CONTENTS Introduction 1 Translator’s Note 12 Bibliography 14 El blocao / The Blockhouse 19 Dedicatoria / Dedication 20 1. El blocao / The Blockhouse 22 2. El reloj / The Pocket Watch 36 3. Cita en la huerta / Tryst in the Orchard 44 4. Magdalena roja / Red Magdalene 56 5. África a sus pies / Africa at his Feet 98 6. Reo de muerte / Death Sentence 106 7. Convoy de amor / Love’s convoy 114 Notes 130 INTRODUCTION The publication of José Díaz-Fernández’s El blocao. Novela de la guerra marroquí in 1928 was received enthusiastically both by the critics and the public at large. Díaz-Fernández’s novel went through three editions in less than two years. This was certainly not a minor feat if one considers that the editors of Historia Nueva, the publishing house where El blocao appeared, had always believed that their company would be bankrupt within one or two years (Santonja 1986, 205). To everyone’s surprise, including the author’s, El blocao struck a chord with Spaniards from all walks of life. The success of El blocao must be understood in the context of the highly idiosyncratic position that Spain found itself in at the turn of the twentieth century. Spain had been struggling to take control of the northern Morocco territories that constituted the Spanish Protectorate for over a decade; its inability to succeed was symptomatic of the profound identity crisis that the country had undergone after the loss of its colonies in the nineteenth century, and the deep-seated corruption that had rendered the Spanish military inefficient. Díaz-Fernández’s novel managed to circumvent censorship regulations and provide a much needed critique of Spain’s colonial enterprise in northern Africa. His novel was a response to a specific moment in Spanish history, but this response was informed by his deep understanding of European political realities during the interwar period. Díaz-Fernández was a keen observer of international politics and was equally interested in the cultural production of the European avant-gardes that preceded him. In El blocao, Díaz-Fernández managed to combine elements that seemed irreconcilable: a political critique of Spain’s involvement in Africa presented in the experimental language of the avant-garde but still able to appeal to the public at large. By 1898, Spain had lost the last colony of its once huge empire. The loss of Cuba and the rest of the American and Asian Spanish colonies was not only an economic catastrophe, but also a tremendous blow to the national pride of the Spanish people that struggled to articulate a coherent, post- imperial identity. Spanish intellectuals tried to diagnose the causes of the country’s decadence in an effort to regenerate its vigor in the belief that Spain could regain its position in the new world order. Africa, and more specifically Morocco, seemed to provide the opportunity Spain needed for imperial regeneration. Its geographical proximity, allied to the historical connection between the Spanish and Moroccan peoples were, in the mind 2 Introduction of the Spanish Africanista colonialist leaders, clear signs that Spain was destined to play a more active role in the colonization of north Africa. By the time the Spanish Empire began to disintegrate during the eighteenth century, the main European nations had already developed empires of their own. Great Britain led the way, followed by France, Germany and Belgium. European imperialist expansion occupied territories in North and Central America, and Asia, but avoided venturing into Africa. By 1880, however, the colonization of Africa became the main objective of most European powers. In a relatively short period of time (1881–1914), Europe partitioned and occupied most of the African continent. The reasons for this delayed, but suddenly acute interest in Africa are complex and manifold, and there is no clear consensus among historians about what was the main cause that triggered what became known as the Scramble for Africa. Explanations of the causes for this sudden interest in Africa can be divided into three main categories: economic, psychological, and diplomatic (Boahen 1990, 10–5). The economic explanation represented by the work of Hobson (1902), Hilferding (1910), Luxemburg (1913, 1915), Bukharin (1915, 1924), and Lenin (1916) argues that with the advent of the industrial revolution, Europe needed to open new markets that could absorb its excess of production. Historians that subscribe to this hypothesis explain that colonialism was a natural outcome of capitalism. Psychological interpretations of colonialism were pioneered by Joseph Schumpeter who explained that Europeans perceived themselves as racially and culturally superior to the peoples they colonized, and that it was this belief in European superiority that led them to occupy other continents, including Africa. Finally, the diplomatic theory, represented among others by Carlton Hayes, argues that colonial expansion was a question of national prestige, and that colonial possessions became a very valuable bargaining chip in turn-of-the-century Europe. There is ample evidence for all three theories, and the colonization of Africa can certainly be explained as a combination of all three. Nationalist discourses were often used to promote specific economic interests. Similarly, nationalist pride led most colonialists to believe that European civilization was the only possible outcome of progress, which meant that any other non-Western civilization was out of pace with history and hence in need of intervention. The partition of Africa among the different European powers aimed to avoid conflicts that could lead to a war among