Hungry for Lost Worlds
Last week we lost one of the great scholars of medieval Spain,
Maria Rosa Menocal. I never had the opportunity to meet Menocal but I have benefited
immensely from her varied collaborative scholarly projects such as The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and
Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture
(http://www.amazon.com/The-Arts-Intimacy-Christians-Castilian/dp/0300106092)
and her contribution to the The
Literature of Al-Andalus (http://www.amazon.com/Literature-Al-Andalus-Cambridge-History-Arabic/dp/0521030234#reader_0521030234).
Her accessible and affecting The Ornament
of the World was a great resource when I led a group of students through
Andalucía a few years back and it is one of my favorite books to recommend to
people travelling to Spain.
Menocal focused on “La España de las tres culturas”- the
multicultural world created by Christians, Muslims and Jews through centuries
of fighting, killing, marrying, trading, ridiculing, lusting, condemning,
imitating, demonizing, and idealizing each other from the Muslim conquest of
the Iberian peninsula in 711 until the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of
the Jews in 1492.
I say that “we
lost” without knowing exactly who will read this, but I believe that Menocal’s
work is a gift and a resource for all of us living in today’s multi-cultural
world, a world of global, unmediated interconnectivity, of hybrid identities, with
its comingling of utopian and dystopian
visions of our near future along with the violence, incomprehension, feral
fanaticism and blind demonization of all the “others” that we can’t seem to
encounter face to face. Menocal sought out the textual remnants of those
moments of contact, exchange and engagement between Spain’s three main
religious communities. She was able to conjure up the complexities and layers
of relationship between individuals who never lose their particular identity as
Jew, Chistian or Muslim.
One small example: When the Bishop of Córdoba complains that
all the brightest and most accomplished Christians have turned their back on
Latin and only want to write their poetry in Arabic we can appreciate the
complicated ways that culture and language can blur the boundaries between
communities. These Christians were
not becoming Muslims, they were “Arabizing”.
Her vision was optimistic; I often felt it was a
rose-colored, favoring a narrative of easy commingling and often eliding the
harsher realities of interethnic violence and demonization that many of the
texts also point to. But perhaps her emphasis and her framing of the question
of “Convivencia” is what we need more of today! More ideal models of learning
from those who are different than ourselves, more romanticized visions of Jews,
Christians and Muslims imitating and reinterpreting each other, shaping a
shared culture out of the proximity of people of flesh and blood living next to
each other, shopping in the same market, defending the same city walls; of
individuals who are open to the foreign without losing their own particular
identity.
Menocal’s project (and she was/is by no means alone in her
quest for conjuring the convivencia
of Sefarad/Al-Andalus/España) is ultimately an attempt at recovering a lost
world—or capturing that “ornament of the world” in order to share it with your
friends, to hold it up as a model to the wider public, to preserve its memory
for our children and grandchildren.
(A conjecture that I only allow myself as the child of Cuban
exiles: Could her longing for the lost world of medieval Spain come out of her
own experience as a Cuban exile, mourning the island of her youth and the
distance that exiles from that enchanted place feel in a myriad tiny ways- everyday
of their lives. )
This week I came across another project in search of a lost
world of Jewish-Muslim coexistence, this time through music. I stumbled across
Chris Silver’s digital labour of love, “Jewish Morocco” http://jewishmorocco.blogspot.com/, a
blog dedicated to documenting as much of the Jewish presence in Morocco as
Chris Silver can locate and photograph. He went to dozens of small villages and
photographed their (mostly) abandoned schools, graveyards, synagogues, etc. It
serves as a testament to one of the great Jewish communities – with over a
millennium in the country, a rich and varied history comprising multiple
regions and languages/ethnicities and a proud history of religious piety and
socio-economic and cultural distinction. Hearing Silver interviewed on Vox
Tablet (www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/.../moroccan-grooves-blogged) my heart broke.
Nostalgia/añoro
flows thick in my veins, but I was caught off guard by my reaction—there was a
distinct pang of loss and regret, of lost worlds, lost possibilities and a
sense that we are today more impoverished and weaker because we have lost these
communities- they have found their way into the homogenizing machine of global
Jewish sameness. Jewish life in the Muslim world was not all rosewater and
na’na! What I am struck by is that Jews were so rooted in these places— I am
pained at how quickly their languages, their music, their religious
sensibilities have been swept away, too often twisted into fetished kitsch, or
submerged by the demands and expectations of the dominant culture.
To think of a stark contemporary example: Jews in France,
another zone of rich Jewish life in an uneasy but dynamic relationship with its
“host society”, are under attack and looking to seek their lot either in Israel
or the United States—our world is shrinking by the day. And with this shift we
need projects like Silver’s and Menocal’s to remind us of different horizons,
different modes of being and imagining.
One other point of light—of past glory re-emerging even at
the present moment of deep anxiety, violence and confusion in the Arab world.
This was an exciting story of old men rocking out!! (Tunisian Buena Vista
Social Club?)
Long live “El Gusto”!
a link to an obituary and resources about Maria Rosa Menocal
http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2012/10/maria-rosa-menocal-medieval-historian.html
