by Marissa Dearing:
As celebrated scholar, author, and director of the Whitney Humanities Center, María Rosa Menocal stressed in her talk Wednesday, “On Convivencia and Exile: The Enduring Power of Américo Castro’s vision,” that convivencia is a word whose “glorious and troublemaking ambivalence” does not tolerate translation. Historically, “La Convivencia” refers to a situation in Spanish history during which Jews, Muslims, and Catholics in Spain lived in relative peace together. For Menocal, this “term that aspires to so much” reflects the rich and contentious complexity of an “entire period and culture.”
The convivencia took place in the diverse religious, lingual, and cultural groups coexistent in medieval Cordoba, but the phenomenon of this cosmopolitan center of Spain depended not on any “simplistic political definition” of convivencia as coexistence, but rather on the aggression of military expansion and the desire for cultural acquisition that often accompanies conquest.
As lamented by the disenchanted, like Paul Alvarez of Cordoba, although the thoroughly “Arabized” Christians of the convivencia would never themselves become Muslims, they deeply valued and adopted as their own much of the Arabic culture the conquest brought to Spain. Similarly, the Castilian reconquista exemplifies what Menocal termed the “codependence of convivencia and conquest”: in her view, the convivencia can be attributed to the concurrence of the Castilian conquest of formerly Arabic territory and their hunger to absorb what they conquered. Far from being “Arabized against their will,” the Castilians chose their cultural appropriation: they did not burn the great Arabic libraries but rather “held them dearly as part of the booty of conflict.”
Menocal therefore challenged the conception of convivencia as counterpart to conflict implicit in the title of the lecture series, “Conflict and Convivencia: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity in the Iberian Atlantic and Mediterranean Worlds.” As Menocal noted, the series’ opening lecturer, David Nirenberg, author of Communities of Violence, had spoken of the degree to which the intimate and productive interfaith relationship among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain came through violence, strife, and conflict. In her view, it is “impossible to draw a clear line between love, hate, admiration, and fear in such matters;” the “cultural borrowing” inherent in convivencia often involves an element of aggression and appropriation.
Américo Castro, as Menocal explained, offered his own, remarkably enduring interpretation of convivencia. A Spaniard who fled to America at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Don Américo fundamentally altered how Medieval Spain has been imagined and studied, and according to Menocal, “made Medieval Spain important far beyond itself”: convivencia is that “vision of Medieval Spain that makes people care about it.” In exile in the New World, he began reading in Spain’s literary texts, “another moment of internal destruction and exile.” In every respect, Don Américo’s writings on convivencia look back “through a dark glass of anxious memories of a past long gone and suppressed.” Thus, Don Américo would call convivencia the “infinitely fertile . . . memory of a pre-exilic Spanish world.”
Menocal related Américo Castro’s vastly influential conception of convivencia to her own exile from and recent return to Cuba, an emotional experience that made her realize “not for first time but with particular intensity” that she has done so much work “on something that seemed so distant but is actually so relevant to [her] own history.” Returning to a Havana that has become “a memory palace reminiscent of ruins in Spain,” she came upon a former convent in the mudejar style so emblematic of the convivencia. Menocal suggested that although in this building “lies another great story of exile [she doesn’t] fully know yet…this home for Christian nuns, built to explicitly recall the caliphate, in Cuba speaks to the endurance of Américo Castro’s vision of medieval Spain.”
Marissa Dearing ’14 is a freshman in Berkeley College. Contact her at marissa.dearing@yale.edu