the colonizing nations. As part of this more or less orderly partition of the African territories, Britain and France signed in 1904 the Entente Cordiale, an accord by which each Introduction 3 country agreed to respect the areas of influence of each other’s empire. Among the many issues settled, it was agreed that Britain would continue the colonization of Egypt while France would occupy Morocco. Conflicts, however, did arise and Morocco became one of the main scenarios where those conflicts were to be resolved. One of the results of the Entente Cordiale was that in reconciling their colonial interests, France and Britain had become allies against German expansion in Africa. Germany, as could be expected, was not willing to accept this disadvantageous position. In 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Tangier and made a series of public statements regarding his support for the independence of Morocco, which was interpreted as an explicit expression of interest in the colonization of Morocco on the part of Germany. France was outraged by what it considered a threat to its own interests in Morocco, and Britain was ready to take sides with the French to protect its interests in north Africa. The Algeciras Conference was convened to negotiate the colonization of the territory. There was, however, very little room for negotiations since only one of two options could prevail. In the end, France, with the support of Britain, succeeded in claiming Morocco thereby securing its control of north Africa. Germany was forced to abandon all plans to occupy Morocco; its relations with France and Britain were seriously strained. Spain, on the other hand, was allowed to pursue its interests in Morocco. The decision of the European powers to support the project of a Spanish Protectorate was perceived by the Spanish government as a vindication of its historical rights. France and Britain, however, were not as concerned with Spain’s historical rights over Morocco as with securing the strategic status quo. In this sense, Spain was clearly the best option; Spanish control of northern Morocco was to act as a buffer against British influence in the area without compromising France’s control of the region. Spain represented a weak colonial power that should not, in the calculation of the British and French, interfere with their own colonial agenda. The agreements reached at the Algeciras Conference, however, did not entirely appease Germany’s desire to intervene in Morocco. In 1911, Kinderlen complained about the political chaos in French-controlled Morocco which was, in his opinion, endangering German economic interests in the area. Spaniards were also complaining about the limited access to the country’s resources that the partition of Morocco had granted them, and the stability of the Protectorate seemed to be in question. The Germans sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir and demanded compensation from France. Germany was hoping that France’s military weakness and Britain’s political 4 Introduction instability resulting from the constitutional crisis caused by the rejection of the 1909 budget by the House of Lords would play in its favor and allow it to either break the alliance between Britain and France, take control of part of Morocco, or both. The Second Moroccan Crisis, as the conflict came to be known, confirmed Britain’s support of France and Germany’s isolation. France agreed to grant Germany control over two strips of land in French Congo, but Germany had to agree to a French protectorate over Morocco (Burke 1976, 171–3). Germany’s national pride had been hurt once more, and it decided to arm itself in preparation for what it considered an inevitable war. World War I would eventually begin as a result of Germany’s support of Austro-Hungary after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but the alignment of forces had already been articulated during the two Moroccan Crises. Germany’s struggles to participate in the Scramble for Africa have traditionally been described as a family feud between Kaiser Wilhelm II and the other European royal families to which he was related since he was the grandson of Queen Victoria (Clay 2006). The interests of the different European monarchies were certainly interwoven, and marriages and kinship had often been used as a way to promote political agendas. The family- feud interpretation, however, tends to depend heavily on the importance of personal character. These accounts present Wilhelm as a spoiled, young man obsessed with military parades and imperial glory. Wilhelm’s own account of the events in his memoirs suggests that the visit to Morocco was the idea of his chancellor which he initially objected to, but finally “gave in, with a heavy heart, for I feared that this visit, in view of the situation at Paris, might be construed as a provocation and cause an inclination in London to support France in case of war” (Wilhelm II 1922, 108). Of course, Wilhelm II’s account tries to avoid blame for the actions that eventually led to World War I, Germany’s defeat, and the demise of the German monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family-feud interpretation of the two Moroccan crises, however, is also an attempt to present European (French, British and even Spanish and Portuguese) colonialism as moderate and rational as opposed to German irrational and temperamental colonialism. The colonization of Africa presented two different models: on the one hand Britain and France followed a liberal model; on the other hand Germany developed its own Weltpolitik which was closer to the mercantilist model. This