I have always refused to let others manage my loyalties and feelings.
I usually carefully avoid the use of terms such as Homeland or Nation, whose meaning has evolved throughout history, under the influence of impulses and interests (whether political or economic...) not always confessable.
I was lulled, like so many Canarians, with the singing of the lullaby.
"I'm dying of love for the Colombian woman", "I want to dance the black beat" or the first notes of "Suspiros de España", intermingled with all the airs of Canarian popular music that my mother sweetly hummed, make up the soundtrack of my childhood.
I have trained under martial music in the courtyard of the old Nava La Salle, in the OJE camp in Las Raíces or in the old mansion in Ronda, where the "Ceuta 54" Regiment was housed, in which I served as an infantry soldier. And my insides were not insensitive to its patriotic effects.
I listen to "let no one put their mark between your body and mine", "you don't know me: I am", "I would like to be the shadow of the night"... and I am unable not to feel that the same blood, the same popular breath, the same cultural roots of understanding love, that is, life, beats through Canarian or Margariteño fandangos and malagueñas.
I have never sung The Internationale in the euphoria phase of camaraderie, nor under the influence of wine, because the people who believed and the lives that were immolated for those ideals, which are mine, form --with some elementary values and the veneration of the memory of my ancestors-- the religion of the person without gods that I am.
But yes, I admit it, I have shuddered singing so many times with red people of my generation the "mira Marusiña, mira cómo vengo yo" of the miners of Asturias.
I feel very close to Bartolomé de Las Casas, Francisco de Vitoria and the other members of the "party of humanity", defenders of the American natives.
I would not understand myself, nor would I know who I am, if I repudiated the heritage of Los Comuneros, the Laws of the Indies, the residency trials of the governors at the end of their term (which we would need so badly now), the spirituality of San Juan de La Cruz, the patriotism of Manuel Azaña or Don Inda Prieto, the poetry of Antonio Machado or Miguel Hernández; that of Ana Belén in the torn shirt of my hope, sometimes mother, always stepmother; or, why not say it these days, that of Joan Manuel Serrat of Mediterráneo or the saeta when singing...
Nor if I had not identified more with Quixote than with Sancho, nor emotionally sided with our aboriginal ancestors, against European conquerors and adventurers; with the American Indians against the genocide; with all the kuntakintes against slavery; with the Jews against the pogroms of yesteryear and the Holocaust of the day before yesterday; or with the Palestinians of so many Sabras and Chatilas.
Nor if I stopped abhorring the authoritarian and fanatical tradition that links the Inquisition, the racist Aristotelianism of a Ginés de Sepúlveda and Francoism, from which it is so difficult for us Spaniards to get rid of. Because, although some democrats who have come along would laugh then, the old general knew very well what his curse of everything tied up and well tied up meant.
I love my land, which is what homeland was originally called: its people and its traditions, its peaks and its shores, which for the natives of the old Achinech are cliffs, not beaches. I love the Atlantic Sea, mother of the Canarians.
I have tried to defend the natural heritage of all against real estate devastation; to commit myself against painful social inequalities, so rampant in these parts since always.
And to try to avoid, joining forces with many people with whom I feel related, that the Canarian Institutions fall into the hands of the colonizers of here, who were in the past and are today the most insatiable. Making a path full of meaning as we walk.
So... I don't understand those who say they love the Canary Islands and hate Spain, nor those who try to place us in the delirious crossroads of "either from here, or from there". Because when I hear the avancemos como hermanos, by Braulio, I can't help but feel closer, fraternally closer, to the ideas and illusions of so many Andalusians, Castilians or Catalans, famous or anonymous, than to the voracity and selfishness of some born in the same land that saw me born.
Nor to those who, to cover up their own interests and their miseries, or as an expression of fanaticism --that one, typically Hispanic-- try to push us here or there, to a struggle of identities that is really a struggle against oneself. In which it is sung who is going to lose; because there is no possible winner.
Those who, without realizing it, identify Spain with an idea of Spain, with the most culturally intolerant, politically dictatorial and socially unjust. But Spain, that of the people and the peoples of Spain through the centuries, is much more and much better than all that.
By Santiago Pérez
