Margaret Rich Greer. “The Politics of Memory in El Tuzaní De La Alpujarra.” In Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modern Spain, 113. NED – New ed. Boydell & Brewer, 2006. (pp. 113-130)
In her article ‘The Politics of Memory in El Tuzani’, Greer explores how Calderón infused his dramatic tragedy with its historical context of the seventeenth-century Spain, replete with religious persecution and cultural genocide, despite the Catholic monarchs’ promise of religious and cultural tolerance. El Tuzani takes place in Granada during the 1568-70 rebellion of the moriscos, who largely populated the area. Greer is intrigued by the way in which Calderón, known for his strong allegiance to the Catholic Church and even ordained as a priest in 1651, builds sympathy towards the moriscos, rather than the Christians.
To examine Calderón’s portrayal of the moriscos in El Tuzani, Greer divides her text into four parts:
- Construction of dramatic spaces in Calderon’s play;
- Bodies in those spaces;
- Laws of religion, state and class;
- The role and context of dialogues.
Initially, Greer paints a broader picture of Calderón’s intentions when writing the tragedy, as she detects some of the direct and indirect inspirations that may have influenced the playwright’s work. Whilst Greer covers the context of the Christian religious, cultural, and economic oppression, coupled with the morisco resistance, she also points out some more subtle influences, such as the transportation to Madrid of Libros Plumbeos – the relics found in Granada, allegedly implying the ancient and now restored Christian heritage of the Granadians. Thus, the key contextual influences, in Greer’s view, are a new regime, a consequentialist view on expulsion, and the Libros Plumbeos.
Greer further examines Calderón’s construction of dramatic spaces, from intimate households to formidable fortresses, which amplify the tensions of the moriscos’ experience at the hands of the armoured Christian forces. From the very beginning of the play, the space depicted emphasises the constant fear and suffocation of the moriscos, as the threat of Christian invasion becomes increasingly menacing and real. The bodies that fill these spaces portray the anxieties of the oppressed, positioned as the ‘internal enemy’. This heightens the suffocation experienced by moriscos, as, just like the Christians, they were the monarchs’ subjects.
The author argues that Calderón does not side with either the Christians, or the moriscos in El Tuzani, distributing the responsibility for the conflict between the two sides. In this Christian-Islam conflict, Calderón stresses the class divide, rather than that of the religious doctrines. As Greer writes, ‘Calderón makes the gulf that separates noble from commoner wider than that which divides Christians from moriscos’ (p.126). To do this, Calderón uses fictional bodies as personification of a certain class caste, such as Garces, who embodies the new breed of soldiers who were not of an aristocratic descent. As the characters in the play engage in dialogues, the fictional bodies and the spaces they inhabit become riper with significance.
Greer writes very clearly, although the intersections of the four aforementioned factors become tangled at times. The overall message of the essay, to my understanding, is that Calderón, above all, centres on the questionable political decisions of the monarchs and the complexity of individual actions, rather than the responsibility of divine providence or religion.