often meant that British and French governments worked in close collaboration with private companies to develop commercial networks Introduction 5 in their colonies while Germany pursued a much more centralized type of colonization (Conrad 2012, 64). It also meant that liberal thinkers had to reconcile the concepts of human dignity around which liberalism had been articulated with the inhuman conditions that colonization created for those peoples it colonized. The psychological factor alluded to before is probably the best explanation of how this contradiction was resolved. European liberals wanted dignity for all peoples, but perceived non-Europeans as backward and in need of colonization to attain what they deemed to be a dignified status (Pitts 2005, 5). Spain, particularly after 1914, was divided in two large groups: those that considered themselves Germanophiles and those that sided with the Allies. Although the line that separated one group from the other was at times unclear, Germanophiles were for the most part traditionalists that saw in Germany a protection against liberalism. The Spanish military, the Carlistas, and Mauristas were traditionalists and consequently Germanophiles, but some Spanish liberals like philosopher Ortega y Gasset were fascinated by German culture as well. Despite the pervasive presence of traditionalism in Spanish society and politics, liberalism had had a long if conflictive history in Spain. The proclamation of the 1812 Spanish Constitution, one of the earliest and most liberal constitutions in Europe, a model that inspired liberals in Italy, Germany, Russia, and Latin America, was certainly a benchmark in the evolution of liberalism. Liberal ideas, however, arrived too early to Spain. Despite the existence of a liberal intellectual elite, and even members of the aristocracy that were willing to go along with liberal reform, Spain’s traditionalists greatly outnumbered the liberals. The result, as Stanley Payne has argued, is what has come to be known as the ‘Spanish contradiction’: “the persistent efforts of small, liberal or radical elites to introduce ‘advanced’ systems which lacked an adequate social, cultural, or economic base” (Payne 1967, 145). This contradiction applied not only to the political and economic organization of the Iberian Peninsula, but to the attempts of the Spanish government to pursue its colonial agenda. The Spanish colonial project in Morocco became an amalgam of private enterprise interests (especially the iron ore mines), demands for colonial expansion from the military, and an ambivalent role on the part of the Spanish government. If liberal colonization was normally characterized by the coordinated efforts of the business sector, the military, and the government, in the case of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, each of these entities seemed to have been acting independently of the other two. In the minds of the Spanish people, 6 Introduction including large sections of the military, Morocco became synonymous not with a national project of regeneration through colonization, as it had initially been intended, but with the defense of the economic interest of a small group within the Spanish upper bourgeoisie. The large number of casualties produced by the efforts to pacify the Spanish Protectorate made the Moroccan campaigns even more unpopular; a problem aggravated by the fact that most of the soldiers who died in the colonial wars belonged to the working class since the sons of the upper classes could afford to pay a ‘quota’ to secure a safe posting. In 1921, the Disaster of Annual during which Spanish troops were surrounded by Riffian leader, Abd el-Krim, resulted in the loss of over 13,000 men. The Picasso Report compiled to investigate how the massacre had been allowed to happen, revealed pervasive problems of corruption in an underequipped army. The colonial officers also became estranged from the central government that was often unwilling to pursue the aggressive expansion that the Africanista career soldiers would have preferred to undertake. The radicalization of the colonial officers was basically motivated by their unwillingness to abandon the opportunity for rapid promotion that the Spanish Protectorate represented. Any effort to slow down or halt the colonization of Spanish Morocco was resented by them. The dispute between the colonial officers and the Spanish government also came to have an ideological component. Most colonial officers were staunchly traditionalist, and viewed the liberal bourgeoisie and the leftist leaders of the Spanish Second Republic with disdain. It was precisely the colonial officers who organized the coup d’état that eventually led to the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, consequently, lacked a firm colonial agenda. Neither liberals nor entirely mercantilists, the Spanish colonial authorities seemed to have left part of the planning to improvisation. This somewhat chaotic approach to colonization was in part motivated by the lack of economic resources that the Spanish governments of the time had to deal with. As Moroccan historian Mimoun Aziza has argued, the Spanish Protectorate implemented a ‘poor man’s colonization’. Rather than bringing a modern lifestyle to the colonized, Spaniards led very similar lives to those led by Moroccans. “[T]here were no segregated neighborhoods as happened in the French zone,” and, with the exception of the top brass and colonial administration, Spaniards and Moroccans shared the same limited resources (Aziza 2003, 257). This sense of comradeship between the colonizers and the colonized was certainly