Towards the tail end of Fernando Aramburu’s expansive, 592-page metanarrative about a Spanish community that finds its soul cleaved by the terrorist impulse of Basque’s ETA separatists, there’s a self-referential scene in which the “writer” makes a cameo appearance.
It is framed as an event to memorialise the victims of terrorism in the cause of establishing a Basque ‘homeland’, and the ‘writer’ — presumably Aramburu himself — provides the backstory to why and how the book came to be.
The story cuts close to the bone for Aramburu, who was himself born in San Sebastian, where the novel is set: as a Basque teenager, he too had in some ways been exposed to — but not indoctrinated by — the nativist political ideology that spawned terrorism. “I’ve thought it all over many times and I think I’ve found the answer,” the writer says.
Oh, would that answers to such existential civilisational questions were so easy to find! After all, one man’s ‘terrorist’ is another man’s ‘freedom fighter’. In Homeland, the frontiers that separate the two opposing ideologies are very proximate: the novel traces the relational contours of two families — one on either side of that divide — whose matriarchs, Bittori and Miren, were once good friends.
Promised land
Their husbands hang out together, as do their children. But when Bittori’s businessman-husband Txato receives extortionist demands from Basque separatists, the idyllic neighbourly spirit is torn asunder — because Miren’s son Joxe Mari is now with ETA, and the mother’s loyalties are conflicted. Txato’s murder by Basque terrorists accentuates the rift.
It is easy to visualise the story at the heart of Homeland being played out in many other conflict-divided geographies, from Kashmir to Sri Lanka to Palestine. Wherever the quest for a “homeland” has embraced violence as a vehicle to get to the promised land, it has driven families and friends apart. In many ways, those individual stories are just as tragic and no less consequential than the larger political narrative about nationhood and competing ideologies.
Aramburu is at his best when he focusses up-close on the personal tribulations of the two families. As the “writer” at the memorial event says: “I tried to answer concrete questions. How does a person live intimately the disaster of having lost a father, a husband, a brother in an attack? How does a widow, an orphan, a person who’s been mutilated face life after a crime?”
All Bittori wants, in order to bring a closure to the tragedy that has overrun her life, is an acknowledgement of her plight, a simple act of contrition on the part of Joxe Mari. In this enterprise, she has the moral and material support of Miren’s own paralytic daughter Arantxa, a sterling character who rises above the limitations of her bodily frame. Soldiering on, with quiet dignity, Bittori finally secures the balm that can heal her family’s bruised soul.
And what of Joxe Mari? After 17 years in prison — during which period he nursed hate as an antidote to the poison of nostalgia — he abandons ETA, broken down by the loneliness of jail life and doubts, “which are like mosquitoes in summer”. And when ETA decides to end its armed struggle, the announcement leaves him cold, as if it was “a matter that didn’t concern him”. So, when Arantxa writes to him, to persuade him to make peace with Bittori, he reasons that seeking forgiveness takes more courage than firing a weapon or setting off a bomb. It is a confirmation of the futility of the ‘cause’ that overwhelmed his life.
Strong women
All through Homeland , it is the two matrons and the other female characters who bear the story along, typifying the strong women who are characteristic of the Basque region. In contrast, the men are less stirring, and fall into stereotypical portrayals, frequently as philanderers. And Aramburu deploys a curious literary technique to propel the story: the characters often intervene, sotto voce, in the narrator’s rendition of events, sometimes even mid-sentence. It serves as a way of fleshing out the narrative, adding layers and facts to the storyline, and occasionally questioning it. It takes a while to get used to, but when the reader gets into the stride, it makes for a refreshing style.
On the other hand, Aramburu’s narrative style, at least in the English translation of his work, is somewhat antiseptic — perhaps deliberately so, given the author’s conscious effort, despite a manifest empathy for victims of terrorism, to avoid “making a judgement about who is good and who is bad”.
In interviews, he has noted that since he is “not a historian, not a politician, and not a journalist,” he has “placed his bet on literature”. Also, he has self-admittedly steered clear of “sentimentality” (or pathos) and “sanctimony” — or what he calls “the subordination of facts to a thesis”.
Which is actually something of a pity. An exploration of the morality of the whole ‘homeland’ enterprise, and of the methods adopted therein, may have arguably led Aramburu to more engaging geographies of the mind. As it is, for all its expansiveness of scope, and its fleeting flirtation with, and gentle tugs at, readers’ heartstrings, Homeland leaves us a little less than sated.
Homeland; Fernando Aramburu, trs Alfred MacAdam, Picador, ₹799
venky.vembu@thehindu.co.in
