents down on the ground in El Call were among the guinea pigs for those experiments.   

Plaça Manel Ribé, El Call, created on January 30th 1938

by the bomb that destroyed the building at Nº 13, C/St Domènec del Call 

'Forasters' (Part 1)

Forasters is the Catalan word for "strangers" or "outsiders." It's also the title of a Catalan film from 2008 which was rescreened on a local channel one night in January, as a last minute change of schedule. The reason: the sad and quite sudden death from cancer, just the day before, of one of the stars, Anna Lizaran, pictured above. She was one of the reference points of Barcelona theatre, lauded as a gifted and generous actor, and there has been much grieving for her across the Catalan arts scene. I have to say, to my shame, that I am not familiar with much of her work. The main reason is, also to my shame, that I do not go to the theatre very much - and Lizaran's very successful career was very largely in the theatre (see slideshow), Forasters being one of only a handful of major film and TV roles in her CV. I read one piece in the press that said she simply never bothered to get herself a film agent! Whatever truth there might be in that, one thing it does underline is that Barcelona has had a very dynamic theatre scene for the whole of Lizaran's professional life - basically, the post-Franco era from the 1970s on - and particularly in the Catalan language. Lizaran was both prominent in helping to construct this as a founder member of key Catalan companies Els Comediants and Teatre Lliure, and also sufficiently talented to build a monumental artistic career for herself within it, without much need to go outside the theatre or outside Catalunya (bear in mind that all performers who work in català are easily bilingual enough to work in castellano and most do so, to a greater or lesser degree). So there you are: the Barcelona theatre was one of the cultural areas where the Catalan language most demonstrated its renewed vitality when Spain emerged from dictatorship, and Anna Lizaran was one of the artists who personified that in her own career.

So they showed the film Forasters, which was quite close to the bone as far as tributes go, because of Lizaran's role, actually a dual role, playing two women in different eras who are themselves dying of cancer. But it was her performance that was the thing: and it did indeed stand out, and that was ultimately all the justification required.

However I have to say it was another aspect of my response to the film itself which made me sit down at the keyboard and begin writing this. When the movie began I initially pricked up my ears when it appeared one of the major themes was to be the interaction of a rather dysfunctional Catalan family with new neighbours upstairs who are immigrants - the film, adapted from a stage play, shows us two parallel snapshots of the same family, 40 years apart. In the 1960s view, an Andalusian clan moves in above them; in the 2000s, the same thing happens but the new neighbours are Moroccans.

But what then made me groan was that the moment the newly-arrived immigrants opened their mouths, they all spoke perfect Catalan. It was completely unreal, and instantly took a lot away from the film for me. Well, I kind of expected it in fact, because this has tended to be the rule rather than the exception in movies and TV fiction set here: Barcelona is represented monolingually in either Catalan or Spanish - and that is not the reality that I experience every day. The linguistic reality of Catalonia is a rich and dynamic and often mongrel mixture. Some people use mostly català, some people (a slightly larger proportion, according to most studies) use mostly castellano, but the great majority are bilingual and most use both to an extent, and everyone is exposed to both, and there's a myriad of varied dual language situations and lots of mixing, both artful and clumsy. And many people also speak English or a hundred other languages so that is also part of the mix; immigrants arrive and, especially in Barcelona, some never learn to speak or write Catalan well, but their children learn it - in particular, because its the vehicular language in all schools. So it's a complex linguistic picture, and for someone like me, who lived the first 30 years of my life in an overwhelming English-speaking environment (well, it was then anyway) and has spent the last 20 here, it's still a source of both fascination and frustration, every single day. And given that it's such a big part of my reality I crave to see it reflected more in locally-produced film and TV programmes.

(Note: this was called Part 1 because I was aware that this was only part of the story. Unfortunately I haven't yet got round to writing Part 2. Huge subject. One day...)