enhanced by conscious decisions on the part of the Introduction 7 Spanish colonial authorities. For instance, Spaniards, unlike the French who promoted the teaching of the French language among Moroccans, allowed Arabic to be taught in their schools. The psychological element that informed the Spanish colonization of Morocco was also different from that of other European powers. Spain did not argue its fitness for colonizing Morocco on the grounds of cultural superiority, but rather on the grounds of its cultural affinity with the Arab peoples who, lest we forget, had ruled the Iberian Peninsula for almost eight centuries. Historian Gustau Nerín has coined the term Hispanotropicalism to describe this type of colonization through cultural fraternity: the idea that the colonized is attached to the colonizer by an emotional bond of cultural brotherhood (Nerín 1998, 11). The notion of Hispano-tropicalism, of course, describes the way that Spaniards understood their own colonization, and not the way that colonization was perceived by the Moroccan people. Morocco, as could be expected, became a popular topic in Spanish literature at the turn of the century. Modernismo, the literary movement that was in vogue in the Spanish-speaking world at that time, advocated a highly estheticizing exoticism for which Morocco was perfectly fitted. Rubén Darío said about his visit to Tangier in Tierras solares: “I feel, for the first time as if I were in the setting for one of my favorite books [One Thousand and One Nights]” (Darío 1904, 150). Among the Spanish modernistas, Isaac Muñoz made the Maghreb,1 the central theme of his entire literary career. The novels and poems of Isaac Muñoz presented the Maghreb as a mysterious land where Spaniards could reconnect with the primal vigor that their nation had lost in 1898. His exotic descriptions of Moroccan life alternated with highly detailed analyses of the best approach for a colonization of Morocco. Like many of his contemporaries, Muñoz was able to entertain both the lofty rhetoric of Orientalism and the objective analysis of the economic advantages that an expansion of Spain in Morocco would engender. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán published La pipa de kif (1919), a collection of poems that exalted the liberating and revolutionary power of the drug popularized in Spain by Spanish travelers to Morocco. If the savage brutality of the Moroccan traditions described by Muñoz was supposed to allow Spaniards to reconnect with the primal will to power that Nietzsche had described in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, the sensual view of the world induced by smoking kif was, according to Valle- 1 The Maghreb is the name used to designate the region that includes Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco, Western Sahara, Libya, and Tunisia. 8 Introduction Inclán, capable of subverting traditionalist conventions and allowing for a more egalitarian culture (Fuentes 1987, 173–5). The traumatic death of thousands of young Spanish men at the Disaster of Annual contributed to the radicalization the positions of those for and against the colonization of Morocco. Spaniards were not only shocked by the loss of life, but humiliated by the fact that a non-professional army of Berber rebels had been able to defeat them. In 1923, Ernesto Giménez- Caballero published Notas marruecas de un soldado, a literary account of his own experiences in Morocco. The book was an ambivalent denunciation of the problems of corruption and lack of political support that the Spanish colonial troops endured in the Protectorate. Giménez-Caballero was not complaining about Spain’s involvement in north Africa. On the contrary, he considered that Spain should be much more active in establishing its presence in the Maghreb, but that Spanish politicians were not providing the military with enough support. His denunciation of irregularities in the administration of the Protectorate, however, came at an extremely sensitive time. The Picasso Report stopped short of accusing King Alfonso XIII of participating in the overall corruption that had mired the Spanish military, and Giménez-Caballero was arrested and given an eighteen-year sentence. General Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état saved him from serving his sentence. The coup was primarily motivated by the efforts of the military and the monarchy to put an end to the investigation, and Giménez-Caballero’s book was understood as a vindication of the military’s honor and a critique of liberal politicians. Giménez-Caballero combined the pseudo-journalistic reporting of his experiences with an estheticization of the situations that he described. Despite the uneven literary quality of the book, Notas marruecas de un soldado was certainly original in its ability to bring art to everyday reality. Giménez-Caballero’s prose alternated between the direct style of journalistic reporting and the lyrical description of his experiences. Giménez-Caballero would eventually become the editor of La Gaceta Literaria, a literary journal that played a crucial role in the articulation and promotion of the Spanish avant-garde. In fact, he would become one of the few exponents of the avant-garde Ultraista movement as the co-editor of La Gaceta Literaria, and prestigious literary critic Guillermo De Torre, acknowledged (De Torre 1965, 571). One of the chief objectives of the avant-garde was precisely to estheticize ordinary reality in order to subvert it. Subversion, however, could go in many different directions; in the case of Giménez-Caballero and the avant-garde artists that became associated